UNLEASHING THE POWER OF
RELATABLE COMEDY:

How we took the Fray Bentos socials from zero to a MEATY 2.42m impressions in 90 days - with Engagement Rates up to 13x higher than the competition

Sales were down, market share was shrinking, and well-intended changes to the classic recipe had backfired.

This was the stark reality facing the Fray Bentos team at the start of this year…

The iconic pie-in-a-tin was once Britain’s favourite (pretty impressive for a nation that considers pies one of your ‘five a
day’) – but now Fray Bentos had a serious problem.

Between 2019 and 2023, Fray Bentos lost market share equivalent to almost £5.4m in retail sales due to two main factors… 

Firstly, trust had been eroded – and the brand was constantly criticised because of the low quality (and small quantities)
of meat in their pies – something that they were now on a mission to correct and take back control of the narrative.

And secondly, they were slowly being forgotten. With a core customer base now in later life, and younger generations
having worryingly low brand awareness.

They’d seen other iconic brands recapture lost glory, and explode sales through entertaining, engaging social content –
and they wanted to do the same.

But with a dormant social presence (no posts on Facebook or Instagram in 18 months, and no Twitter account at all), and
a limited paid ads budget – reviving the brand wasn’t going to be easy.

That’s where we came in.

Fray Bentos gave us - White Label Comedy - just 3 months to give them an entertaining, engaging, on-brand social voice that would…

1 – Make Fray Bentos the brand everyone’s talking about on social media…
(In a good way, not a “Did you see Balenciaga did a bondage shoot with kids??” way.)

Which we’d do by using our ‘Relatability Matrix’ method – that turns an audience’s strongly held beliefs into entertaining
content they can’t resist engaging with.

2 – Win back previously loyal customers…
(The ones who used to think that the blue on the UK flag represents Fray Bentos pie tins.)

Which we’d do by combining entertainment value with the psychology of persuasion by crafting ‘jokes that sell’ – there
are dozens of examples below.

3 – Acquire brand new customers…
(Without having to ask the CEO questions like, “Could you pivot to being the Spotify of tinned pies??”)

Which we’d achieve by building our content around ‘Relatable Truths’ that tap into strongly held beliefs that are true for
both their older core buyers, and their new (younger) target demographic.

THE RESULT?

A team now ADDICTED to pies.

(I’m talking one for lunch, one for dinner and, if I’m honest, sometimes one for breakfast.)
Oh, and…

We crafted...

90 Entertaining Posts (Posted on all platforms)
1021 witty replies to other accounts’ Tweets

That led to...

60,982 engagements…
2.42 million impressions…
And about a billion calories consumed “for research” (worth it)

Our comedy content didn’t just drive massive brand awareness, it also helped build partnerships too – as other brands
who wanted to entertain and engage their audiences slid into the Fray Bentos DMs looking to collaborate.

(And why wouldn’t they? Our collaboration with Iceland earned them so much engagement and reach it became the supermarket’s best performing tweet of the year – and we’re not even on their payroll).

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“You guys at WLC have also been a dream to work with. Starting the day with laughs (of which there have been lots) at the content you’ve pulled together is the best antidote to spreadsheets and boring PowerPoint presentations. You’ve totally nailed the perfect TOV for Fray and looking at our social posts, we’ve gone from trawling through negative comments about the lack of meat, to lots of positive sentiment, plenty of comments about loving our pies and not much bad stuff! Exactly what we were hoping for.”

Jude Smart - Fray Bentos

How we got sky-high engagement-rates that blew industry averages out of the water AND an army of evangelists now singing the praises of Fray’s new recipe in the comments.

Our mission was to make Fray Bentos one of the most entertaining, engaging brands on the internet – and you can’t measure
success without benchmarks.
There are three stats that matter to us:

  • Organic Reach Rate (Organic Reach per post as % of Followers)
  • Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Organic Reach)
  • Follower-Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Followers)

And as well as comparing our results to each platform’s average – we also ran the numbers for 4 comparison brands*:

Ryanair - the self-styled “noisiest brand on the internet”, that has a huge team dedicated solely to creating a buzz on social.

Yorkshire Tea - the darlings of wit on Twitter, Yorkshire Tea is one of the best-known (and most successful) funny brands on social.

Aldi - since their “birthday party moment” (if you don’t know, google it), Aldi has developed an impressive reputation for funny branded collabs that get audiences talking.

Pukka Pies - one of the only pies *nearly* as well known as Fray Bentos, the best direct comparison.

In order to make this a fair fight, we excluded Fray Bentos posts that had received any Ad Spend / Paid Traffic – so these barnstorming results represent Organic Reach and Engagement only.

*Competitor data taken from a sample of 20 sequential posts on each platform, collated in January 2023.

