Q 1. What seems to be the business’ goal with their social media marketing?
Plated was founded on the belief that “Individuals want better, more nutritious, less greasy food, and they’re willing to put in 20-30 minutes of work in order to get it-if given the choice.” Plated’s unique outlook on creating time and budget friendly meals for all of it’s customers every night paired with a dynamic social media campaign covering mediums such as Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook create an experience for its customers unparalled by many other companies in America. Plated strategically uses its social media campaigns in order to create brand awareness across the internet, engage its customers through the sharing of personal takes on recipes, recipes success and failures, and the asking of questions to the chef whom designed a specific recipe, explore untapped consumer markets through social media analytics, build brand loyalty and drive sales. Plated successfully uses social media to gain fan feedback and suggestions, create discussions that engage consumers about their food related opinions, for creating brand engagement and loyalty, and to embrace the consumer and position its brand. Plated is able to successfully gain critical insights into its target audiences wants, needs, likes, dislikes, which in turn enables Plated to adapt its company to its target audience thus increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. In terms of what Plated could improve on, the company’s social media campaign lacks unison with the companies’ value proposition. Plated was founded on the idea that consumers do not have a large amount of time to purchase groceries or plan and cook meals. Plated’s entire social media experience is extremely time consuming and extensive, geared toward a consumer with extensive amounts of time. Plated could optimize there strategy by dialing in on ways to make their social media experience less time consuming and useful. I recommend Plated create quick “How to” tutorials, upload them onto YouTube, and then post links to these videos on accompanied promotional merchandise shipped to consumers homes and post these urls at key activity times such as 7 and 8 p.m. across all social media to further reach and help their target audience.
Q2 Social media mediums (i.e., which social media mediums are they employing?
Plated utilizes various social mediums to create general consumer interest, public visibility, tie strengths and social interactions ultimately creating word of mouth advertising. Plated can be found across various types of social media mediums including: Videos, Microblogs, Message Boards, Blogs, and Voucher Coupon Sites. It is important to note that Plated successfully identifies and targets through its various social mediums it’s companies target audience. It’s audience is successfully targeted through the companies use of eye-catching visuals, creation of community challenges on Facebook, as well as posting a comprehensive Pinterest page where recipes are subcategorized, organized, and easy to find. Thus, Plated successfully has created a unique brand experience in which consumers can digitally express themselves and share creations and expressions of what they’ve created through the use of Plated product and services; increasing brand awareness, consumer engagement, and brand loyalty. One area in which I think the company can improve its strategy is across mobile social media mediums more specifically, Yelp. Plated has no brand awareness or exposure across the mobile social medias thus hindering the companies exposure to a large group of consumers. Yelp consumers are a unique and socially active group of individuals who use the mobile technology to make informed purchasing decisions. It is important to note “yelp is the #1 regional/local website and mobile app and is used on 10.4 million unique mobile devices monthly.” Due to Plated’s lack of presence on the mobile Yelp medium the company is missing out on a huge demographic of consumers that would likely be interested in and take advantage of Plated services if targeted. I recommend Platted reach out to the Yelp medium and create a Plated Yelp profile in order to tap into these consumers and raise brand awareness ultimately increasing its consumer reach and company sales.
Videos-YouTube
Plated optimizes its YouTube channel to deliver to its customers videos and tutorials with messages encompassing things such as how to create, execute, and improve recipes as well as how to prepare ingredients before creating a meal. YouTube reaches customers of nearly all ages in both gender groups making this platform imperative due to the fact that online videos are one of the top areas of social media consumption with nearly 3 billion videos being viewed daily and nearly 50% of the videos having been commented on and rated on by the community. Through the use of the companies various messages across it’s YouTube videos the company ultimately strives to inspire the video viewer to get engaged through the use of Plated’s products. Plated’s use of YouTube videos successfully creates brand engagement by walking customers through easy tutorials about how to prepare key ingredients Plated has provided into mouthwatering meals. Plated could improve its YouTube channel and videos by gearing the videos created more towards its consumers to further engage consumers and promote brand loyalty. Currently, the YouTube channel has videos organized by “Homemade with Plated,” “Plated Crunch Time,” and “Plated Test Kitchen” I recommend gearing these video categories more towards the consumer such as recipes most men enjoy like “Grilling” and recipes women enjoy such as “Pastas” or “Light” meals for people watching there figure.
Message Boards: Pinterest
Plated uses its Pinterest social media channel as a means of increasing loyalty amongst its customers, it uses the data generated by the users of Pinterest to find out more about its customers thus improving the overall company and as a means of giving its customers instant access to large amount of information encompassing nearly all types of recipes and food information Plated has to offer. Plated presents its customers with messages composed of recipes, innovative food presentation ideas and holiday meal options all organized by specific community boards. Plated’s use of Pinterest specifically targets the female population with little emphasis on the male population in those ages in which individuals are cooking for themselves and or there families ranging in ages 24-34. The Plated Pinterest social media strategy is successful in allowing customers to create and share experiences across their social networks in which Plated played a key roll. For example, when a young woman “pins” a recipe off of the plated site, cooks it, then is able to send it to her mother via Pinterest about how create the Plated recipe that she cooked last night this concept increases sales, increases brand awareness, and the cycle repeats. I would suggest improving the Plated Pinterest strategy by targeting other key demographics within the Pinterest network through the use of specific Plated boards. I suggest Plated tap into the younger 18-24 female college market by creating a board for “Quick College Meals” or “College Meals when your away from home” as well as tapping into the seemingly untapped male target market by creating boards such as “For the Grill” “A Mans Dinner”. Microblog: Twitter
Plated uses Twitter to express its business digitally, increase it’s social network, generate company awareness, and improve its customer service. Across the companies twitter feed messages ranging in content from cooking tips such as “how to clean a cast iron pot” to seasonal recipes, to chef awareness such as “Who’s making our Chicken Larb? Cook along with Jon Shook” to customer raving reviews like “Why am I only just now trying sunchokes? Thank you @plated.” Plated’s is targeting consumers ages 18-49 representing nearly 36% of the internet population both male and female. The Plated Twitter strategy is successful in reaching its consumer with engaging content through perfectly crafted tweets. These well thought of messages are significant due to the fact that they keep consumers aware and keep them thinking about Plated. Nearly every tweet Plated broadcasts has a call to action, a purpose or a goal, and a photo enabling the user to “picture” themselves preparing that Plated meal or enjoying the Plated dinner. Plated’s Twitter strategy is lacking emphasis on promotional campaigns and calls to action. Plated could improve its Twitter strategy by creating promotional awareness campaigns in which Plated creates a call to action campaign asking individuals to tweet photos of themselves with there most recent dinner using a hashtag such as “#IPlated” to Plated’s Twitter. This campaign would create brand awareness, consumer engagement, and may even bring additional purchases into Plated seeing as that Twitter is composed of a younger audience and younger people tend to make impulse purchases.
Q3 Summarize overall thoughts on the business’ social media marketing efforts
Plated utilizes various social mediums to create general consumer interest, public visibility, tie strengths and social interactions ultimately creating word of mouth advertising. Through the companies use of various social mediums specifically Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube the company successfully engages its consumers, creates brand exposure, awareness, gains customer feedback and ultimately increases company revenue. Plated’s social media strategy lacks organization on all mediums, lacks targeting to the male demographic, and lacks engagement on mobile social mediums. I recommend Plated re-organize it’s YouTube and Pinterest strategy to further target younger demographics, males, and there overall target market as well as gain exposure through incorporating mobile social medium, Yelp, into there social media strategy.