Heavenly Desserts - Empowering Local Users

Heavenly Desserts is a franchised premium dessert business, founded in 2008. Their first location was in Birmingham. They now have over 50 locations in the UK and 1 location in Ontario, Canada, with some more international expansion planned for the next 12 months. It serves a combination of waffles, crepes, cookie doughs to more innovative desserts. It is a brand that evokes a sense of indulgence, luxury, and pure delight in the world of sweet treats. As a dessert-focused brand, Heavenly Desserts positions itself as a purveyor of exquisite and heavenly creations that go beyond the ordinary. 

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Social media is incredibly valuable to Heavenly Desserts. Its key demographic is 18-34s. Over 60% of their current audience is female meant that they needed to create campaigns that would speak to this demographic. 56.4% of Instagram’s ad audience in the UK is female according to Meltwater’s most recent 2023 social media statistics. Heavenly Desserts provides Halal, and vegan options and also offers non-alcoholic mocktails. They want to use social media to share these offerings with local communities and allow their franchises the opportunity to connect with their communities and discuss relevant topics with their audiences. 

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The Heavenly Desserts franchisees reached out to their Head Office and asked for a tool to allow them to have autonomy over their social media while also giving them access to brand content from the franchise’s marketing team.

Authenticity is the most important element of social media for Heavenly Desserts and that was why Head Office wanted their retailers to post on social media and create an authentic local introduction to their store that both included brand values and told the story of their location. They wanted to empower their local retailers. By opening up local posting to retailers, they created an additional 28% reach to the Heavenly Desserts local pages on social media over 12 weeks. 

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We spoke with Sophie Page, Head of Marketing, at Heavenly Desserts, to ask her about why local social media marketing was important to them, how they found using SocioLocal made this easier and what they plan to achieve over the coming few months. 

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Kate (SocioLocal): How valuable is social media to Heavenly Desserts?

Sophie (Heavenly Desserts): It’s extremely important. Being part of the local community is a key part of showcasing authenticity on social media and that is why we wanted our local franchises to have access to their social media pages whilst getting our global brand campaigns fed directly through SocioConnect.

Kate (SocioLocal): Did you do local social media before joining SocioConnect? 

Sophie: Not recently, no. However, it was a key objective to bring local social media into the fold in 2023 for our Marketing Department. This was to ensure that local franchises could post on their pages whilst also giving us in the Brand Marketing Team the ability to view what they were posting and have an overview of the brand online.  

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Kate (SocioLocal): How did you manage to roll out the social media once joining SocioLocal? 

Sophie: All of the internal team had training sessions with SocioLocal. We then broke the local teams' training up into different groups. I showcased what we would do from a marketing standpoint and then, Gareth, our technical account manager in SocioLocal, trained them on how to use the app and how they could schedule local posts and answer direct messages from the SocioInbox. Initially, we gave them access to the SocioConnect app to view what the brand team was posting in advance and to allow them to respond to direct messages, comments and reviews for all of their social channels directly from SocioConnect. Just to make sure they could get a feel for it. Then, after 4 weeks, we gave them full access to posting, the content pool on SocioConnect and access to all brand content. We have had a great uptake on it. Some franchisees are really switched on with it, they constantly post local posts and opt into all brand content. Others, just want to utilise the content that our brand team create for them. There is a variation as all franchises have.

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Kate (SocioLocal): What pain points were you looking to solve with SocioCommand?
Sophie: It gave us a little bit of everything we needed. It gave us, as a business Head Office, the autonomy to be able to post centrally, on behalf of the franchisees and also to have that management tool there which allowed us, if we needed to pull a post down from any local page for whatever reason, we had the ability to do so.

That reporting functionality was really important for us also. We can deep dive into everything and anything you need to about the performance of your franchise's social media online.  

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Kate (SocioLocal): How are you monitoring the effect of social media on your brand?
Sophie: Our social media executive pulls all of the reports from SocioConnect on a monthly basis and tracks how each campaign is performing. I also like being able to pop onto the website at any point and being able to view top-line figures on the Business Intelligence dashboard. It gives me a quick overview of how we are tracking for the quarter. 

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Kate (SocioLocal): How are local store retailers reacting to your local social media strategy?
Sophie: They really like it! It was something they had been asking for so that they could have autonomy over their own social media channels. They like having the freedom to post what they want for their local communities while also having access to all of the brand content.

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Kate (SocioLocal): What is your social media strategy for 2024? 

Sophie: We want to drive brand awareness and by doing that, increase reach and engagement with current and prospective online customers through both delivery platforms and via click and collect. 

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Kate (SocioLocal): Overall, how are you finding SocioConnect? 

Sophie: It’s got everything in one place! It’s great to have a platform where you can schedule and manage the local social media for your franchise but also to have that human support from the team we work with in SocioLocal. 

Kate: We’re looking forward to seeing how the Heavenly Desserts franchisees learn and grow their local posting over the coming weeks and months and continue to grow the brand reach Heavenly Desserts can harness online.

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Made with love, dedication, and passion, Heavenly Desserts desserts aim to create heavenly moments for all who visit. 

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