Twitter

Organic Reach Rate (Organic Reach per post as % of Followers)

660%

That’s 5x as much as the self-styled “noisiest brand on social” RyanAir.

Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Organic Reach)

2.0%

Aldi are the brand known for getting everyone talking. That’s 7x higher
than them.

Follower-Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Followers)

13.17%

13x higher than the closest competitor (and 325x higher than Pukka Pies).

Industry averages from SocialInsider.com Fray Bentos data is Organic Only – excludes any posts that received any Ad
Spend. Competitor data taken from a sample of 20 sequential posts on each platform, collated in January 2023.

Facebook

Organic Reach Rate (Organic Reach per post as % of Followers)

23.24%

Over 5x higher than Facebook’s average of 4.32%*

Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Organic Reach)

7.43%

Over 19x higher than Facebook’s FMCG food brand average of 0.38%*

Follower-Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Followers)

1.75%

Almost DOUBLE the Follower-Engagement Rate of our closest competitor.

Industry averages from SocialInsider.com Fray Bentos data is Organic Only – excludes any posts that received any Ad
Spend. Competitor data taken from a sample of 20 sequential posts on each platform, collated in January 2023.

Instagram

Organic Reach Rate (Organic Reach per post as % of Followers)

22%

More than DOUBLE Instagram’s average of 9.34%

Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Organic Reach)

12.04%

Over 12x Instagram’s FMCG Foods Brands average of 0.96%

Follower-Engagement Rate (Engagement as % of Followers)

2.65%

(Only one of the comparison brands is ahead of us on this metric – and we’re working
hard to close the gap.)

Industry averages from SocialInsider.com Fray Bentos data is Organic Only – excludes any posts that received any Ad
Spend. Competitor data taken from a sample of 20 sequential posts on each platform, collated in January 2023.

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10 ways we successfully used comedy to SUPERCHARGE the Fray Bentos socials, drive INDUSTRY-BEATING ENGAGEMENT, and earn 2.42 million impressions

(And 1 way that failed – sort of)

1 - We took control of the narrative with an entertaining apology (and earnt Print, Radio AND Social coverage in the process).

Changes to the classic recipes had eroded trust and left Fray Fans disappointed. Sales had slumped in response.
When Fray Bentos took the bold decision to own up to the error and bring back their classic (and much loved) 2013 recipe –
the apology was a huge opportunity to generate positive PR.

Which we’d do by using our ‘Relatability Matrix’ method – that turns an audience’s strongly held beliefs into entertaining
content they can’t resist engaging with.

In partnership with Ad Agency Guy & Co, White Label Comedy wrote the copy for an entertaining “Humble Pie” apology Print Ad that was placed in industry publication ‘The Grocer’ (a magazine with a print circulation of 28,300 and an online readership of 386,500)

In collaboration with PR Agency Democracy we also wrote a bespoke, personal apology to specific journalists, celebs and influencers – sent in a “Humble Pie” press kit that included our new pies – and engaged with the recipients on social media to make sure they amplified our message.

Our approach earned amplification from a whole host of famous faces – including Thomas Skinner, Lloyd Griffith, Vanessa Feltz, Chris Moyles (who waxed lyrical about his love of Fray Bentos pies two days in a row on his Radio X morning show), and Chris Stark (who celebrated Fray’s
new recipe on the Capital Breakfast Show).

2 - We used relatable jokes to “Stealth Pitch” the brand’s key messages (making our content not just engaging, but PERSUASIVE too)

Increased brand awareness won’t drive sales on its own – we also need to persuade our audience that what we’re selling does, ahem, what it says on the tin…

The most important thing for Fray Bentos to communicate is that their pies now have BETTER MEAT and MORE OF IT (66%
more in the case of the Steak and Gravy pie).

But any content that just tried to tell an audience that up front would’ve been easy to ignore.

Instead, like hiding vegetables in a child’s dinner, we used jokes to sneak these facts past our audience’s protective “I hate
being sold to” filter – embedding them within entertaining content that people actually want to consume.

The result? An audience chomping at the bit to get their mouths around a new and improved Fray Bentos pie.

3 - We “Fed The Trolls” - leaning into the audience’s most common criticisms in order to provoke discussion and drive engagement.

Every brand has things that their audience associates with them that aren’t necessarily… ahem… positive.

(Even here at White Label Comedy, where we’ve sometimes been described as “intimidatingly handsome” and “disconcertingly funny”…)

And sure – you could try and distract people by getting them to focus on all the other (good) stuff. But we prefer to take a different approach.

The lack of meat in the old recipe pies wasn’t the only thing Fray’s audience loves to grumble about. The tins are known for being notoriously difficult to open without a Grade A top-flight tin opener (and even then, some people struggle).

Instead of deflecting – we leant in. Creating content that doesn’t just acknowledge the criticism – it takes ownership of it, using it as the jumping-off point for relatable jokes.

