[Brand Analysis] Innocent Drinks' Marketing Strategy: How Authenticity Defines Their Social Success

Still wondering how some brands manage to appear slightly "unhinged" on social media and still get enormous amounts of attention and engagement?

It's totally doable, with the right strategy.

Thanks to an out-of-the-box social media strategy, some of the most ingenious brands - like Innocent Drinks, for example - has succeeded in quickly gaining considerable attention from their potential customers.

Wondering what the secret is?
Let’s dive in!

1. Innocent Drinks' marketing strategy for TikTok

With social media platforms and features evolving greatly in the last few years, a couple of sporadic posts don’t make the cut anymore for getting the user’s attention, let alone their active involvement with your brand.

These days, for a social media strategy to be successful, there’s a great need for in-depth research, audience analysis, and tons and tons of creativity.

In case you didn’t notice by now, nowadays, social media consumers want authenticity more than anything. THIS is what smart social media marketing implies today and what helped different businesses grow, get incredible popularity, and thrive.

Such a business is, for example, Innocent Drinks, a UK-based smoothies and juices brand that, thanks to its original social media strategy, has managed to attract quite a significant number of fans and customers.

Jumping on the cool kids' train, Innocent Drinks launched its TikTok account in 2021 and since then has creatively leveraged plenty of TikTok trends that speak directly to younger generations, quickly earning their fondness and interest.

Innocent Drinks adopts the most popular TikTok filters and trends

Similar to Ryanair, Innocent Drinks has understood what TikTok users like and started creating more TikTok content in that direction.

With the face filter being one of the most popular TikTok effects at the moment, Innocent Drinks chose to capitalize on that and integrated it into a part of its funny TikToks.

Since TikTok is a platform where comedic content performs best, Innocent Drinks equally chose a friendly and rather humanized approach for its TikTok content creation.

Most of all, Innocent Drinks' TikTok content caters to Gen Z, and that can be very easily spotted in their feed. A very good example of this is the "Tube Girl" trend, which is extremely popular among the younger generations,

On TikTok, Innocent Drinks focuses on being authentic and relatable

Innocent's main hook on social media is its relatability, and that of course applies to TikTok.

Their goal is to feel as far from corporate as possible. Whenever you spot one of their posts or scroll through their gallery, they want you to see them as one of your friends.

And of course, they know that Gen Z are the ones who appreciate this type of relatable and authentic content the most, so sometimes they share posts that are directed specifically at them:

2. Innocent Drinks' marketing strategy for Instagram

We’ve already established that smart social media marketing can positively influence a brand’s image and finances in multiple ways - from generating increased brand awareness, more traffic, and even sales.

With social media marketing proving to have quite a satisfying ROI, and new platforms emerging and gaining more popularity, it’s highly recommended to give it a shot.

Like TikTok, Instagram Reels are among the new generation of social media features created with the intention of encouraging video creation.

Innocent Drinks owes its Instagram popularity to its humanized content approach

Despite Reels' popularity nowadays, Innocent Drinks’ most engaging post type remains the single image-framed one, as can be seen from the data within Socialinsider's Instagram analytics tool. What's more, carousels (which are still static posts) come in second.

As for the brand’s marketing strategy on Instagram, Innocent Drinks talks with its audience in a friendly, personal tone, adding a splash of humor to its messages.

And it all starts right at the top of the page, with their Instagram bio: "We make healthy drinks. Please buy them so we don't get fired."

Actually, if we were to name Innocent Drink’s Instagram’s one characteristic trait, that would undoubtedly be its unique, effortlessly comedic content approach.

And, as the proverbial cherry on top, once in a while they give special shoutouts to other brands that are thriving on social, such as Monzo:

With an average engagement rate of 0.80%, which is only a bit lower than the platform’s average, through its bubbly brand personality, we can confidenty that Innocent Drinks aces the Instagram game.

3. Innocent Drinks vs competitors

Every brand should be looked at in a larger context and compared with other similar brands in their league, that's why no brand analysis is complete without a proper competitive analysis.

So, naturally, for this brand analysis I snooped around and found a few of Innocent's closest competitors: Plenish and MOJU.

I then added their Instagram and TikTok profiles into Socialinsider and found out how they stack up against each other.

To get this type of brand-level data, I used the Brands feature.

Turns our Innocent Drinks leads by number of fans and posts, reach, engagement, video views and posting frequency. Basically, everything else besides the engagement rate by posts, where the brand Plenish is winning.

Next, I wanted to see exactly which platforms are favored by each brand, so I scrolled down to see the brands ranked by fan count and engagement, respectively.

I found out that most of Innocent's fans and engagement come from Instagram, and the same pattern applies to their two competitors (albeit at a smaller scale).

Final thoughts

A key takeaway for brands that aim to follow the brand’s footsteps and - to some extent - replicate Innocent Drinks’ marketing strategy and success is to focus on being relatable instead of salesy.

What’s most interesting in Innocent Drinks’ strategy, and probably one of the best examples of its efficiency, is that the brand gets its exposure mainly through organic content, paid advertising having just a small piece of the pie that’s the brand’s marketing strategy.

Hopefully, these insights presented about Innocent Drinks' marketing strategy offered some inspiration for your own marketing plan.

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