Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix: Lessons from GrubHub.com
This session will discuss how to best develop, manage, and measure your social media strategy effectively. Learn how GrubHub.com tripled their Facebook fans in less than four months, optimized their Twitter channel for customer service, and increased brand awareness in new markets with their social media strategy.
* Casey Winters, Consumer Marketing Director, GrubHub.com
* Amy Le, Social Media Manager, GrubHub.com
Seal of Good Local Governance (SGLG) 2024Final.pptx
Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix: Lessons from GrubHub.com
1. Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix Amy Le Social Media Manager [email_address] Twitter: @grubhub and @5spice Casey Winters Consumer Marketing Director [email_address] Twitter: @onecaseman
If you’re on these sites, you should have a reason to be. The most important thing is to have a strategy for any social network you enter. For our social media strategy, we had five goals: we want to engage our users more, hear what they liked about us, didn’t like us, show that we cared what they thought. Listen and respond. Second, we wanted to create a brand identity. We wanted to show that we’re a group of good people, not a faceless website, and that we’re local food experts. The third was proliferation. We wanted people to talk about us more. Increase the conversation about our brand. Make people mention us in their tweets, status updates, etc. The fourth was transparency. A common thing we saw is that people didn’t know all of things we were doing to make delivery better. We wanted to show that. The last was link building. We wanted to identify and leverage any opportunities social media had to increase our rankings on search engines.
-As communication and brand experts, PR and marketing teams need to own the communication process, develop the right tone and voice that mirrors your brand’s identity, but also speaks to your customers in an authentic way. -All social media strategies need to be flexible enough to address the organization as a whole, individual brands and specific departments (corporate strategy, PR/marketing strategy, or customer service strategy.) -No one should discount the public’s ownership stake in social media or the power they have in shaping brand perception. You have to be willing to take the good with the bad and when you open yourself to this level of transparency.
http://twitter.com/grubhub
March 2009=650/Following: 200 Jan. 2010=2,193/ Following: 582 June 2010=2,797/ Following 750 On average Twitter sends about 60 customers to GrubHub per week -Keep the # of following to a minimum. We don’t follow back everyone that follows us. Quality vs. quantity. We tend to follow back those who are more engage and interact with us on Twitter (leaving comments, providing feedback, recommending us to others, and even have negative comments about our brand). To cut down on the noise on Twitter, it’s important to identify potential brand evangelists. I also try to identify Twitters that are key influencers in the tech and food sphere to connect with. The power of Twitter to promote and spread your message virally can be extremely powerful. Site Haiti relief drive. Talk about using the blog as a platform to tell the story, then integrating Facebook and Twitter as the blow horns to get that story out to larger audience.
-The power of Twitter to promote and spread your message virally can be extremely powerful. We saw this in our Haiti relief drive. -We used our Daily Grub blog as a platform to tell the story, then integrated Facebook and Twitter as the blow horns to get the story out to a larger audience. -I identified influential media, GrubHub brand evenagilists, and nonprofits to help us spread the word about our Haiti donation drive. We quickly saw them tweeting the message onto their network of followers. -Site figures from the drive.
http://www.facebook.com/grubhub July 2009 # of fans on GrubHub FB page=570 Jan 2010 # of fans on GrubHub FB page=2,142 (1,572 new fans) June 2010: # 4,006 Since Adding the Like button to our site, the number of visits from FB has doubled. About 300 visits a week. -Initiated Monday trivia questions in September and gave away GrubHub gift cards for answering correctly. We averaged about 10 new fans a week before initiating Monday trivia. After the first week of trivia we got 100 new fans. We’re averaging about 80 new fans a week now. We also recently added photo trivia and links to interesting food releated stories. Content is king. -In addition to the trivia, we began posting office photos linking our blog to the FB fan page and posting updates about events and GrubHub restaurants. The more you engage, the more you’ll likely increase your fan base.
http://blog.grubhub.com/ We use The Daily Grub blog to let users who contribute blog posts, read stories about some of our more unique restaurants. The goal is to build a community among people who love everything about food. We don’t try to be food critics on The Daily Grub Blog, just a bunch of food nerds sharing their stories. -We also link to other food sites and encourage our guest bloggers to link back to us on their blogs. -We also use our blog to discuss new product and feature launches. The founders Mike and Matt also use this platform to communicate with GrubHub users. This goes back to the idea of building transparency around who we are as a company. -On the blog we also have a widget that allows people to directly connect to our site and order online. We also link to our other social media channels.
Vlogging and YouTube -We hope to strengthen our social media efforts with video and post restaurant interviews, new feature launches and everyday life in around the GrubHub offices. -From ring toasts tournaments to weekly group trivia at local bars, we’re a pretty active bunch at work. We want to be a company that people look at and say, “wow I would love to work there” and we also want to provide people a glimpse of how we create the site. This opens the discussion for feedback from our users.
Some things to mention: contests making people talk about us, retweets, food news, tweet your order, update your status with your order, communicate new features, connecting with fans, hearing what they have to say immediately, customer service through these channels
-Educate your customer service team on how to use Twitter. Monitor your competitor mentions and their Twitter accounts. -Identify what messages are working and resonating with your consumers. I’ve found some of my contests have worked better on Facebook vs. Twitter.
- We will approach users on Twitter that may not be frustrated with our competitors services. But as an etiquette, we never bash or speak negatively about our competitors. Let the consumer decide. -Use social media sites like Twitter to increase brand awareness among existing and potential new customers.
For Twitter, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Seesmic is great for mobile use, but Tweetdeck has all you need to monitor Twitter and now even Facebook and LinkedIn. Set up searches to monitor brand mentions of us, our competition, or anything important to us as a topic. Ow.ly in Hootsuite also provides you good anayltics on your tweets. You can even view the most clicked tweets. Link shortening: there are many URL shorteners people use for Twitter, and each have their pros and cons. We have decided to use su.pr because it automatically submits content to StumbleUpon, and allows any user that clicks on the link to stumble the content as well. The cons of Su.pr is that there is no potential SEO benefit. It’s true that most social networks nofollow their links to prevent SEO benefit, but feeds from these accounts on other sites many times are not nofollowed, and sites can achieve SEO value from that. All three shorteners provide great reporting information on how many clicks occur. Elsewhere on the internet, we use Google News, Icerocket, and Forum Search to monitor mentions of GrubHub in blogs or other websites. We use Google Analytics to track visits and orders coming from these channels, specifically our own blog.
Twitter: Our approach is more focused on quality vs. quantity of followers. Facebook offer companies and brands the opportunity to engage one on one with their consumers. But don’t use this platform to sell, use it to engage and build a community with common interests.