Social media has become a powerful tool in modern marketing, reaching 75 percent of the world’s population and attracting over 93 percent of internet users to various social media channels worldwide.
The opportunities for food and beverage companies to reach consumers directly are endless across many channels. From targeted advertising to community engagement and direct sales, finding the channel that fits your brand and audience is key to a successful social media marketing strategy.
The continuous expansion of social media in the last 25 years highlights its significant influence on the changing consumer shopping behavior. With devices in hand, social media has perfected the one-click purchasing etiquette.
How to Win Over Consumers
With each platform adding new shopping-specific tools for brands, coupled with e-commerce for groceries now omnipresent, brands can grow sales and consumer engagement through social media, and they should!
The game’s name has always been to concur with the channel’s algorithm, reaching key target audiences with your content that the platform will prioritize for them, ensuring more views and engagement.
With new AI tools created by each platform daily, new opportunities exist to advance your social media engagement. But the challenge of getting eyeballs is still the greatest hill to climb, and most have moved to a pay-to-play structure, encouraging brands to invest in boosting, sponsoring and advertising on the platform for the highest engagement. This does not have to be the case.
Related Article: How Social Media is Influencing the Future of eCommerce
Set Priorities
Prioritizing quality content and strategic scheduling is the best formula for slow and steady growth on social media.
Using a structured approach like a 90-60-30 planning cycle can help create and schedule content effectively, moving a brand out of a reactionary position and allowing our social media team to dedicate more time to developing creative brand content.
- Begin mapping out topics 90 days in advance.
- Write and review content 60 days before publishing.
- Gain necessary review and approval in the 30-day window before publishing.
Aligning your planning with product launches, new seasonal offerings, and other annual traditions, events, and holidays will ensure you don’t miss an opportunity to deliver next year’s April Fools fake-food post opportunity, among others.
Once you’ve planned your content, it’s time to activate your sales stack. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok all have e-commerce tools and integration that allow consumers a one-click purchasing experience.
Use the Right Tools Across Social media
Whether you want to sell your product directly through your own channels or you are working with influencers and allowing them to provide their followers with an exclusive offer for your product, you should be familiar with the sales tools across social media.
44% of Instagram users use the app to shop on a weekly basis. Meta Commerce Manager will allow you to manage an e-commerce sales funnel that is supported by both Facebook and Instagram. It is a robust selling tool and allows you to view sales activity directly tied to these channels.
In the short life of the platform, TikTok has become the largest selling tool on social media, with products exclusively selling (e-commerce) via TikTok Shop. 70% of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the channel.
And if you’re not on Pinterest as a brand, you should know that 89% of US pinners use Pinterest to research purchasing decisions. 47% or 150 million potential new customers are on Pinterest just to shop. With 320 Million monthly users, many people are going to this one platform to shop.
The many and varied direct-to-consumer sales tools across social media have enabled companies to operate solely through these channels, building tremendous engagement and sales to rival many on-shelf food, beauty, and fashion products.
It’s one thing to have a social media marketing plan. It’s the next level to sell through social media, and the channels are catering to brands. Go online.