Not only did this content spark a huge amount of engagement – it also prompted a lively debate in the comments, with hundreds of Fray Fans who’ve never struggled to open a tin jumping to the brand’s defence.

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4 - We jumped on breaking news stories at lightning speed in order to make Fray Bentos a part of the topical conversation (safely).

When brands go viral, it’s almost always because they’ve managed to jump on the one breaking news story everyone’s talking about – and given it an entertaining spin.

The good news is that doesn’t always have to mean taking a bold stance on a divisive topic (we’ve all seen that backfire before).

For Fray Bentos, we used breaking news stories as a jumping-off point for jokes we know that everyone in our audience will agree with – and framed those jokes in ways that reliably got our audience talking.

(And yes, our designers did enjoy the brief, “Can you find us a pie that looks exactly like Prince Harry?”)

5 - How we made Fray a central part of the UK’s most important national holidays (like ‘Easter’ and ‘National Puppy Day’)

When a brand doesn’t have a direct connection to a national holiday, seasonal posts can end up feeling embarrassingly disconnected and out of place…

Like your local kebab shop posting about National Computer Security Day, or the Ministry of Defence dropping a Bob Marley GIF that says “Happy 420!”

By looking at seasonal moments through the lens of Fray Bentos’ newfound sense of humour – we were able to give each one a pitch-perfect spin that allowed us to celebrate the day with relatable jokes that remained seamlessly on-brand.

(Even if a few mums did end up receiving tinned pies for Mother’s Day because of it).

6 - How we generated a never-ending stream of content ideas for non-pie-related posts we knew Fray’s audience would still love.

Brands who only ever talk about their own products run out of steam pretty quickly on social – and as the well of ideas dries up, so too do any hopes of building an engaged audience of their ideal customers.

When you’re cracking jokes, however – the wider world of the audience (and the things within it they feel strongly about) all become fair game.

For the Fray Bentos audience that meant pubs (and pub politics) – which we covered with our ‘Pubservations’ posts (following extensive research in the field – written largely from a corner table in our local, The Social Media Marketer’s Arms.)

Whether you’re selling relaxing holidays or roofing tiles – your audience has a hugely relatable wider world that’s ready for our team of comedy writers to tap into.

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7 - We armed the Fray Bentos audience with a series of witty “Pie Fact” one-liners easy enough to remember (and share in the pub).

The most successful brands are the ones that get people talking – and while that’s usually measured in terms of likes, comments and shares ON social – there’s nothing more powerful than getting your audience talking you up in the real world.

Just as Guinness invented the “Guinness World Records” to give people something to talk about at the bar, our “Pie Fact” series was specifically designed to emulate the kind of fun, funny conversation you have with your mates in the pub.

And while we have no way of measuring how many times these jokes jumped from the internet into the real world, we’re pretty sure that Kevin (46) from Barnsley wouldn’t have hit it off with Karen (43, also from Barnsley) down at the Kings Head (in, you guessed it, Barnsley) without his repertoire of borrowed Pie Facts.

(and the fact that we’re onto our 7th strategy in the list – and this is the first one that’s “just jokes” – should tell you just how seriously we take the business of entertaining and engaging your audience…)

8 - We created content designed to offer journalists and news outlets their dream headline …

The most efficient way to grow a new audience is to leverage existing ones – and that’s why our strategy had a big focus on collaborations (like the one you’ll see in a couple of pages, that gave Iceland their best-performing post of the year).

With a small (albeit growing) following – not every brand was open to this kind of collaboration – but for those bigger brands who were far too busy to take our calls, we decided to try and leverage their status in a different way.

We pitched Netflix a whole host of BRILLIANT ideas for TV shows.

We knew they wouldn’t respond – but we had a hidden agenda…

We wanted to generate Buzzfeed headlines like “Fray Bentos won’t stop pitching Netflix stupid show ideas – and it’s really f****** funny”.

When working up outlandish ideas in search of press coverage it’s important to make sure that whatever the outcome – you end up with a win.

If we get press pickup, it’s a win – because we’ve earned exposure beyond the content itself.

But even without pickup, it’s still a huge win (and not just because we finally got to see Bryan Cranston take on the role of a kitchen utensil) – because not only did the audience get a huge kick out of the content, they also loved following along with the “behind the scenes” narrative of our increasingly ridiculous pitches.

9 - We built the Fray Bentos Twitter audience from scratch by “comment-jacking*” in order to drive MASSIVE organic reach from day one.

*If this sounds dirty, that’s on you

Launching a new social account from scratch is tough for anyone, but it’s especially tricky for well-known brands – who are wary of tweeting into a vacuum without any real following, in case it makes the otherwise successful brand look bad.

