Twinings – a Little Treat

We had the in-laws to stay recently, and they brought their own Twinings English Breakfast tea. I noticed this on-pack ‘a little treat’ promotion so I thought I’d give it a go. Clearly the promotion has been running for some time because some of the offers closed in June. I’d not noticed it in the supermarkets though. I go to www.twiningstreats.com and discover that this is a Coinks promotion. I’m already a member of this loyalty network so I just log in (after navigating through to another domain uk.twiningstreats.com. Even though the mechanic is controlled by Coinks’ software, it’s branded pretty well to Twinings and this avoids some of the problems of Casillero Del Diablo’s recent Coinks promotion. I get 10 points for my code, but nothing on offer immediately appeals to me, so I decide to bank the points for now. I guess I’m not the target market for this tea (though it is one of my favourite tea brands). Search engine optimisation is low-to-average, with much room for improvement. They get first place in Google for ‘Twinings Treats’, but this phrase only gets 390 searches a month. They’re unlikely to rank for anything else because it’s clear that search engines haven’t been considered as part of the site build. Poor meta data, poor title tags, poor semantic HTML, poor domain strategy. All easy things to resolve, given the desire. A quick look at twinings.co.uk tells me that Search isn’t high on Twinings agenda. That’s a shame because it’s cheap and effective; millions of people search for tea-related content every month on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Twinings have  a lot of content that could be converted into a killer search destination. Twining’s social media strategy is equally non-existent with no UK presence on Facebook and a dormant Twitter account. I realise that  few brands are doing social media well, but what could be more social than sharing a nice cup of tea?