How One Box Meals use social media to engage and expand their customer base

1. You don’t need to post on social media every day

Many businesses wonder what the right frequency is for posting on social media, often because they want to ensure their messages have maximum impact. But creating content and posting every day can also be exhausting.

Dionne comments “One of the major lessons we learned is that doing social media can be very intense, and that sometimes it’s OK to take a bit of a break. We don’t have a massive marketing budget and so to get the message out there we were creating content and posting every day.”

Candice adds “Dionne and I were juggling that with looking after very small children, so it was hard work! But we soon found out that posting three or four times per week was fine.”

2. Make engagement the focus for your content

Rather than posting too often, it is better to post less frequently but with content that’s truly going to engage your audience.

Carleen remarks “It’s better to post better content that’s really engaging less often. When we initially started, we used a lot of static images, and then Tik Tok came along so we started to use video more, really focusing on what will engage our audience. By focusing more on engagement, we were able to increase our followers with content that stands out and doesn’t get lost in the feed.”

3. Tell your story on social media

One of the advantages of social media is that it can help create personal and authentic relationships with customers. The sisters found that by telling their own One Box Meals story, people wanted to engage more with the brand.

Dionne says “In the beginning we didn’t really put ourselves on the page. The recipes were really the stars of our posts! But after about a year we created a post that said ‘this is the face of One Box’ and covered what we’d been doing. We found people like to see the faces behind the product, and it helped them to feel like they were buying into what we’re doing.”

Carleen adds “When we told our story people did start to engage more and come on the journey with us. I think people related to us quite a bit. As much as it’s about the cooking, I think they love the unified family aspect of the business.  They definitely like it that we have a logo that’s a cartoon character of our Dad!”

4. Spread social media activities across the team

As One Box Meals has grown, it has got progressively busier to run. Spreading the social media workload between the sisters has helped to maintain the flow of content and kept it fresh.

Candice explains “There are three of us behind the business. We all post on the main One Box account as well as our own personal social media accounts. Rotating the posts and defining some roles and responsibilities across the team around creating content has really helped us keep on top of it. The creativity flows when it’s not just one of us posting.”

5. Plan your content calendar

Another way that the sisters have taken a more organised approach to their social media output is by using a content calendar.

Candice comments “Planning out our posts has really helped us create engaging content in advance. We create special boxes for events like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and these have been very successful. Mapping out our content calendar for these events means we can spend time on getting the content right, creating the visuals in advance and planning out engagement features like polls.”

6. Get to know the strengths of different channels

Social media encompasses a number of different channels including Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter and even LinkedIn. Knowing the different strengths of each and the type of audiences you reach, means businesses can target the right message to the right customer group.

Dionne says “Different channels reach different audiences and age groups. The engagement we get on Facebook is different to Instagram.  With Instagram we get the followers, the traction and the engagement, and we get a lot of enquiries, but with Facebook we tend to get more direct conversions from followers to customers. When we posted about our Valentine’s Day Box last year, more orders came through Facebook. In the future we plan to get on LinkedIn because we’ll reach a different target market again.”

Last year we put One Box Meals to the test. Watch Dionne, Candice and Carleen complete an O2 challenge, while sharing their experience of O2’s flexible business contracts. You can check out their delicious meal kits here. And you can read more about what they’ve learnt in their first year of business.

Are you a small business looking to grow? Take a look at how we can help your business flex and get the most out of your digital tools.