Fray Bentos had existing (dormant) accounts on Facebook and Instagram – but when we took the reins in January we had to launch their Twitter account from scratch – and we knew we’d need to put in the leg work in order to grow their following.

In addition to our regular posts, we set aside time each day for “comment-jacking” – finding the audience we want to build “out in the wild” elsewhere on the platform, and interacting with them (and the accounts they follow) in order to get their attention.

With just a few thousand followers, we earned over 1 million impressions on Twitter over the course of the campaign – and over half of those can be tracked back to our Comment Jacking activity.

With a small (albeit growing) following
– not every brand was open to this kind
of collaboration – but for those bigger
brands who were far too busy to take
our calls, we decided to try and leverage
their status in a different way.

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10 - We drove account growth (AND massive engagement) with ENTERTAINING giveaways

It’s hard to find a brand that hasn’t tried the “Like and follow for a chance to win some free stuff” angle to grow their following. But this kind of content usually has zero value beyond the transactional element, and can easily attract the wrong audience (freebie seekers who’ll never engage on another post again, plus a load of bots who want to marry you).

At White Label Comedy, we do still use competitions and giveaways in order to grow accounts – but we always make sure they are as fun as the rest of our content – so that we’re not just building an audience, but entertaining them too.

Four ways we used entertaining giveaways to drive engagement, reach and brand awareness for Fray Bentos

1 – Our first entertaining giveaways (where it all began)

A fun quiz question where the prize was in the answer, and a Cold-War-Steve-inspired “Count The Pies” competition were our first two entertaining giveaways. Both got a huge response – telling us that our growing audience was hungry for more.

2 – Giving Iceland their most successful post of 2023 so far

Our comedy-powered giveaways didn’t just drive massive brand awareness for Fray Bentos, they also helped build partnerships too – as other brands who wanted to entertain and engage their audiences slid into the Fray DMs looking to collaborate.

(And why wouldn’t they? When we recreated our “Count The Pies” competition as part of a Pie Week collaboration with Iceland, it became the supermarket’s BEST PERFORMING TWEET OF THE YEAR – and we’re not even on their payroll).

3 – Using giveaways to make important announcements impossible to ignore (and driving foot traffic in the process).

Ever notice how the posts you REALLY need your audience to pay attention to are often the ones that get barely any organic reach? There’s a reason.

Those posts don’t give your audience ANY reason to engage. And posts without engagement don’t earn a place in the feed.*

*They just earn a permanent place in the social media manager’s nightmares…

So when Fray Bentos asked us to help drive foot traffic to an Activation in Birmingham – we knew a simple announcement post wouldn’t get seen by anyone.

So instead, we ran a competition in which the “announcement” just happened to be the correct answer.

And the fact that the other answers were basically just jokes added an extra layer and gave our audience even more of a reason to engage. (And worked as a fun social experiment for us to see if we could get anyone to clamber up the Angel of The North looking for Pies!)

It generated 1,590 engagements, and 18,602 organic impressions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

(Whereas a vanilla announcement would likely have gotten a couple of hundred impressions at best, and you wouldn’t now have a mental image of ‘Auntie Sue’s back garden bush’).

4 – Our week-long ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ event that generated 11,955 engagements and earned 186,732 organic impressions

You can’t just run the same old competition format over and over again – or the audience will cotton on and lose interest.

So for our next giveaway, we took Fray Bentos back to the 80s (minus all the dodgy bits) with a weeklong “Choose Your Own Adventure” event – asking the audience to vote in order to decide where the story goes next.

As well as generating massive engagement, and earning a truckload of organic reach – the response from the audience after the event was HUGE.

They’re already excited for our next adventure. (And when your audience is begging you for more – you know your content’s hitting the right spot).

Ok, so now you’ve seen how RELATABLE COMEDY CONTENT (from our team of top TV comedy writers) fueled Engagement Rates up to 13x higher than the competition…

…and took the Fray Bentos socials from a standing start to 2.42 MILLION impressions in just 90 days*…

*Which is, incidentally, also the record for “longest time taken to open a tinned pie”…

There’s just one question:

Are you happy with the results your brand is getting on social?

If the answer is anything less than a “hell yeah!” – I’d love to show you how me and my team of top TV comedy writers can strategically inject belly laughs into your socials to create lifelong fans, and supercharge your sales.

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“You guys at WLC have also been a dream to work with. Starting the day with laughs (of which there have been lots) at the content you’ve pulled together is the best antidote to spreadsheets and boring PowerPoint presentations. You’ve totally nailed the perfect TOV for Fray and looking at our social posts, we’ve gone from trawling through negative comments about the lack of meat, to lots of positive sentiment, plenty of comments about loving our pies and not much bad stuff! Exactly what we were hoping for.”

Jude Smart - Fray Bentos

“Our industry is too INSERT EXCUSE HERE though - could this really work for us?!”

Hold My Beer

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