When it comes to marketing food, you might think it sells itself; it is a basic necessity with inelastic demand, after all. But how do you market something digitally when it’s stripped of it’s main selling points, taste and smell? That’s an omnivore’s digital marketing dilemma.
After publishing our Colossal Content Marketing Report earlier this week, we thought we’d take a closer look at the competing content strategies of a sub-genre of blogs. When we came across the winners of Saveur‘s Fourth Annual Best Food Blog Awards, we knew we’d found our subject.
So we put our marketing analytics platform to work and took a closer look at the digital marketing strategies from some of the top food blogs. Here are some interesting – if not mouth-watering – trends and insights from the group.
First, here’s how the top food blogs face-off on social networks:
Thanks to its flippantly aggressive, “Eat like you give a f*ck” brand voice, Thug Kitchen leads the pack on Facebook and Twitter, with 494,215 fans and 48,857 followers, respectively. On Facebook in particular, Thug Kitchen has over four times the followers of its closest competitor (Joy the Baker with 117,173 fans), and receives 7,465 average interactions per post. So what is Thug Kitchen doing to blow (and curse) away the competition on Facebook?
Looking at Thug Kitchen’s Facebook posts with the most engagement, it’s clear the blog is making the most of its seasonal food offerings, from their springtime lauding of asparagus to their holiday hot toddy recipe.
They even heralded Thanksgiving with a stuffing recipe and some genius copywriting that encapsulates what everyone is really thinking about while gathered around the table… (Hint: it isn’t gratitude.)
On Twitter, though, Thug Kitchen and the “made with love, baked from scratch” Joy the Baker are roughly neck-to-neck, with 45,857 and 44,202 followers, respectively. (Though Thug Kitchen sports better interaction on Twitter, with 44.5 retweets on average versus 12.8 for Joy the Baker).
Thug Kitchen continues to use the power of cleverly-captioned photos on Twitter, but the top tweets were more aimed at the struggles of working professionals (with some fantastic use of hashtags).
Joy the Baker, on the other hand, saw top Twitter interaction by getting meta, directly addressing some of the tactics (and quirks) behind managing a food blog brand.
On Instagram, however, there was a much more competitive playing field among Saveur‘s top food blogs. As predicted, Thug Kitchen made sure to maximize their social reach by repurposing their captioned pictures on the image-driven network.
But Joy the Baker lead the Instagram leaderboard by playing to her confectionary strengths with these sugary, mouth-watering snapshots of baked goods.
Meanwhile, from the Instagram runner-up, the more traditionally wholesome Green Kitchen Stories’s top posts played to the heart of food aesthetics with simple but stunning food photography. Note that almost all of these food blogs are professionally staging and editing their photos, opting to use no Instagram filter. (Fortune 500 companies saw increased engagement using the Mayfair filter – more on that here.)
In the end, Thug Kitchen’s unique voice and strategic content distribution across social channels paid off. After an extended silence on their blog, social shares for the tongue-in-cheek, profanity-laced site peaked once again with the announcement of their upcoming book release on their blog:
“We know y’all have been patient and we really appreciate that shit. We’ve poured everything we can into this damn book and it’s taking some time to get that shit right. We didn’t want some half-ass book that looks like we just printed off a bunch of stuff from the site. Naw, we know you deserve better than that. So this book hits hard with 100 brand new, tasty as fuck recipes that are guaranteed to elevate your kitchen game.”
Thanks to the blog’s dedicated readership, the book publication news scored Thug Kitchen over 80 times as many social interactions as their average blog post!
So now that you’re hungry, grab a snack and go dig into your own digital marketing tactics.