Building a horror-centric, consumer products-based social destination that drives both clicks to purchase as well as active fan engagement.
Digital Media Management was thrilled to partner with Warner Bros. Consumer Products to launch the social presence for WBCP’s new horror-focused brand, Horror Icons. While traditionally, consumer product pages focus solely on the product, we crafted a fan-focused, engagement-driven strategy to engage fans of the genre with fun and interactive content in order to foster a community around WB’s franchises and products.
Our Horror Icons Instagram page focuses on the IT franchise, The Conjuring Universe, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among others. To speak authentically with our fans, we established a voice and tone which paired relatable humor with a first-person perspective and a demonstrated knowledge of the genre. This helped ensure high engagement rates through discussion, community management and creative use of platform tools.
To speak to fans of these franchises, who are wary of traditional product pages, we utilize a 70/30 rule for our content: 70% of our posts should be fun, engaging and focused on the film franchises themselves, leaving 30% of posts dedicated to product promotion. In order to elevate the look and feel of the product content, we ideate and design stylized creatives, and we carry through a similar creative aesthetic for our fun content as well.
Our non-product content seeks to start a dialogue and conjure laughs. Our gamified posts range from “Tag Yourself” posts to short-form trivia, testing our dedicated fans’ knowledge around our franchises. We have also developed memes featuring our Horror Icons, which fuse our well-known IPs with cultural trends in a timely manner.
Another focus of our campaign is robust community management. We lean into our humorous yet dark voice and tone to actively respond to fans throughout the day. None of our responses are ever “canned” or pre-scripted, so our fans never quite know what we’ll say back to them, enticing them to engage with us even more.
We strategically launched in October 2020, a month when horror is always in the spotlight, and we channeled this momentum through the holiday season and into the new year. By engaging with partners like New Line Cinema and relevant product outlets such as Hot Topics and Funko, we extended our content’s reach and forged relationships.
WB Horror Icons’ following continues to grow at an average of 10% – 15% per month, and our engagement rate is consistently at least 2x higher than the benchmark rate for other retail brands. As our community grows, we have seen correlating growth in engagement, reach, and impressions. Looking ahead, we look forward to continuing to scare, surprise, and delight our horror superfans with our unexpected content that taps into the cultural zeitgeist.
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