New Belgium | The Purist Clean Lager
In recent years, the craft beer category experienced significantly slower growth due to shifts in consumer habits. For an entire generation, seltzers, hard kombucha, and better-for-you beers are now the norm. To capitalize on this shift, New Belgium launched an organic lager with traceable ingredients and low cals/carbs. They partnered with us to craft and execute a 360º Content Plan to launch the brand, drive traffic to their store locator, and ultimately convert at retail (Whole Foods, Bevmo, etc) and via delivery services (Drizly, Minibar, etc).
Crafting the Content Persona
To kickoff the Content Strategy phase, we identified what makes The Purist special. Why should our audience care? What does the brand represent? And how will that dictate our content?
Mapping the Tentpole Moments
Beer marketing is heavily concentrated around three summer holidays: Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day. For the Purist, product hit shelves at select retailers in May, so we began our organic publishing at the same time. Then, for Memorial Day in late May, we did our first big coordinated paid, owned, and earned push.
Memorial Day Campaign Architecture
In the lead up to and through Memorial Day weekend, we launched a campaign spanning paid, owned, and earned channels. For paid, we experimented with a three-tiered approach to test different creative assets and targeting. Each of these ads pointed to the beer finder on New Belgium’s website. For owned, we boosted all posts to drive potential followers to the profile. And for earned, we shipped seeding kits to select influencers and athletes to spark relationships.
A New Beer—With Timeless Stories
As a new product in a crowded space, we needed a foundation of brand storytelling to establish the beer and to tell an evergreen message. It was particularly important to lean into New Belgium's brand equity since it's secondary in hierarchy on the packaging. This all came together as a series of IG Stories that became pinned highlights on the profile.
Creating the Launch Look
We produced a shoot in a sunny, modern location to capture the bright, light, and forward-thinking appeal of the brand. For these launch assets, we wanted The Purist to be the star of the show with the environment and people a backdrop and for context.
Distinctly The Purist
On owned channels, we wanted our posts to pop amongst the noise. To achieve this, we square cropped each asset and used a thin blue border to play off the packaging design. This created a scroll-stopping presence in our audience’s feed and complemented the cans in the image. Additionally, we periodically introduced bold message blocks related to key product propositions.
Pin Pointing Paid $$$
As a new account building from scratch, we tried a variety of visuals, messages, and targeting to see what worked—then doubled down.
Earning Authenticity
With pay-to-play influencers a dime a dozen, we wanted to create relationships with people that reflected our values. We focused on specific audience interests and shipped beer with notes to 200+ people. We then doubled down on those that engaged.
