How Social Media Monitoring Can Help the Food and Beverage Industry?

When it comes to food, the camera eats first. Millions of posts are related to the food and beverage industry, as well as thousands of restaurants and eating joints are checked-in every single day. Today, taking pictures of what you eat in a restaurant and posting them on social media is a global phenomenon. And guess what – it’s continuously growing, and our beloved Italian dish pizza has been found to be the most popular Instagrammed food.

From the media and entertainment industry to manufacturing, everyone is investing in food and beverages where people applaud the beautiful pictures of these foods and share them on social media. Moreover, it has a significant impact on the prices, customer interactions, and services about the industry.

The blend of social media in the food & beverage industry

Whether it is the Starbucks, which is at its highest or the increasing prices of Avocado, social media has a great impact on customer preferences in the food and beverage industry. All thanks to the posts that have created a new hype about these foods. It changed the way we eat now.

This proves that the food and beverage industry is the most volatile sector, which is affected by the slightest shift in customer preferences and needs. Earlier people trusted advertisers, then, they trusted people and relied on the interactions that take place on social media. Moreover, from startups to established global companies in the food space, customers express their views and concerns on social media. This makes social media powerful enough to have the potential to move commodities and change prices.

In a nutshell, social media conversations matter, making sense when it comes to understanding and predicting the coming changes through analytics. So, let’s understand the need for social media analytics in the food and beverage industry.

Why does the food and beverage industry need social media analytics?

As the food and beverage industry has grown over time, it has undoubtedly come across various challenges in the market. Whether it’s the changing tastes and perception, or a demand for healthy food, or the ascent of veganism trend social media unlocks a holistic customer insight about the brand health and the competitive share of voice. Let’s have a look at the needs of the food industry and the challenges they are facing:

Inability to gather vast data and make informed decisions

The food industry is volatile and sensitive even to the slightest of changes. The complex environment fraught with the challenges of data handling is adding to the issues. Moreover, the growing data-driven culture in the food and beverage industry is helping to improve productivity. People are already generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, and its analysis is fostering growth.

This makes it apparent that data analysis has a significant role to play in the decision-making process. To expand the product line and reduce food wastage, companies are bound to take a closer look at the data so they can save resources.

Data analytics have turned out to be useful in keeping track of batch expiration dates for faster processing, food temperature for safe storage, and market trends to optimize inventories. It also helps to track surplus that can help to meet the expectations of the growing demands of the consumers and fill the gap. With the data analytics, the food and beverage industry can handle supply chain disruptions and stay ahead of any competition.

Inability to understand customer sentiments

Consumer sentiments have become a focal point of discussion and one of the major considerations for analysis. Consumer sentiments directly imply consumers’ emotions and feelings that have the potential to bring about a big change in the trends. However, organizations find it hard to understand the perception people hold for their products and services, and the mixed-signal adds up to more confusion.

It is essential to know what they have on their minds when they think about your brand because these form the basis of their behavior in the future. Social media analytics play a significant role in the sentiment analysis of consumers, which helps to understand the latest trends and gives you an idea about where your brand stands. It also helps to understand the consumer likes and dislikes that can help you come up with products and services that completely satisfy your consumers.

Lacks consistent food quality

Consumers have become extremely selective, and they switch when they realize an unpleasant change in your products and services. Also, if they find better services, they will not think about a second and will quickly shift to other best alternatives that they discover. Companies find it hard to handle these issues because it is challenging to maintain a consistent food quality in this competitive era where there’s something new in the market now and then.

Social media analytics enables the food and hospitality industry to preserve consistent quality where consumers expect a uniform food taste. This food tastes on factors such as accurate measurement of ingredients, food quality, season, and people working on it.

Social media analytics helps to evaluate the impact of food taste and quality and considers every other aspect that can help to determine the areas of difficulties. All this facilitates improvements in the areas where it is needed the most and ensures the delivery of the best quality food and services.

Social media analysis to track success in the food & beverage industry

Whether it is a vegan-friendly trend or Paleo diet for the health-conscious, social media science paves the way for delivery of better services and the best quality food. Social media analytics help to research trends for product development, optimize product portfolios, and discover new opportunities for the brands to grow and expand. 94% of marketers and business professionals find data analysis important for their growth. Here’s how the companies can track their success in the food and beverage industry through social media analytics:

Understand brand perception

Brand perception is the idea of your brand that a consumer has, and he sees it in a different light. Let us tell you that brand perception is critical for social media interactions as it can quickly change from positive to neutral to negative.

Social media analytics gives you real insights into what consumers think of your brand and how they feel about your brand. It will provide you with an idea of what your consumers love, like, or dislike, which you can use to build better strategies. It quickly drills into consumer sentiments such as attributes, feelings, emotions, and behavior that give an idea of purchase intent and switching behavior. You will be surprised to know that the brand value of various fast food brands has increased over the years due to their fast-paced services and quality food.

Source: Statista

You can figure which of your food items, products, or services are mentioned at most, what kind of product line ups people are more passionate about. The conversation tone is also a critical thing to focus on when trying to understand what light your products are being portrayed on social media.

Identify customer needs and fuel production ideation

When you try to understand the idea behind the customer conversation taking place over social media, you know what the unfulfilled demands are. You can easily figure out the areas of improvement and strategize to exploit the coming opportunities.

The categorical analysis helps to identify unarticulated needs, current value systems, and existing competitors in the food and beverage industry. Based on the insights, you can build a content strategy that ensures your message is clear, timely, and targeted, which gets amplified in the market space. Moreover, it will help you to identify popular diets, ingredients, and consumption moments to which you can align your marketing strategy.

