Highest Engagement Rates in Two Industries

Kirk’s Natural, South of France Natural Body Care, Dark Star Hot Sauce, and The Grandpa Soap Company

OPPORTUNITY

Engagement with consumers.

STRATEGY AND ACTIVITIES

In running marketing campaigns, we pay attention to...

Brand Character – values, products, packaging, ingredients, look & feel (see our consumer goods client portfolio);

Visuals and Text – we create and rigorously test different visuals and text;

Audiences – their interests, demographics, and purchase behaviors (see this in-depth persona case study); and

Data – what works and what doesn't.

We don't explicitly chase engagement, yet we bring our clients some of the highest engagement rates in their industries in the US. We're careful about bringing qualified followers in the first place (how we bring top-notch followers), we focus on brands and products, and we rigorously test all marketing materials for high-quality responses. 

OUTCOMES

Consistent high-performing engagement for four CPG brands in two industries in the US.

NATURAL BODY CARE

The graph shows likes per post on Facebook (read why Facebook is so important), adjusted to 100k followers...

Natural Body Care: US National Brands

Average likes per post on Facebook, adjusted to 100,000 followers, for natural body care brands in the US Aug-Nov 2016. Excludes sale/giveaway posts, and includes paid posts, if any. Raw data is publicly available from brands' pages. This analysis proprietary by Sund and Company 2016-17. Ask us for details.

Our natural body care clients have 42,000 followers, yet we get them the same amount of engagement as an average competing brand with 160,000 followers. This is without gimmicks like giveways. We focus posts on the brands and products.

HOT SAUCE

The graph shows likes per post on Facebook (why Facebook), adjusted to 100k followers...

Hot Sauce: National and Regional Brands

Average likes per post on Facebook, adjusted to 100,000 followers, for hot sauce brands in the US, Jan-Mar 2017. Excludes sale/giveaway posts, and includes paid posts, if any. Raw data is publicly available from brands' pages. This analysis proprietary by Sund and Company 2016-17. Ask us for details.

HOT SAUCE: NATIONAL AND REGIONAL BRANDS

People like body care products, but they're passionate about hot sauces! Engagement rates are several times higher. There are many more brands of hot sauce than natural body care, many with regional distribution – our client is available in the Midwest – so we haven't done as thorough a job of checking the competition, but we have included other prominent Midwestern as well as national brands. We bring our client the highest engagement rate we've measured in their industry.

WHAT Does It MEAN?

A brand can have a lot of followers, but if they aren't engaging them, those followers are wasted. High engagement rates means our clients make more efficient use of their followers – on average, nearly 4x higher their competitors.

NOTES

  1. We measure engagement on Facebook. Why not on Instagram? Instagram is great, but a lot of likes and comments on Insta are based on #hashtags. People, brands, and influencers-on-the-make surf and use bots to engage and attract followers based simply on the hashtags in the posts. For the foreseeable future, Facebook is a far better measure of engagement with followers and prospective customers.
    Why we depend on Facebook for research.

  2. We measure engagement for social media. Why not for display advertising? Display ads (aka "digital", even though everything is digital) are useful for volume advertising. But you don't get nearly the feedback – no range of reactions, no comments, no degrees of click such as enlarge image or read more on the fly. Besides this, competitors' data is known only to them. We have no access to their numbers nor they to ours. Social engagement is public, so everyone can measure each other transparently.

Consumer Products