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Domino’s spills the beans – Q&A with Kathy Connolly-Livings

Domino's ham and mushroom pizza in a box

Students are a key audience for Domino’s and they have a long-term partnership with Student Beans to aid student engagement. We recently caught up with Domino’s Customer Acquisition Manager, Kathy Connolly-Livings, in our exclusive webinar to discuss why Gen Z are such a valuable demographic for brands to engage with. Here, Kathy answers all your questions on apps, social media strategy, and more.

What is Domino’s brand strategy to stand out from the rest on social media?

That is a very good question, and I think one that we are still trying to answer. We are in a really lucky position in that we can have quite a fun tone of voice with Domino’s. It used to just be about putting a few bits out on Twitter and posting a few videos on Facebook, and then Instagram, but now we’ve got Snapchat, we’ve got TikTok, and I think we are still trying to work out what our place is in all of those. We are trying to move away from just putting exactly the same thing out across every platform, but making it bespoke to the platform by creating a different way to talk to people or a different kind of content. We’re very much going down the route of creating content rather than ads for our social channels.

What does your attribution model look like? How do you ensure social gets the credit it deserves in the bigger picture when so much social data is so difficult to track back to consideration and purchase?

This is definitely one that we are still working on. I think because the social channels are not last-click channels, and behave more like brand and display, and are driving the demand rather than driving the sale – we are doing a lot more lift testing to really understand what sales are coming from channels like social. So lots of in-platform lift testing at present, but I think that later in the year, we will probably move to looking at how that marries up to the other channels – so actually, are social campaigns driving people to the affiliate channel or driving people to search? The next step for us is how do we link up those channels and get a real attribution model in place. It’s a work in progress.

Has the pandemic led you to pivot your marketing budget more towards online? Will the successes/challenges of this lead to a permanent shift?

We’ve definitely been moving more of our budget towards digital channels. I think there is definitely still a place for us to have that above the line and TV on our media plans, but definitely the shift is going more in favor of digital. Even with the performance channels, we just have to keep up with that demand. We want to be present when people are looking for us so, for that reason, much more budget has gone into digital. Even on the people side as well; we’ve been hiring during COVID where others have had to put staff on furlough, but actually our digital team has grown even more over the last few months.

Someone picking up a slice of Domino's pepperoni pizza

You mentioned that for Gen Z, gaming is shifting away from desktop to app. Do you think there’s a similar trend occurring within gen z shopping – is the future app-first?

Yes we have definitely seen this massive shift. Again, we’ve always had an app and have won a load of awards for how great the app is and how easy it is to use, but even since the start of this year it has just continued to grow – and it’s the first year that we’ve set ourselves some KPIs around monthly active users within app, because we really think that’s something that we need to go after. Obviously our biggest competition is with the aggregators and they’re really app-heavy – the likes of JustEat, Deliveroo, UberEats – so we need to compete with that as well. But yes, I definitely think app-first is the future. 

Do you use any specific strategy to engage with Gen Z within the Domino’s app?

We’re doing lots of work in the background on user experience – watch this space for updates coming soon. We will hopefully be able to make an experience where you can order your pizza in less than 30 seconds using our app. This maybe isn’t specific to Gen Z, but I think that’s the generation that wants everything right now and we’re trying to build that a lot more into our user experience on app and on desktop.

Want to learn more? Domino’s spills the beans: how to be remembered by Gen Z for all of the right reasons is available to watch on-demand now. 

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