Creative content strategy and campaigns

If we ask you what is the motivational force that helps your design a marketing campaign? With 3.8 billion people using social media, it is a positive customer experience that inspires you to create a unique campaign that embodies the tone and preference of the audiences you are planning to target. But how would you do that?

Your engaging posts will give you an idea of customer engagements and their preferences according to which you can create and run a marketing campaign. Identify the platforms where most of your customers are present and are interacting to figure out the apt timing to post your content. Also, measure your campaigns with core KPIs to understand the shifts and their impact. Make sure you keep close tabs at the conversations pre and post-campaign to analyze if there is any change in consumer sentiments or behavior.

Optimize all your campaigns

The food and beverage industry relies heavily on limited time offers and creates campaigns for a stipulated time to drive continued diner interest. So, they make sure that their resources are not wasted, and efforts are not in vain, and they feel optimizing at every step is important. Use images, hashtags, social CTAs, and videos to optimize your social media campaigns.

Source: Slidesharecdn

Here are some considerations that you should keep in mind while optimizing your social media marketing campaigns:

• Categorize your marketing campaigns by discount and coupons, product/menu updates, limited time offers, and beverages.
• Analyze the techniques used in the previous campaigns and determine the utility of a similar technique in the current campaign. It could include paid influencers, sponsors/partners, contests, brand utilities, sponsored conversations, and many more.
• Analyze the vibe that has engrossed the campaign, such as food experience, price, services, and many more.

Improve customer experience

More than 80% of the customer interactions are automated and digitized; customer care is the most crucial aspect of your organization, making or breaking your brand. Ensure that all the issues don’t fall under one category, and you segregate the issues based on their nature and priority to improve customer experience. The categories can include hospitality service, price/value, food and quality, ambiance and cleanliness, service, and order accuracy.

Source: SuperOffice

You will be able to please your guests as you focus your energy on the area of improvement areas you discover after the analysis of conversations. Moreover, it would help if you used social listening to understand the feedback that people have for your services on social media.

Collaborate with influencers

Identify and partner with influencers who create a compelling story around your brand and share it among customers. You will be surprised to know that 17% of the companies from all the spheres are spending over half their marketing budget on influencers. Now, if you are thinking, how will you find the right influencers for your brand? Then don’t worry because the chances are that they are already stalking you. You need to figure out who fits the best based on their bio text, verified status, brand mentions, engagement rates, and much more that could complement your brand.

Source: BigCommerce

Make sure to analyze and measure the impact that an influencer has on your brand. Also, monitor all the channels of the influencer you have collaborated with. Check whether overall messaging and behavior is consistent with your brand.

Monitoring product launches

Product launches are a big deal in the food and beverage industry where you need to stay attuned to all aspects of the new product. It will help you deal with sudden hiccups promptly and engage with the audiences in a better way. Whenever you launch a new product line for your company, make sure you target the right audience and spread your message among them. Also, try to understand the response you got after the product launch, which will give you a clear idea of what people liked and whatnot. Moreover, identify any issues and make room for improvements.

Social media analytics – KPIs food & beverage industry should track

Now, the question is, what are the critical factors to track the success of your social media campaigns? What to assess in the social media tactics used for a campaign? We are here with a list of five important social media KPIs that everyone should track in the food and beverage industry to measure the success of any campaign; so, let’s begin:

Engagement

It is one of the most important KPIs to track in social media where you need to monitor the likes, dislikes, shares, subscribers, tweets, retweets, or comments. The higher is your engagement; the higher is your chances of conversion. When you have a high engagement rate, it depicts that your message resonates well with your targeted audience. Moreover, higher engagement is a symbol of popularity and quality, which is going to prove profitable for local restaurants and cafes.

Reach

Source: Slideshare

Reach is another critical aspect of the success of your social media campaign. It indicates how far your message has reached, which is measured by followers, subscribers, impressions, and traffic data. Moreover, it gives you an idea of the huge potential your campaign has that can expand the scope of visibility for your social media campaign and your brand.

Leads

Do leads imply how much profit a social media campaign can earn for your brand? Higher leads don’t guarantee ROI, but it surely depicts how people will end up buying at your place. Also, higher leads act as social proof that your brand is credible and makes it easier for you to earn people’s trust. It will help build credibility and authority, which later on, can drive more conversions. If you are not making leads, you are probably focusing on the wrong social media platform, or you need to work on improving your content quality.

Conversions

Conversion is the last step of the marketing funnel where your leads transform into your customers. Here Facebook lead ads are your best bet when you want to increase conversions. Moreover, it would help if you kept close tabs on which social media channel brings in what. If you get more conversions from a specific platform, try investing more in that particular section instead of creating campaigns for all social media platforms. Make sure you reach new customers and retain the old ones.

Customer sentiments

Source: Evokad

Customer sentiments imply in what light your customer sees your brand. It is one of the crucial factors to determine how well your restaurant is performing. Make sure you monitor all the reviews on different sites such as TripAdvisor, Google My Business, Yelp, Uber Eats, and many more. These reviews can influence them, and that can shape their opinion. Consider having a feedback form on your website from where you will get to know what they like and whatnot. Therefore, you can make improvements to your service.

How Mentionlytics can help the food and beverage industry?

When you belong to the food and beverage industry, things can turn messy. To keep things aligned with your brand, you continuously need social media monitoring to track customer behavior, preferences, sentiments, competitors, and engagement. If you face challenges to track key social media metrics, it’s best to invest in social media monitoring tools like Mentionlytics. Once you start collecting the important insights, you can use it to look for trends and strategize your campaign accordingly.

Mentionlytics give you access to mention insights, help you find the right influencers for your hospitality brand, and grow your brand’s reputation and sales. It also gives you important insights related to your competitors, products, and industry. You can easily discover what people are saying about your brand as it offers complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.

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