Set an extra place at the table
If you are yuppies or young career women who, during the week, usually bring a quick lunch from home or have business lunches in a partner restaurant, the idea of having guests for dinner at the weekend could cause you slight anxiety. What should you cook to make a good impression?
They say that 59% of young people between the ages of 25 and 35 cook with a smartphone or tablet on hand, and you're probably no exception: like all your peers, you were raised on bread and digital technology and you can do online research autonomously. You have Grandma's recipe book but it stays in the attic, you have no desire to look for it. You fill Google or Youtube's search engine strings with phrases such as "How to cook... " or "How to make the best...", regarding the dish you intend to whip up and you rely on online recipes to cook.
Incidentally, as revealed by a OneSpot study, these phrases are among the ten most searched on Youtube and Google. If we keep in mind that the consumer gives more value to content that is informative (40%) and educational (28%), Food Brands that share digital assets such as videos, texts and uses cases of this kind, which tend to fuel the desire to create something delicious, are more likely to be noticed among the content jumble found on the Net nowadays.
With this content it becomes easier to engage the consumer, who will consequently feel positively about the brands that inspired them and visit their food stores or buy their products directly. Food Content Marketing represents an invaluable opportunity to create stronger relationships with one's customers and we know that once you reel them in, food lovers are among the most loyal fans there are. Just think about the fact that BuzzFeed's Tasty has over 94 million followers on Facebook, and that most users' social feeds are tied to food pictures.
If we also consider the millennials trends reported by a Nielsen study, we see that they care about the way their food is produced and they want to know the story behind it, so content can be an exceptional tool for satisfying their curiosity. In addition to suggesting methods and recipes for preparing food, you can tell millennials the story and the beneficial impact on the body of each individual ingredient, respecting the healthy attitude they try to apply to every aspect of their daily lives. Millennials, in fact, give great importance to moral satisfaction, by searching for ethical and organic food. Their enjoyment of the food increases due to the perception of having made the right choice.
The menu, just as you want it
At this point we have to transform ourselves into Chefs, into real Carlo Craccos of the Marketing world, and prepare a menu of tasty content that can satisfy the palates of all the customers who visit us. But if we want to make our brand experiences truly relevant, we need to personalize them so that the bond with the consumer will become stronger and stronger, until it will become indissoluble. Continuing with our culinary metaphor, the content menu we propose to our user must be modelled on their personal taste, but to extract this content we need the support of technology, of Artificial Intelligence.
With Content Intelligence, that is AI applied to content, we can maximize its value by extracting valuable data on the interests of the users. We have entered the Customer Age, so if we want to emerge victorious we must offer them a "superior experience". If we find out that our user is vegetarian, through the analysis carried out by the AI engines which scan the viewed content, we must absolutely never offer them dishes of what they see as corpses!
So far, there are still only a few Brands that have a consistent and constant content strategy on all the channels they communicate with: a virtuous example is Taco Bell, the giant of American Fast Food, which is reaping the fruits of having created unique content. On social media, as revealed by NewsCred, Taco Bell has 1.1 million followers on Instagram, 1.91 million fans on Twitter and 66.000 followers on Youtube (the series "For here or to go", with videos on how to prepare scrumptious dishes, is very popular). But the website is the place where the conversions take place, a real content hub that is no stranger to the art of storytelling, with employee and fan stories (some people even got married in a Taco Bell!) and a variety of information, always presented in a pleasant and captivating style.
Thanks to CI, we can measure how this content is performing and identify the tastiest foods and stories, those that most attract the interest of users, and therefore we can obtain a set of information that, combined with the customer data history already in our possession, enables us to optimize our editorial strategies using the topics that we know are most welcome and to automate the customization process with Marketing Automation initiatives (email, smart tips etc.).
For example, a food company that customizes the user experience is Halla, which uses AI to make meal predictions based on the users' food preferences data, collected from their order history and revised according to their online behavior. Or PetMio, a company that offers personalized diets for pets, based on data collected on their activity and biometrics.
Carrefour, a MMR of the Food sector, uses THRON, a DAM that includes Content Intelligence, to optimize the online shopping experience, thanks to data derived from the interactions between users and content, which are then used to recommend the favorite products of each person.
