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How we use social media to enhance our B&I business
Bartlett mitchell use social media to reach all our audiences. I have a social media plan that considers all our audience segments; team members (current, past and prospective), customers, clients, prospects, suppliers and influencers.
My marketing strategy breaks down into different objectives and social media is one of the tools that helps me to achieve these. I am a big fan of the ‘S’ objectives; SELL, SERVE, SPEAK, SAVE and SIZZLE. These help me set, review and control our social media performance. Sell is obvious, serve is adding value, speak means getting closer to customers, save is about reducing costs, and sizzle is everything that goes towards creating a memorable on-line brand experience and brand advocates. All our activities have to answer one of these or we don’t do them.
Our brand is strengthened by having much better consumer insight and we get insight by using it to understand our audience’s needs, characteristics and behaviour. This insight has lead to new product or service development for customers and employment enhancements for team members.
It enables us to showcase our offer to prospects, it provides great recognition for our current team member’s skills, and for potential team members it shows what it’s like to work at bartlett mitchell. It demonstrates our expertise and knowledge and positions us as market leading, thought leaders with our influencers. Our blog is read by over 2,500 people every week. On the basis that its ‘better to give than receive’, we do a lot of useful sharing including recipes, business tips, cooking hacks and trends. Customers really like interacting and getting a response; they ask us questions, they give us feedback and they make requests. An example was one customer’s facebook request to provide gluten free options, our response resulted in positive coverage from leading coeliac and gluten free social media channels.
One of our brand values is honesty. It’s in our nature to be open which is a perfect for social media because it continues to build trust in our brand.
Social media’s great advantage is being able to measure everything. We can see straight away what engages and do more of it. This keeps our brand relevant, no one is interested in the bore that doesn’t listen to anyone else. One final thought, social media is a TIMITI science (try it, measure it and tweak it).
You can read more of my thoughts about social media for contract caterers here.