So, I want to focus this blog post on brand building, specifically as it relates to social media. Admittedly, the true broodjes authority to speak to this is Janny (our marketer/my sister), but she’s too busy being a social media guru for Planned Parenthood and others to add any concrete insight to the conversation.
I’d like to preface this by directing you to our About page. I’m just a kid who loves sandwiches and is running a sandwich company. This is my first foray into business and so, a lot of what Broodjes does is trial and error.
It seems today that brands are built online. Of course, that depends to a degree on your target audience, but I would say that unless you’re catering to a 40+ crowd, you need some kind of digital presence.
I’m not an avid tweeter and I try hard to not follow businesses on facebook. Regardless, there are a few companies so witty, so cool, and with such timely content who I let blitz my wall every so often.
The week prior to our hard launch, I started thinking seriously about how we could become one of those companies.
How do we convince individuals to let us into their virtual stream of consciousness? How do we make people care about what we’re saying and then, more importantly, take part in that conversation because ultimately, yes, we want 5,000 ‘likes’ on facebook, but we also want to engage individuals.
For now, I’m thinking it’s the content piece. Broodjes needs to be a reliable source of information on the sandwich space, specifically the Dutch sandwich industry.
Given that particular market in the US is small/nonexistent, our focus needs to be on those differentiating factors that make this industry unique: quality of ingredients and taste.
For the next month (or shorter if it is clear this approach doesn’t work), my focus will be sharing this type of content with our network.
It’s my hypothesis (technical term, waddup), that by doing this we will gain more followers or individuals who want to include us in their digital lives.
Now, for the engagement piece. Having people ‘like’ us (on facebook and literally) is awesome, but we also want to have conversations.
Engagement is key to building a customer base we can depend on as well as checking the wants and wills of the people.
The hypothesis on this front is that we need to state opinions. It’s not enough to be an encyclopedia of sandwich knowledge. We also need represent a point of view on what’s out there so we can instigate conversations around it. As a result, we’ll learn more about our customers and they’ll learn more about us, all factors key to healthy growth.
This is the social media project for the month! Let’s see if we get any bites..Frankly, it should be easy to check. It’ll all be on the wall.