Greggs wins accolades for social media campaign

Greggs has won two digital awards for a social media campaign, which helped to sell more than one million doughnuts nationwide.

The ‘Greggs Superstar Doughnut Awards’ campaign, created by digital marketing agency STEEL London, won a gold and silver award at this year’s Digita Impact Awards.

The campaign aimed to raise awareness and drive sales of a new range of doughnuts launched by the high street bakery firm, by turning the products into superstar characters on social media websites Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The doughnut superstars led ‘real’ lives, with jobs, friends, back stories and they competed to be crowned the Greggs Superstar Doughnut of the Year, which Greggs’ online users had to vote on.

Moray Twaddle, marketing manager for Greggs, said: “Our Superstar Doughnut campaign provided us with an innovative and effective campaign that created record levels of engagement across our digital audiences and complemented our in-store campaign activity.

“We wanted to do something different to generate awareness of our new range of doughnuts and position them as fun and relevant products, so that people would reappraise Greggs’ sweet offer. We certainly achieved these aims – and had a lot of fun as well.”

As a result of the campaign, Greggs sold 1.5 million doughnuts from its new range, as well as selling thousands more through doughnut vouchers claimed by consumers on Twitter through a hashtag topic called #DoughnutDay.

In addition, it generated 150,000 online visits to the Greggs website and helped to significantly increase follower and page ‘like’ numbers on Twitter and Facebook.

Andy Hinder, chief executive at STEEL London, said: "The success of our campaign is stark evidence that, when done right, social media has the power to have a direct and positive impact on sales and improve financial results without breaking the bank.”

Greggs and STEEL London picked up gold in the Best use of digital in the food and beverages sector category, alongside a silver for Best use of digital in the retail sector.