Today’s chefs aren’t just preparing meals. They’re also taking amazing pictures of those meals and sharing them with loyal followers on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. But cooks aren’t the only ones who can capitalize on the new digital foodie culture. Food brands have a lot to gain as well.
Meal delivery startups such as Blue Apron and Plated, which offer subscription-based packages of ready-to-cook ingredients, are creating engaging digital campaigns with the help of their customers. Because Plated and Blue Apron users frequently share photos of their meals on social media, these companies are tapping into this data and content for their own marketing purposes.
One of their most successful methods has been consistent A/B testing of marketing channels—native, mobile and social—followed by optimizing creative based on the efficiencies found in each of those channels. According to Adobe, effective A/B testing requires more input than many marketers might realize. For instance, not all marketers understand the effects of the significance level, which can have an impact on the difference in conversion rate between two offers. Brands that have mastered the science of A/B testing have seen a lasting impact on their ability to market their products efficiently.
Plated, for example, used Google Adwords, display ads and Facebook promotions to showcase its stylized pictures of foodies cooking its recipes at home. By A/B testing headlines, thumbnails and content sources, Plated quickly found that creative, close-up images performed better on mobile, so it optimized creative across email and native to feature more inventive photos. The result was over 3.5 million total visits to their website, which led to a 12-percent jump in new customer sign-ups.
Blue Apron, which was valued at $2 billion earlier this year, also found that emphasizing imagery in its social feeds resulted in higher conversion rates and more subscriptions. In a recent campaign, the company encouraged subscribers who were making, say, a crispy catfish dinner or sauteed shrimp sandwiches to share their photos on social, hoping it would help new users discover the service.
The strategy worked. Blue Apron’s co-founder and CEO Matt Salzberg largely credits its fast growth to referrals from Facebook and Instagram. “Customers hear about us from other customers or from social media,” Salzberg said in a recent interview. “One of their friends who cooked a Blue Apron meal shares it on Facebook or Instagram because they are really proud of what they’ve created. Then others go to our website and sign up.”
Armed with this knowledge, Blue Apron devised a strategy last summer to boost referrals. It teamed up with the social media studio Niche to connect with photographers, illustrators and other creative professionals with large social media followings. These artists then took photos and video of Blue Apron meals and ingredients and posted them on their own social channels. The company bet that more elegant and artsy imagery would result in better engagement and more subscriptions. And that’s what happened. Before Blue Apron activated this social campaign, it had 5,000 followers across its social media accounts. Today it has more than 800,000 and delivers more than three million meals a month.
Blue Apron didn’t stop there. After analyzing the data from this campaign, the company identified a new revenue opportunity: tools. Many of its customers didn’t have the necessary utensils to prepare the meals they’d ordered. As a result, Blue Apron introduced an e-commerce site for kitchen tools so that the next time a subscriber ordered the catfish but didn’t have a spatula, he or she could add one to the same order.
While images and social proved to be the most impactful combination for Blue Apron and Plated, it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy for every brand. And that’s the point. Routine testing of marketing programs and practices produces insights and results. Follow the recipe. Put that data into action—and repeat—to find your winning combination.
