Case Study

Strategy

Initially, the business strategy was product-centered. Sausages, meat delicacies, and many other products – they were in the spotlight, stood center-stage, as the rest of the world revolved around them. Content promotion, then, was based on publishing photos of dishes and wares; the emphasis was placed on calm, neutral tone, image quality and neatness. Post design was pleasing to the eye, but was somewhat bland and muted, as it lacked any situational content or bright, attention-grabbing creativity. The goal of this strategy was attracting users through the use of appealing and appetizing visuals. Post frequency hovered between 20 and 25 per month.

As the project evolved, there had been a decision to reconsider the strategy with the aims of increasing the reach, creating a stronger brand presence, and furthering its penetration. This time it was not the product taking center stage, but the customer.

Emphasis shifted towards customers’ lifestyle. The narrative changed - from trying to fit audience life experience within the product, to embedding the product within audience life experience. Social media posts reflected on the ordinary, regular, ever-present features of everyday life; they did, too, refer to the extraordinary, the memorable, the worth-talking-about.

How we did it

Our specialists were faced with the goal: improve community reach, increase user engagement (comments, likes, reposts), and grow the volume of feedback.

Strategy’s key elements were chosen to be the creative and the design quality of posts & visuals.

Throughout the course of this project we’ve added a multitude of images to the posts, implemented unique headers (new header each month, introducing a new product and featuring individualized lettering). Brand promotion was characterized by particular, bright, and imaginative creative. The distinguishing feature of social media posts was how they were filled to the brim with - among other things - situational images reflecting current local and world happenings, newsworthy events; everything sufficiently viral, important or controversial.

Among the abundance of situations we riffed on, here are a few:

Situational posts inherently require rapid and smooth operation from the whole team. Such efforts were not in vain – they had a definite, positive impact on community reach and engagement, as content stayed relevant and never derivative.

Specifics of publishing for different social media networks

As user interests, demographics and many other aspects vary among the networks, it has been decided to adapt the posts for the needs and peculiarities of each community page. This made the publications more effective, as it fulfilled the needs of a larger volume of users.

Content was stylized for each network:

• Facebook: posts are a bit less playful and a tad more formal, photos and pictures are used.
• VK: posts are geared towards entertainment; GIF images are added.
• Instagram: emphasis on eye-grabbing, mouth-watering visuals; photos and pictures are used.

Furthermore, the texts differed between the networks, too – and so the user could get multiple impressions from the same post.

Supporting social media through ad campaigns

Managing social media was paired with promoting the posts through small-scale ad campaigns. This had positive impact on achieving target metrics – reach and engagement. Ad budget was split equally between the three networks (Facebook, VK, Instagram). As strategy was reworked and post density lowered, the rate of promoted publications rose – whereas only each third post had been promoted before, after the shift almost every single one of them has been. In addition to increased reach, volume and rate of new subscribers also improved.

Results:

1. Multiple posts (among which are the ones riffing on the new Star Wars movie, playing with H&M controversy, dedicated to Day of Cosmonautics) have been featured in marketing selections on major web resources, including 2 posts in adindex.ru, 2 in vc.ru, and 2 in “Russian Marketing” channel on Telegram. According to SimilarWeb, this lead to approximately an additional 7 million users reach from those resources. This is unprecedented in the industry, possibly stemming from the conservative approach typical for the competitors.
2. Last few months’ metrics, namely engagement and volume of feedback, are much higher than competitors’. (For example, most popular post in our communities received 1584 likes in total, whereas the closest competitor top result is 478 likes.)
3. More than 36% of users enter the community page through their news feed, which represents major appeal of our content as well as its wide media spread and virality.