Kraft on Facebook: tried and tested content marketing

From A1 Steak Sauce to Easy Cheese, from Maxwell House to Vegemite, Kraft is a behemoth.

And in the food and drink sectors, content marketing seems to be a cinch. Pushing people to recipes and adding some fun around holidays, seasons, special edition products and family lifestyle are all the order of the day.

I'm just going to picture a few of the Kraft brands here, fairly simply, but go and check them out. 

Recipes

The Kraft Foods recipes website is very good. It's easy to use and linked to heavily from Facebook. All in all I'd say this a good example of a now standardised, dare I say 'traditional', marketing strategy for primary goods.

Recipes are where Kraft excels. Across YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, their websites and Facebook, Kraft gets big brand exposure.

Kraft Food – recipes and tips

This has 1m likes, as well as  a Twitter account with 75k followers. 

Recipes are so important to Kraft's content plan that the main Kraft Foods Facebook page is titled 'recipes and tips'. The pictures and fairly informal text are used to link fans up to the Kraft Foods website and /recipes.

The site is fresh, with clear buttons to share and an easy navigation. There's also a Spanish version of the site. 

Kraft Canada – what's cooking 

Kraft Canada (285,000 likes) also has tons of recipes on its website, which is a little older than the main site but very easy to use and nicely visual. There are French and English versions available.

The Kraft Canada Facebook page also nicely surfaces these recipes with images and the odd tagline. It's not rocket science, but it works.

Kraft Dinner (KD)

Canadian version of mac 'n' cheese. With 436,000 likes, it's been delivering cheesy goodness since 1937.

It doesn't post too often, and they make sure what they do is funny, ridiculous or (appropriately) cheesy. 

For me, this is a pretty low risk, low effort, high reward strategy for big food and beverage brands. Here's the perfect example. KD has set up a Tumblr account to host these images, too.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

This one has 1.5m likes in total, and hundreds of likes on each post.

Again, product news and promos, quirky imagery and photographs. There are pages to 'show your love' and 'find recipes' but these are essentially pages with a big image to like the brand and a link to the website for recipes. 

The website is interesting in that its URL is http://www.youknowyouloveit.com/. Kraft does off-shoot websites very well, including funny stuff like Planters Mr Peanut at www.ineedsomeenergy.com who sings and dances for your pleasure.

Mac 'n' cheese also has a nostalgic timeline where users are invited to explore the history of the brand. This is a nice bit of brand building that isn't too difficult to have a web design agency create.

Kraft Dressing

With 132,000 likes, this is rather a controversial but successful account. The Zesty Guy, pictured below, is the Kraft mascot, and some find him a little patronising to the female audience. Again there's a dedicated site with a quirky URL - http://www.getmezesty.com/

Arguably this Facebook account is fairly weak. As one of the comment points out, there are no recipes and the Zesty Guy doesn't feature on the product in the aisles. 

Kraft Peanut Butter

This has 129,000 likes, and the same formula of pics, recipes and quirkiness seems to work well for Canada's Kraft Peanut Butter.

This screenshot shows the inevitable price of the transparency of social networks, with negative comments creeping into corporate pages.

Kraft Cheese

Kraft Cheese, with 96,000 likes, occupies subpages on Kraft Foods recipes website. Yes, cheese is pretty much a staple foodstuff. Same strategy again here.

Kraft Original

I have to say, this account, also aimed at the Middle East market where Kraft squeezy cheese is also sold, is pretty saccharine to say the least. It has 186,000 likes.

There are some recipes, but a lot less quirkiness and lots more parenting (for back to school perhaps) cheesiness. It likely works well, but I can't help but feel the account is playing a bit safe. 

Kraft

13k likes

This is the main corporate Facebook page, and draws on food, drink, US news, company history etc. for its posts. There's still a focus on products, but the account feels like it's for employees and uber fans. Thus, only 13,000 likes. 

Conclusion

There are plenty of Kraft products I haven't included here, as I've focused on Facebook pages that have Kraft in the title. But if you add in Facebook accounts for the rest of Kraft's brands (split into beverages, cheese, refrigerated meals, international and foodservice, meals and desserts, 'enhancers and snack nuts) the footprint is huge. 

There's a lesson here for brands. Kraft is actually currently fighting to simplify the representation of its myriad offerings. But if your company has more than one strong trademark, product, mascot, using them to create further standalone Facebook accounts will help increase popularity online. 

I've seen millions of likes across Kraft brands. Obviously, that's because Kraft and Mondelez are huge. Yet still I feel the simple approach of imagery, plentiful links to recipe sites and meal suggestions that suit the season all add up to a solid Facebook strategy for a perfectly suited sector.

As Facebook ads and arguably competitions and surveys aren't suited to primary goods, brand awareness is the main thrust of this Facebook activity. 

I'll leave you with Planters' Mr Peanuts, whose song we appreciate in Econsultancy's Content team.