Over the last decade we’ve all had a front row seat to the evolution of social media from what was essentially a digital toy for teenagers into a tool that is integral for business success. I have found it interesting to watch how much more open the meat industry, particularly companies with brands, has become to using these platforms. Just a few years ago, businesses hesitated to invest any marketing dollars in social platforms. Today, social is what we call “table stakes” — a must-have tool in helping generate significant returns on marketing investments.

Social media can play many roles as part of a marketing strategy. While I’ve spent a lot of time talking about influencers lately, here I thought I would focus on two other impactful social tactics: community management and paid social ads.

Community management refers to the activities happening within social channels to engage, nurture and grow online communities. It is about building a relationship with your target audience that fosters loyalty among followers. While community management can include a variety of efforts, the main activities center around engaging the audience by responding to messages or comments, moderating user-generated content for appropriateness and paying attention to the data to tweak efforts for even better results. (Data analysis is a big part of everything these days!)

We know that concerted management of a meat brand’s social platforms can lead to a lot more traffic. And traffic leads to sales. For one particular brand, their community management program includes monitoring comments, tags and messages, and engaging with users where appropriate. This led to nearly a 300% increase in traffic on the brand’s Facebook page.

Community management can also lead to B2B sales. For example, during a two-week period in May, seven inbound sales inquiries came into the Instagram account of one meat brand. Daily monitoring and sorting of inquiries ensures that a potential lead is quickly connected to the appropriate sales representative.

The growth of and engagement on these pages shows how community management helps create social platform relationships between a meat brand’s customers and the brand itself.

It really gets fun when customers begin to mention and tag the brand in their own posts. This often happens when a chef is particularly pleased with a brand he is using in the restaurant and wants to ensure patrons know the quality of meat being served. Professional chefs are known to take high-quality photos and videos of their dishes and tag a brand, generating new, no-cost assets that can then be used by the brand for advertising. Community management is important for engaging your customers and maintaining an ongoing relationship.

Social media is also great for attracting new customers and moving them through the sales funnel toward a sale. Executing paid social ads that direct potential customers to a brand’s e-commerce website to make a purchase is a powerful way to connect and create phenomenal Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS). One particular meat brand put significant focus on direct-to-consumer Q4 holiday sales and reported a ROAS on their Meta (Facebook and Instagram) spend of over 450%! This is done by carefully targeting the ads to be shown to the individuals most likely to purchase the product, serving them an ad they will react positively to and having that ad direct them to the brand’s e-commerce platform.

It goes without saying that any brand’s success with social media depends on many factors, including the strength of the agency-client partnership and how social media fits into overarching marketing strategy.

Social media has become a critical tool in the marketer’s toolkit — and not for any one single application. Whether you’re creating and running ads directly on social media that convert into sales, working with influencers to increase your brand awareness, or engaging with your community of customers, social media platforms make it easier to connect your customers with your products and ultimately drive sales.

Leveraging social media for business success

Join for free* to continue reading.