Table of Contents
1) Introduction and Business Overview 2) Client Discovery and Business Goals 3) Analysis and Recommendations •
SWOT Analysis
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Audience Analysis
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Communications Strategy
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Social Media Strategy
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Recommended Tools
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Metrics
4) Closing Summary and Findings
Introduction Company Description: Yo Soy is an underground supper club servicing the Chicagoland area. The company was started by two food enthusiasts, Brian and Mikey, looking to provide LGBTQ community events that incorporate food and culture through a creative and memorable night of eating and art with others based around common interests. The brand has expanded to serve beyond their initial demographic, bringing in customers from many walks of life that all share a common passion for inventive cuisine. Their unique selling point revolves around their fusion of contemporary cuisines with traditional Mexican cooking. Yo Soy has cultivated a very specific atmosphere for their events, blending the counterculture idea of an ‘underground supper club’ with upscale dishes and art. An attendee leaves a Yo Soy dinner with much more than a full stomach. The night includes live music sets, a cocktail hour, customized ambiance, and additionally fosters community interaction. Current Business Positioning: Supper clubs are a growing trend in large urban cores such as Chicago. Yo Soy not only has to combat competition from other local supper clubs, but they also are competing with the many other dining options available in Chicago. There has to be a direct incentive to spend the time and money to go the extra mile to attend a supper club night when you could just make a reservation at a restaurant. This problem is exacerbated when you take into account the burgeoning supper club landscape in the Chicago area. With established competitors such as the Cake and Whiskey Club, Goose and Fox, and Clandestino, Yo Soy has entered a market segment that doesn’t play by traditional marketing rules, instead relying on clout and word-of-mouth to grow community
interest. Many of these flagship supper clubs are exclusive, invite-only, and do not advertise their events publicly. The trendy nature of the restaurant business is also a competitive factor in itself. Food service businesses come and go rapidly and people are constantly thriving for something new and fresh. Yo Soy has the ability to adapt to this need because of their style and format. They can feature different musicians, locations, atmospheres, food features, cuisines, and many other interchangeable elements of their business design.
Discovery Summary of Client Needs and Concerns: Yo Soy’s primary need is expanded market exposure. They have fallen into a rut of habitually repeat customers. Diversification of customer demographic, location, and event type is a necessary step in order to grow Yo Soy successfully. The business also lacks organizational qualities. Most noticeably, this deficiency manifests through their social media presence. The accounts they have chosen to utilize are not consistently updated. The several different platforms fail to portray Yo Soy as a cohesive brand and this causes major hurdles for the growth of the business. Lack of consistency tarnishes the brand image, and makes those social media platforms inefficient at reaching their intended audience. If the audience doesn’t feel engaged by the brand, there is virtually no incentive for the audience to engage the brand in conversation or social sharing activities. For a lean, small brand such as Yo Soy, social media is the most cost-effective method to reach the largest potential audience. Given that their audience (‘foodies’ and food enthusiasts) is traditionally very active and outspoken on social platforms, it serves a dual purpose of exposing
new potential customers to the brand, while creating a stream of socially sharable content that can then be leveraged by ‘content curators’ in the Chicago food community. Yo Soy needs to capitalize on the social media tools available to them so that the maximum amount of people are informed and inspired by the Yo Soy brand and their product. Business Goals: •
Increase dinner ticket sales and revenue.
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Diversify customer demographics and event locations.
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Energize social media platforms in a manner than illustrates Yo Soy as a unified brand.
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Build on culture and art integration through meaningful relationships and partners.
Success Criteria: Considering that Yo Soy currently has virtually no activity on their social media platforms, any signs of customer and audience engagement on these platforms would be strong indication of the effectiveness of this campaign. If we are able to engage with even a small percentage of their potential audience in the short-term, that momentum can be used to further build the brand. With the algorithms used by Facebook and Twitter such as EdgeRank and Sponsored Post Display Mechanics, these platforms organically promote content that the audience is engaging with. Quite simply, if we engage a portion of the audience with content that is genuinely good, that content will be displayed to other potential customers, and so on, building not only the brand, but the reach of their network.
Communications Audit: Currently, Yo Soy has social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, and traditional communication with their existing customers through email outreach. Their social media presence is inconsistent, with sporadic posts that aren’t added with
any regularity or scheduling. Twitter is considerably more active than any other platform, due to the direct mentioning feature that allows users to tweet directly back and forth. This is being used currently to reply to some customers, but not with any regularity or criteria.
Analysis and Recommendations SWOT Analysis: Analysis: Yo Soy is currently standing at a pivotal point. The company has great potential for growth and expansion. They are servicing a niche clientele that has demonstrated a loyal attitude toward their services. The next year will be formative as to what direction Yo Soy will progress with. The weaknesses identified in the chart are definitely manageable and can be remedied through deliberate branding and a bite the bullet mentality coming from the two owners. A clear direction needs to be established, a steadfast marketing strategy needs to be implemented, and all of this needs to be shared with the market through social media platforms in a brandstrengthening manner. The food service industry is trendy, meaning new restaurants, supper clubs, meal services pop up and also collapse daily. Yo Soy will need to continue to stay on the cutting edge of creative cuisine and experience based dining.
