2020’s Creative Campaigns #17 – Free Meal Deals Up For Grabs

Much like the Greggs sausage roll, the Nando’s peri peri chicken and the McDonalds Big Mac, the Tesco meal deal is iconic.

Therefore, a chance to win one will never fall on deaf ears.

Tesco could have done a classic ‘like, share and follow’ for their recent social media competition, it would have worked. But instead they decided to do something really unique and different. It’s not often I put pen to paper to write about a social media campaign alone. But this one, deserves all the praise.

Win A Meal Deal, With A Catch

Tesco’s most recent social media competition was run with a catch. Meal deals are up for grabs – but to be in with a chance of winning you must do a quote tweet that gets absolutely no interaction.

Most people thought this would be easy, if they had a small amount of followers, for example, but they were mistaken. It’s really easy to click on to see who’s recently quote tweeted a post, and because we’re a nation of jokers, there were handfuls of people at any given time going down and liking all of the new tweets – crushing the hopes of many.

Naturally, I put the challenge to the test and quoted the tweet, within 15 seconds I’d gotten 4 likes – rendering my entry to the competition invalid.

The sheer volume of quote tweets from people as hopeful and naive as myself led to #TescoMealDeal reaching – and then dominating – the UK’s top Twitter trends for most of the day on Tuesday and in to Wednesday.

Why It Works

I love this social media campaign for a number of reasons, the main being that it’s so original. It’s easy to run a classic competition that asks entrants to like, share, follow and tag 3 friends. Many brands go by the mantra “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and because we’re a nation of people who LOVE free stuff – this isn’t ever going out of style. If you’re looking to build up follows on a social account, then this is a dead easy way to do it.

As I said earlier, most of us love a meal deal, so if Tesco wanted to do this, they could have, quite easily.

They didn’t, however, and their risk taking paid off. This quirky and unique idea earned them a great deal of engagement, plus meant that Tesco bagged a (branded) spot on Twitter’s top trends which is pretty much the perfect result for any social-led campaign that has interaction-based goals.

Tesco have also done a good job in developing their tone of voice, and this competition went hand in glove with that. Supermarkets in particular seem to be evolving in the way they speak on social. Gone are the days of just using Twitter as a platform to handle enquiries, now brands have a reputation to uphold here too. A good example of this is the Co-op tweet that went viral following Aldi’s invitations (or rather lack thereof) to their 30th birthday party. Brands are becoming more personified by the day, and this helps a lot of consumers relate to them a little better.

I digress slightly, but I think it is worth mentioning though that social should be a balance of humour and great content, but also managing enquiries and complaints. If you’re dashing out meal deals and joking around, but ignoring very real problems from actual customers – then this isn’t going to win you any favours. The ideal account will be the perfect blend of serious and silly. After all, dealing with enquiries day in and day out is necessary, but it isn’t going to get people talking about your brand.

Back to the competition, another reason I think it did Tesco a lot of favours, is because it generated a great deal of conversation. It’s clever that they asked users to quote tweet, as this meant that their original tweet was more likely to be seen by more people (quote tweets > replies). This also means that the hashtag would register as a new tweet every time it was shared, helping it to trend. When impressions are the goal, the more people that are talking about your brand, the better. The idea behind sharing posts in competitions is so that there’s more eyeballs on that specific post. I like to think that Tesco really nailed that down. At over 140,200 RTs, the views of that original post will be in their millions.

Ultimately, there are many reasons why I really appreciate this social media campaign by Tesco. Creativity is top of that list. I also enjoy how the exposure just further helps to build Tesco as ‘the meal deal brand’. Plenty of supermarkets offer them, but nobody does them quite like Tesco does.

It pays to take risks and be creative with your social media content, so take notes from Tesco.

Oh and *just in case* Tesco sees this, my meal deal is a sweet chilli chicken wrap (no mayo), Walkers prawn cocktails and a Ribena. Cheers.