Campaign: Pairs Well With Now — Justin Williams

Campaign: Pairs Well With Now

In the saturated beverage alcohol industry, it takes differentiation to move the needle. One of the key ways we differentiated Tröegs was though storytelling on our social media.

For the “Pairs Well With Now” campaign, we focused on something we believed we did better than any of our competitors: pairing beer with food. Exploring the intersection of beer and food is part of the DNA of Tröegs.

Pairing beer with food was not new, but we worked hard to differentiate our efforts. We didn't want to simply tell people what dishes to eat alongside our beers. That's what everyone else does, and that would have gone against the independent spirit that we – and many of our fans and target audience – live by. Because pairing is so subjective, we wanted to arm people with the tools and the knowledge they need to create pairings that perfectly suit their own palates.

The “Pairs Well with Now” campaign won a Shorty Award for Best Use of Social Media alongside industry heavyweights like Jim Beam and Absolut.

See how we did it, as well as the results, below.

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Our strategy of suggesting flavors, rather than complete dishes, encouraged beer lovers to experiment and discover their own approach to food pairing, leading to a much more memorable and meaningful experience than simply following a recipe.

Armed with the how and why, we created a multi-platform, multi-media library of content to tell the story of why Tröegs deserves a spot at the table, and we followed a distribution strategy of tease > launch > echo on our most-trafficked channels: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We teased the campaign with photography, launched with a hero video, then echoed through the life of the campaign with videos, photography and illustrations.

In terms of metrics, our Facebook posts saw 2.5 million impressions, and our average post impressions were up 10 percent year-over-year. In terms of our ultimate goal, during this campaign, sales in each of our distribution regions was up, and 4 out of 5 of those regions were up more than 10 percent.

We also got 35 campaign-related pickups from some of the top names in beer-and-food-focused Instagram accounts, penetrating new audiences and increasing our potential reach by nearly half a million people.

And our ongoing efforts to stake our claim at the table have led to some really valuable media pickups, including this in-depth article on our food-and-beer-pairing program in Paste Magazine.

Beer and cheese heaven

Scaling access to a key personality