Starbucks Reserve Social Media

CASE STUDY

This shares the journey of Starbucks Reserve’s social media, from when it was started by a barista to when I brought it in-house and built a creative team to build a digital brand strategy and creative expression.

BRIEF

Our company was maniacally focused on delivering digital-first customer relationships. We were preparing launching our flagship Roasteries around the world over the next 2 years, optimizing our customer experience online, delivering a mobile experience inside our stores.

Social media was also one of our 4 major focuses within the digital-first customer relationships.

COMPETITIVE SET

As we focused on social media and looked to our coffee competition, we saw there was an opportunity to disrupt, differentiate and generate brand momentum through culturally informed storytelling that reflected our deep coffee passion.

content pillars

We created 3 content pillars, that all of our stories would ladder up to and weave together to create coffee culture in our social media feeds.

All of our stories, which we named “tapestries” would last throughout weeks of time, exploring each narrative from multiple angles— people, place, design and of course, our coffee.

editorial planning

All three of our content pillars were distributed throughout the year, with stories ranging from Single-Origin coffees, such as Jamaica Blue Mountain, a new store launch in Milan (Coffee News), or a Whiskey Barrel Aged Coffee (Coffee Innovation).

As part of my role, I was responsible for translating the marketing priorities into an editorial calendar.

tapestry example: coffee news, sodo store opening

When guiding the designers and copywriters to plan out content per post, I encouraged them to think of all angles of the story— teasers, people, place, product and design.

Results

From August 2017, when I began my work leading Starbucks Reserve social media, to October 2018 when I was moved to focus on Starbucks social media, there was a major lift in 97.3% lift in engagement, 450.63% lift in impressions, 256.95% lift in reach and 77.09% lift in follower count.