Using social media marketing for food brands can often turn into a goldmine if done right. To help you get started with using social media for your brand, I’m sharing a great example of how a food brand uses social media to inspire people into buying their products.
COSTA is part of the apetito Group and one of the top providers of frozen fish and seafood specialities. They are doing a great job using social media marketing to showcase their products, share creative recipe ideas and bring together great visual content using a hashtag and a social media wall.
A picture is worth a thousand words. As a food brand, your content needs to be visual. Images or videos help you connect with your audience. Telling your brand’s story through appropriate and consistent imagery will have a powerful and lasting impact.
In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that pieces with more images received double the social media shares compared to articles with fewer images. Social media marketing for food brands should be all about visuals, and COSTA is an excellent example of how to do it right.
Leverage user-generated content for your food brand
Asking for user-generated content is a fun method for both brand and users. It creates a meaningful connection between the two and leads to more engagement. Users get to show off their creative side. Their content helps circulate the hashtag among those who aren’t yet following the brand. Food brands, especially, can get a bucketload of content through UGC without having to create it themselves.
The type of content that you choose to combine with your hashtag is up to you. You can create photo or video challenges on Instagram or ask for creative answers to a question you pose. If you want to know everything about running great hashtag campaigns, have a look at this hashtag campaign guide for marketers.
Collect authentic user-generated content from your hashtag campaign.
Don’t ask for anything too complicated to keep the contest attractive for a broad audience. If you like, make it a requirement for users to follow your account. This way, you can grow your follower base through the campaign. At the end of the campaign, notify the winner publicly and share their content to give it a wider reach. They’ll be grateful for the exposure, and it’s great content for you.
COSTA was promoting healthy frozen products for the barbeque season and created a contest where they give away a professional LANDMANN barbecue. Participants only need to comment on the official social media posts on Facebook or Instagram, sharing their favourite COSTA product they use for creating delicious and easy barbecue dishes.
It’s amazing how many people joined the contest and even shared photos of the dishes they created using COSTA’s products.
You can also use social media to support your retail channels if you want more people to look for your brand on store shelves. COSTA is using Instagram and Facebook to share their latest products with their social media followers. They keep a consistent branded design throughout all their posts, which helps people remember the brand and recognize their products immediately on store shelves.
We all love food, and many times we’re out of ideas when it comes to what we could cook next. That’s where food brands can gain a lot of followers and engagement by sharing unique recipes using their products. Showing people how they can use a great product is far better than just telling them to buy it.
COSTA shares recipe ideas for all the products they sell and the images look so appealing that you just want to run to the store, buy the product and start cooking right away.
COSTA regularly posts updates on social media, and they have an impressive follower community engaging with the content they create.
Since they’re already spending time and effort on posting to the brand’s social channels, why not make it go a little further? By displaying social media content — content that they’ve created already anyway — on their website, they keep their website content fresh and engage visitors.
They are using a social media wall right on the COSTA homepage, mixing Facebook and Instagram feeds and inspiring visitors with new content about their products, recipes or contests they are running.
