As hospitality venues are relying on social media to engage with their customers, it's important to set your social media strategy in a way that works for your business.
Note: This is the final instalment in our three-part ‘Promote’ series. To access our Social Media Success Kit, the previous segment can be found here.
In this instalment of our 'PROMOTE' series, we spoke to Andy Trancao, Creative Director & Founder of VSNRY who specialises in digital marketing in the food and beverage industry and has been managing Royal Stacks' social media profile. From being a customer at Royal Stacks to helping the business to grow digitally, Andy understands Royal Stacks' brand inside out.
Have a read below on how he creates innovative and relatable social media content to engage with their audience.
1. Strategy
Social media plays a huge role at Royal Stacks. It is critical in strengthening their brand identity and communicating with their customers. The brand colours of blue, purple and pink as well as their messaging are consistent so that customers instantly see Royal Stacks as ‘fun and trendy’.
The overall social media strategy for Royal Stacks is to showcase its brand persona while staying relevant and fresh. When Instagram implemented a new feature of the send button, Royal Stacks had to adapt with a modified strategy.
“We used to always post pictures of the food and try to get as many ‘likes’ as possible. Now, our goal is to get as many ‘sends’ as possible.” Andy stated as he believes that customers sharing content among their network has a much higher value than likes and even comments.
To achieve this, Andy and Royal Stacks began to produce light-hearted content with the intention to make their audience laugh, for instance, memes and Twitter-like posts that are relatable to the venue and its customers.
Additionally, Royal Stacks relies heavily on social media to create ongoing conversations with their customers.
For instance, when customers post pictures of their experience, Royal Stacks will aim to acknowledge and reply as one of the ways to put a 'face' behind the business.
2. Execution
To emphasise Royal Stack’s brand personality with a sense of humour, Andy wanted to remain on top of the latest trend which allowed him to produce content on-the-go.
Since Royal Stacks has strongly identified its target audience between the ages of 20 to 40 years old, Andy aimed to transform Royal Stacks' social media profile from just displaying food images to being a brand with personality that people can relate to.
He emphasised, "We want to show how we think, what we stand for and what our sense of humour is like."
"And again, our aim is to generate as many sends as possible followed by likes and comments."
Therefore, Royal Stacks' main focus is to create content that people find funny, cool, relatable or just straight up "food porn" and make their audience feel like they need to share with their family and friends.
Occasionally, Andy will test a variety of content across social media platforms as content that works well on Instagram may not work well on Facebook and vice versa. But so far, the meme type of content has been performing well on both Royal Stacks’ Facebook and Instagram platforms.
3. Results
A good indication that a post achieves its intended results will be if a burger sells well the day after.
On another hand, it is also important to analyse the number of likes, comments and shares to measure the rate of engagement and how effective the post in achieving its goal.
“If you are not active on social media, you are potentially losing business and easily can be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.” Andy highlighted that hospitality venues need to be actively vocal in social media platforms in order to grow in their online presence.
4. Progress
“Identify your brand and embody the brand of your venue as if it were a person,” was a piece of Andy’s valuable advice. With that vision in mind, Andy and his team were able to successfully portray a character behind Royal Stacks’ social media profile. “Your vibe attracts your tribe,” he added.
In summary, here are his tips on how to get better in the ‘social media craft’:
- Build on your brand first
- Find inspiration from other businesses that we look up to, competitors or other countries and see how you can adapt it to work in your own way
- Have conversations with your team to get more ideas and include them in creating more content
- Follow what's going on in the digital world to identify with the latest trends
- Sometimes getting distracted by random content might trigger an innovative idea
- Pay attention to social media yourself, you can't be a better race car driver if you don't race cars often
If you would like to get more resources on how to transition your business from a 'recovery' phase to a 'growth' stage, you can head to our Pivot, Promote & Progress page for more valuable insights and success stories.
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