Audience Analysis and Recommendations: Their current audience is largely young professionals, living in Chicago’s urban core and close suburban areas. They attract many food enthusiasts and food bloggers, lending to the upscale nature of the cuisine served at Yo Soy events. They are technically literate, and are considered frequent users of social media. Many of their customers
have their own food publications, in the form of online food blogs, magazine columns, and food community newsletters. Ideally, these customers would be inspired by Yo Soy to not only participate in providing ideas and feedback for future dinners, but also to share their positive experiences on social networks and attract new customers from their own networks in the process. If executed properly, this ‘social media machine’ will fuel itself, feeding off of the social media interest generated by these ‘content curators’, lending to the curiosity of new potential customers that would have otherwise never been exposed to the brand. Communication Strategy and Recommendations: The key message for the brand to deliver is that food can not only be fun and delicious, it can be educational and transformative at the same time. The brand needs to highlight their service not as a food service, but as a packaged experience that satisfies many needs at once. Not only are customers going to walk away from a Yo Soy event full of delicious food, they’ll walk away with an appreciation for the fusion of two very different cuisines, against a backdrop of art and culture that neatly coincides with the dishes being served. Secondary to this message, they should be promoting and highlighting the different cuisine choices for each event. As part of their unique selling proposition, the fusion of very different cuisines is part of what makes Yo Soy unique. By capitalizing on this aspect of their underground suppers, Yo Soy can call attention to the most inventive aspect of their brand. Culture also coincides nicely with the rotating cuisine choices, as it gives Yo Soy an opportunity to associate the meal with art and history in a way that allows the cuisine to complement the cultural work. Though this is an idea Yo Soy has touched on and explored with their past dinners, the idea could be more cohesive and cleanly executed. We recommend using rich media content to catch the attention of the customer base. Considering that food and art are both very sensory experiences, it makes the most sense to translate this into a visual message that the
audience can more easily understand. It is incredibly difficult to describe how delicious food may be, however a well-photographed meal can make your mouth water uncontrollably. Combined with short, engaging video clips leading up to each supper event can help to generate interest both before and after the event takes place. Social Media Objectives and Strategy: Our business goals are to increase ticket sales and revenue, build audience size and demographic diversity, revamp social media platforms to illustrate Yo Soy as a cohesive, active brand, and to foster cultural and artistic creativity through their supper club events. Given their current weaknesses in social media presence, and their intended audience communication goals, Yo Soy should be focusing first on outward appearance and consistency. Yo Soy must move away from sporadic, inconsistent posting, and generate a schedule of content that is updated regularly and is maximized for audience interest. As discussed previously, content will likely perform best if it includes rich media, especially photo or video. By including this rich media content that encompasses both the events, and the details surrounding them, Yo Soy has the ability to create posted content that includes their audience by design (photo/video tagging, mentions of participants at a dinner, thank you tweets, etc.), and will naturally encourage sharing by those involved. This will in turn expose potential new customers to the Yo Soy brand via this shared rich media content. It’s a very simple, but very effective social strategy for basic outreach and audience building. Yo Soy’s fun, cultural events are good content to share by design, however their current struggle is producing that content in a timely manner. Recommendations of Tools and Tactics: There are currently no social media tools being used by Yo Soy, outside of the basic use of the platforms themselves. We recommend the use of a social platform manager such as Sprout Social or HootSuite. These automated platforms allow you to
create, queue, and post content on a schedule. For a small brand such as Yo Soy that doesn’t have a dedicated employee for social media, using these automation tools is absolutely integral in maintaining a consistent social media image. Our recommendation includes the planning and creation of content no less than two weeks in advance, which will ensure that there is always a buffer of usable content in case both Mikey and Brian are unable to post updates for any reason. This satisfies the need for content, while leaving both Mikey and Brian free to attend to other issues regarding the business. In addition to making and managing posting easier, Sprout Social also provides useful metrics on customer engagement and audience growth, showing you age and gender breakdowns, posting time-of-day heatmapping, per-post engagement, and more. This data would be immeasurably valuable, allowing Yo Soy to determine the best time and day to post certain content, how different types of rich media engage their customer base differently, and geographic demographics. The combination of all of this intelligence will allow Yo Soy to tailor their social media strategy to perfectly fit their audience, and to change their behaviors online as their audience grows and changes with them.
Metrics and Analysis: If this campaign is successful, online relationships between Yo Soy and their audience should become considerably more active and collaborative. Our goal is to grow not only the size and reach of their audience, but the activity and communication between the brand as a result of this growth. Having a large number of followers or users who are fans alone does not automatically increase user engagement, however. The injection of consistent, highquality content to their social media properties is central to their success. Qualitatively, Yo Soy’s success will be measured on the quality of their customer interactions online. The goal is to be able to glean meaningful information from their users online, such as cuisines they would
be interested in trying, artists they would like to see included, or even suggested new venues for supper events to be held in. If Yo Soy is willing to listen to their users, they can tune their experience to best fit the audience, making the brand and their services better in the long run. Increase in the frequency and quality of customer engagement online is a key metric in measuring their growth and success. Quantitatively speaking, we would like to see their audience size increase from sub-1000 users (roughly 800 fans on Facebook, less than 500 followers on Twitter) to be more proportional to their demographic size. With around 3 million people in Chicago, 11.4% of the population is aged between 20-34, meaning even if Yo Soy could capitalize on even 10 percent of that 11.4 percent of the population, they would be able to engage 20,000 to 30,000 new customers in Chicago alone. The risks for the brand on social media are low. Given the low cost of entry to use social tools, and the virtually $0 investment to maintain these tools, the only risks that Yo Soy faces would be negative engagement from their customer base. There will always be the possibility of a customer not being satisfied by Yo Soy’s services, and the possibility that they may take to social media to voice their concerns. For a large brand, they usually don’t need to worry about a single customer tarnishing their brand image, but for a small brand such as Yo Soy, every customer is highly visible and every experience counts. These risks can be mitigated by simply continuing to be active on social platforms, and to respond to any negative activity as quickly as possible. By addressing customer concerns immediately, Yo Soy can take the unlikely scenario of a negative customer experience, and turn it into a positive brand experience in the eyes of the customer.