Supermarkets play a pivotal role in everyone’s daily lives. In 2020, the UK grocery market was valued at over £200 billion* with supermarkets as the dominant store format.

With the digital acceleration over the last two years, we have investigated how supermarkets use YouTube as part of their marketing mix. We have spent a long time looking at the key brands within this category, and with a big congratulations, we have chosen Waitrose to be our channel of the month for July.

Waitrose is an excellent example of a channel that makes the most of every opportunity to engage and communicate with their audiences. They utilise a variety of different YouTube features, including shorts and the community tab, to create a conversational environment.

Here are some examples of how Waitrose is using YouTube as a powerful tool for engagement and connection:

1.      Their community tab is:

Engaging

The community tab demonstrates how the channel is constantly engaging with audiences and forming a community atmosphere. They use a variety of polls to form a conversation with audiences and gain insights on what they enjoy and want to see allowing the channel to be constantly consumer focused.

Relatable

The use of prompts to start conversations under video links, such as ‘Tell us your favourite food using emojis only’ is a creative way to encourage interaction with the content and brand. Most polls have upwards of two thousand votes and show the success of this engagement technique.

2.       Their use of shorts is:

Valuable

Waitrose’s uses shorts in an effective and helpful way. Their shorts maximise the engagement with their audiences as they contain quick and easy recipes that their viewers can preview on the go. Viewers can save recipes they enjoy and come back to them whenever they want to, encouraging viewers to return and spend more time on the channel.

Interactive

The conversational tone of the chefs means that they address viewers directly and they often encourage likes and comments by reminding viewers to engage with the video or post if they try out the recipe.

3.      Their channel structure is:

Clear

The titles are sleek and clear, often using a consistent format, including their brand name, and key words that help with SEO. The channel is organised with clear, clean shelf headings on the homepage such as ‘At Home’ and ‘Quick and Easy Meals.’ The videos have titles that focus on home and family cooking. These keywords rank highly in audience search and show how the channel is providing relevant and interesting content.

Seasonal

Waitrose uses seasonal video updates to introduce variety to channel content. They cleverly tap into viewers interests with holidays and event specific recipes, such as focusing on traditional English dessert recipes for The Queen's Platinum Jubilee 2022. They also incorporate this seasonality by refreshing their trailer often, meaning that the homepage is evolving and staying relevant to what audiences want to see at specific times of year.

4.      Their metadata is:

Consistent

Like titles, most descriptions include a clear and consistent format. For example, recipe videos include ingredients and links to the full recipe on the website. The body of the description contains clear explanations of the video content and who is featured. Not only does this help YouTube SEO but is essential in providing a full and detailed experience for viewers.

Informative

As well as being clear and concise, Waitrose use the descriptions of each video to encourage the audience to interact in the comments below. This increases engagement and participation with viewers on a more personal level. The descriptions also include other relevant social media links and links to other recipes available on the website, adding value to audience.

5.      Their content strategy is:

Varied

 The channel has a varied amount of content such as: recipes, collaborations with chefs, sustainability focus and a variety of series such as ‘20 questions with’. This content is uploaded on a regular basis, keeping the audience engaged.

Collaborative

They use many familiar presenters which is great for creating more personal audience connections and increasing engagement. For example, during their sustainability campaign they used Max La Manna who runs popular social media accounts for sustainable and vegan cooking.

This month we have also come up with some ways Waitrose could build on the success of their channel: 

Playlists

Although the channel includes extensive playlists, they vary a lot in terms of how many videos they contain. Some have only a few videos and others include over fifty. Certain playlists are also not as well curated with vague or simplistic titles such as ‘pies’ or ‘soups’. They could be organised into other overarching categories or into subheadings as some playlists contain an overwhelming number of videos.

Thumbnails

Channel thumbnails could be improved by making images and text format more consistent and by avoiding auto-generated thumbnails. Some thumbnails have issues with text that blends into the background, making it hard to see. Some playlist thumbnails could also use more enticing imagery such as ‘soups’ and ‘vegetarian recipes’ on which the images are unclear and not as appealing as they could be.

Seasonality

Waitrose does include seasonality and changing trends across the year, however not always consistently and effectively. The messaging behind certain campaigns is sparce and leave the viewer with little to no information. We believe that by increasing the conversation with their audiences through their content, the community tab, shorts and YouTube Live, they will create campaigns that really resonate with their audience.

As a supermarket whose brand identity is intertwined with family, fresh food, and accessible recipes it is especially important that their YouTube channel is an environment for open conversation and where audiences can come to give their opinions and ask questions.

The success of Waitrose’s YouTube channel is how they use regularly use their content to engage their audiences, covering specific trends and popular search terms.

Well done to Waitrose for their wonderful work on audience engagement.

 Come back in August to find out who we have awarded brand of the month to next!

*https://www.statista.com/statistics/330171/grocery-retail-market-value-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Need Help? 

We are YouTube experts who will help manage, integrate, optimise, amplify and evaluate your YouTube content and channel, ensuring you reach the right audience and drive high quality engagement and action rates. Get in touch to find out how we can help with your YouTube marketing strategy: stuart@navigatevideo.com