Custom Content Grocery Marketing Propels Growth of National & Specialty Chain Brands

I’m delighted to publish Pace’s second bar chart featuring the number of social media followers of U.S. Grocery Chains. This update focuses on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We dropped the numbers for Flickr because so few companies had that social media channel, and we also show the number of stores for each chain and publish the name of the company.

The new results for the U.S. Grocery Chains number of social media followers reveal a titanic battle between Walmart and Target for the mantle of top supermarket chain with most social media followers. Each has added over 500,000 followers to Facebook in the last four months. While the primary focus of both companies’ business is not grocery, both are important competitors in the industry and have a national presence. While many customers may follow each company’s social networking sites for a variety of reasons, each grocery business gains from being able to reach over one million Facebook followers for both companies.

Only Whole Foods beats Walmart and Target—but not on Facebook—rather on Twitter, with over 1.7 million followers. Interestingly the growth rate for Whole Foods for Twitter followers has been smaller over the last four months, with only 40,000 or so followers gained.

We have more research here at Pace on how content marketing is being used by supermarkets for grocery store marketing, and these numbers about social media followers give a fascinating picture of the changing nature of media and custom media, where companies can leverage online tools to reach customers directly. The chart also illustrates the differences between regional and national brands in the use of content marketing. If there’s one broad statement I can make about custom content grocery marketing, it’s that for national companies like Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Walmart, there’s an understanding of the value of creating content on the Web and in social networks both for their search engine rankings and customer engagement across the Web.

The question we hear from many regional supermarkets has been: Is content marketing worth the investment given a focus on regional markets? I think many grocery stores understand the importance of content marketing, but have not seen as much value from their efforts as national brands. If you run a national brand, the importance of content marketing and social media is clearer because all of your competitors have presence. Regionally, the grocery store marketing using content marketing is not as obvious, but I believe it is possible to gain benefits for a regional grocery store even if content reaches a national audience. In fact I’d even argue that you want content to have a national reach because sometimes your Web advocates may not even be able to shop at your store. But if everyone today is a media creator, any advocacy can bring regional supermarket referrals, if not direct sales.

Overall the chart gives us a snapshot of how grocery chains are developing their content grocery marketing efforts during 2010. National chains committed; they see the value and marketing ROI. Regional chains are still testing the waters. Specialty national chains like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are using national custom content publishing to expand their reach and build a stronger brand.

Posted By: John Cass