Situation Overview

Lamson Products is one of the oldest cutlery manufacturers in the US but struggled with brand awareness, especially with the younger demographics. Lamson recognized that it needed to better reach those audiences and could do so through social media.

Challenge

In an era where original content creation is king and the content experience is queen; where millions of consumers and businesses alike share content organically every day through social media channels, there has been an exponential increase in the competition between brands for their content to be viewed and responded to without payment to boost its presence. Lamson also faces the struggle for market share as a result of increasing competition in its industry. Lamson therefore needed to determine a content strategy that would increase its organic content visibility and drive organic fan follower growth.

Process

We first conducted a brand audit of Lamson’s social media presence on Facebook and Instagram including post content, post performance, fan engagement and audience growth. From our brand discovery exercises, we determined pitfalls of the previous content and audience growth strategies in the post messaging and content shared. Lamson had also been relying heavily on paid campaigns to increase audience growth and engagement which skewed some of the organic fan data.

Tapping into our insights and experiences with social media user behavior and content best practices for Facebook and for Instagram, including both visuals and written captions, we developed messaging strategy to better connect with Lamson fans and followers in an organic/unpaid way. We found that the younger demographic target audiences preferred content that focused on food made with Lamson cutlery and kitchen tools, rather than posts that focused on the products themselves. Regarding Instagram, this discovery also affected the hashtags used and for the same reason—the hashtags needed to focus on food and dining trends rather than product trends.

Execution

Using a provided archive of potential unused content, we planned posts one week at a time based on trending food/cooking topics and seasonal food/cooking themes. This ensured our content was relevant to our audience and authentic to the Lamson brand.

While we used the same image or video across Facebook and Instagram, we optimized the post caption content for the social channel it was going to be published on. For Instagram, this meant including the proper hashtags for the content, monitoring the success of each and revising the hashtag list in favor of those that performed best. We also employed the use of questions for captions for Instagram, where audiences had proven to engage more with posts that posed a question to answer instead of stating a fact or opinion.

For Lamson’s Instagram content, click here.

For Lamson, Facebook content, click here.

Summary

Lamson’s Facebook and Instagram pages have both experienced organic growth in audience and fan engagement. The post content under our strategy is reaching more people and is being reacted and responded to more often than prior strategies. Lamson’s social presence especially has been improved within the group of self-identified “foodies” and “food lovers” as well as with professional and amateur chefs who are most likely to buy Lamson products.