Social Media Management.
Building Your Brand:
Crate to Plate
The Client
What The Brand Needed
Crate to Plate have incredible technology backing their brilliant hydroponic farming solution. While those local to Crate have an excellent opportunity to get their hands on some high-quality produce, they can’t do so without knowing the provider exists. Crate to Plate came to us with a fledgling social presence after only briefly using their Instagram account before contacting us. Hydroponic farming is a topic that isn’t generally understood too well by the average consumer, and finding ways to convey the technology to a social audience was proving challenging for them.
The Challenge
What We Did
Our content specialist devised a killer content mix that included value-driven posts highlighting currently grown produce, educational content, and engagement-driven ask posts that push the audience to comment. One thing we knew for sure was that stock images just wouldn’t cut it. We felt we needed more personality, whether through raw shots of Crates produce or other formats. Our creative team jumped on the opportunity and began amplifying our content with unique and engaging creative. After creating new brand guidelines from scratch, our creative team strengthened the feed through a mix of animated posts, sequencing carousel images and beautiful produce imagery, while our social media manager engaged with their audience.
1
Knowing the Niche
Hydroponic farming isn’t an everyday niche, and it would be naïve of us to have assumed Crate to Plates audience knew much about it. Despite wanting to educate an audience, doing so technically risks alienating your customers for not knowing what you would otherwise consider obvious. Knowing this, we set out to truly understand hydroponic farming to deliver this educational content in a concise, engaging and easy to read manner.
2
Creating A Killer Content Strategy
There are only so many pictures of the same plants you can use before your audience realises. Creating a killer content strategy meant breaking free from the constraints of stock imagery and embracing the beautiful produce Crate were growing – over 100 professional-grade images from our team to be precise. We then mixed this organic content with various formats, including animated videos, carousel images, list-based graphics and more.
3
Growing the Audience
Growing Crate to Plates audience involved much more than a passive posting strategy. Crates social media manager began implementing more poll/question-based stories to generate more engagement. Similarly, our content writer focused on creating a call to action centred around general questions, which further incentivised their customers to engage with the content published.
4
Analysing Key Metrics
As Crates profiles were essentially being restarted, keeping an eye on the metrics within the first few months helped us understand what type of content their customers like to see. We also used this to optimise our engagement strategy by focusing on where customers were already engaging and dialling back on the areas where they were not gaining value. Post analysis is also a great way to see what type or format of content should be focused on more.
Building communities and offering value through your social channels is key to building a high quality following. Be the spark for conversation between your communities.
