How McDonald’s uses competitive insights to stay one step ahead
The Challenge
McDonald's wanted to enhance its digital strategy by leveraging social media insights in order to maintain its competitive edge.
This involved gaining a comprehensive understanding of the brand's performance on individual accounts and in comparison to competitors. McDonald’s was already using Sprinklr to manage social media across 28,000 accounts. The brand was also leveraging Social Listening to monitor online mentions, gaining a bird’s-eye view of its digital footprint. In many ways, McDonald’s was already a leader in digital.
But in order to further evolve its digital strategy, it needed a solution that would provide:
- Precise, accurate, and actionable data on their social and digital channel strategy.
- The ability to create consistent experiences across multiple accounts and channels.
- Better insight into industry trends, competitive intelligence, and audience expectations.
The Solution
Using Sprinklr’s Benchmarking module, McDonald’s was able to hone its digital strategy and create lasting digital experiences.
When the social team at McDonald’s realized they wanted more detailed data on their social efforts, they incorporated Benchmarking to layer on top of their already existing Listening module. Benchmarking tracks dozens of data points, from likes to number of comments to reply time, retweets, shares, and more. Paired with Listening, Benchmarking tracks, monitors, and analyzes social actions, giving McDonald’s an unprecedented level of insight into customers’ social behaviors.
Global brands like McDonald’s, with separate digital teams in each region, run the risk of each unit becoming siloed. McDonald’s leverages Sprinklr Benchmarking to compare performance across all units. This real-time, internal benchmarking provides precise, accurate, actionable data that can inform best practices and create consistent digital experiences across multiple accounts.
With customized dashboards showing the real-time metrics of top competitors, McDonald’s has better insight into industry trends, audience expectations, and competitive threats. Never has the brand had such an in-depth, instantly accessible view of the playing field, and its position on it. Is Pizza Hut earning more likes per post? Tweak messaging. Is KFC delivering great results with fewer posts per week? Consider if frequency is optimal. What are the opportunities to capitalize on and the threats to be aware of from competitors? Depending on the social maturity of other companies, McDonald’s might even have better insights into competitors’ metrics than the other guys have themselves.
Command Center displays allow McDonald’s to see a real-time leaderboard of brands that are dominating in terms of total engagements, brand posts, estimated post reach, participation, unique visits to pages, and more. With real-time updates on the successes of their favorite brands from across other industries, McDonald’s stays up-to-date and aware of the ever-changing digital landscape.
The Outcome
McDonald’s started using Sprinklr’s Benchmarking module to get comparative business insights. By layering Benchmarking on top of Listening, McDonald’s is now able to dive much deeper into social performance metrics, and can leverage that knowledge to drive creativity, growth, efficiency, and competitive advantage.
McDonald’s now has data from roughly 300 social accounts which can be exported into easy-to-use custom reports. What’s more, McDonald’s global team and distributed market leads now have the data they need to power their global brand across social and digital channels.
McDonald’s leverages Sprinklr’s Benchmarking to stay humble, learn, and improve. “I think the overall goal is to learn and grow and be the industry expert rather than to live in a silo and presume we are doing the best,” said Sneha Jain, McDonald’s Global Social Data Intelligence Manager. In addition to having Benchmarking dashboards for internal units and competitors, McDonald’s has one for best-in-class digital brands from all industries. This way, McDonald’s keeps a pulse on the whole digital realm, which not only breaks down silos, but gives McDonald’s a creative and innovative edge.
“We gather research on modern design in the industry to keep us inspired and sharp,” said Sneha. “By layering Benchmarking on top of Listening, we’ve developed a powerful brand health engine. It allows us to get to the heart of trends and shed light on insights that are otherwise hard to unpack.”