GETS SOCIAL TRADER JOE’S · dedication to customer engagement. On holidays we will use filters in our stores that are relevant to that holiday food (for example, a Turkey face filter

TRADER JOE’SGETS SOCIAL

OUR COMPANY’S PHILOSOPHY“Here at Trader Joe’s, we value our interactions with customers. Until now, we have opted to stay off of social media and focus on the personal interactions

within our stores. However, we realize the importance in connecting with consumers outside of our store walls, so it’s time to get social.”

- Dan Bane, CEO

WHY NOW? Until now, we have avoided an online presence in order to focus on our interaction with customers. At Trader Joe’s, our employees are held to exceptionally high standards to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction. Employees are trained to be energetic and lively as customers check out, commenting on food items that they particularly like or are excited to try themselves. Customers are also encouraged to ask an employee for a free sample of any food on the shelves of our stores. The thought of a customer going home with a product they hate keeps us up at night, so we do everything we can to make sure that never happens. And if you want to “try” a Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup every time you come in to shop, we totally respect that.

While we are proud of our in-store experience, we understand the importance of connecting with consumers online in this rapidly expanding digital age. As society moves toward a digital world, we want to meet our customers where they already are - online.

GOALS OF SOCIAL Our strategic goals as a unique grocery chain are to ensure that both our food and our customer service are held to the highest standards possible. We want food shopping at Trader Joe’s to be more than a weekly errand, we want it to be an enjoyable experience and anticipated destination during your busy week..

To extend these goals on social, we will do everything in our power to be sure that our social channels are updated frequently with content that reflects our high quality food and employees. Social media will allow Trader Joe’s to be apart of our customers’ everyday lives rather than just their periodic visits to our store.

Our main goal for social media is to generate a deeper level of consumer engagement and build relationships outside of our store walls.

SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE We will be building our social presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. We have chosen these platforms because we see them as the most appropriate channels to communicate with our consumers, each platform with a unique purpose. We want to treat each platform as it’s own, rather than spilling the same content onto each (we think doing this appears to be a bit tacky and lazy, which is the furthest characteristic of our brand). Although the content across each platform will be unique, each post will carry the same style, tone, and voice to match our overall brand persona.

COMPETITOR ANALYSISAs we begin to build our presence, we needed to check out what our competitors were doing in order to ensure our profiles are keeping up with the trends of a similar demographic.. As a non-generic branded food store, our closest competitor is Whole Foods. Here is what we found on how Whole Foods is approaching their social media tactics on the same platforms we are planning to implement:

Whole Foods is using our planned strategy of sharing recipe ideas in a casual/conversational nature.

Whole Foods has a very clean and appetizing instagram profile. They post recipe ideas and fresh store items.

Whole Foods also uses a conversational tone on Twitter and shows personality through their use of a pun. We consider ourselves punny also.

4.85 Million Followers 3.9 Million Page Followers 2.1 Million Followers @wholefoods

They use snapchat to share items/ deals. They also use it to communicate with their audience, encouraging replies.

Trader Joe’s DemographicBefore diving into social planning, we needed to know exactly who we are

sending our message to. We are so glad we decided to perform this research because talk about an ego boost with these consumer perception rankings:

Consumers 35+

Those “millennials” everyone is talking about (18-34)

Yes, we’re bragging.

More Demo (demographics, not our mix tape) AKA:

We are talking to educated adults, 45 years and younger, who most likely do not have kids but do have high incomes. We could not have created a more attractive consumer profile on the Sims.

Why Facebook?We have chosen Facebook as a platform where we can communicate longer form messages with consumers. We can use this outlet to inform customers of new products, new store locations, interesting food-related articles, healthy recipes, and more. Facebook does not enforce a content character limit, so we will be able to express our message in as many words as needed. We can also incorporate pictures, videos, and text in our posts on this platform, which will make our message as rich as possible.

As social media newcomers, we did our research so we didn’t totally embarrass ourselves on any platform (we all have that Facebook friend that just doesn’t quite “get it”).. According to this graphic we found from Pew Research Center, Facebook ranks significantly higher than other platforms for percentage of online adults; remember, our main demographic is adults 45 and younger. Therefore, this is going to be our best way to communicate with our primary audience. Although the other platforms rank lower, we still find them to be uniquely beneficial to our goals, but we’ll get to that later...if we can hold your attention long enough.

Find us on Facebook : Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s

Hello, loyal TJ fans! Yes, it’s really us. We are excited to join you on social media to continue to express our dedication for high quality food at a price you can afford.

Trader Joe’s is a privately owned grocery chain with high quality food at a low price. We cut out the cost of name brands to focus on the food you love. Oh, and we really like Hawaiian shirts. 2017

Why Instagram? Instagram is the second most daily used platform, trailing behind Facebook by a little more than 10%. This is another platform that will give us a chance to reach a wide audience ranging from young adults to adults. We are seeing a rise in middle-aged/older adults using the platform to stay current in their kids’ lives and we know that these age groups also shop in our stores.

Instagram will be the best way to showcase our high quality and fresh food, being an image focused platform. We will use this platform to share recipe ideas, new items, and pictures from various store locations. We imagine that seeing an image of our items on Instagram will encourage users to visit our store or help develop a craving for something (how can you possibly not jump into your car after seeing a picture of our mango ice cream bars?).

Click for more demographic information

Add us on Instagram:@traderjoes

At Trader Joe’s, we value the high quality of our food, and Instagram is a great way to showcase this. We will use Instagram to share fresh produce, in-store samples, and recipe ideas. We are considering creating how-to videos with Trader Joe’s recipes, similar to Buzzfeed’s Tasty series, to capture audience attention with this recent fad (see, we did our research! We know all the trends).

To the right, you can pictures of our fresh produce, samples in our store, some of our favorite Trader Joe’s products, and a recipe for healthy breakfast energy balls.

@traderjoes

Trader Joe's is a privately held chain of neighborhood grocery stores based in Monrovia, California

Why Twitter? Numbers are boring, but not to us. We wanted to know specifically who is on Twitter and what the benefit would be in using this platform for our brand. Luckily for us, Brandwatch did all the dirty work for us.

310,000,000

Monthly active users HUGE outreach potential

80%

% of users who have mentioned a brand in a tweet (we like name dropping)

54%

% of users who have taken action after seeing a brand mentioned (hello, new website visitors and FB friends)

2 . 5x

Increase in customer service conversations in the past 2 years (we’re going to show you a 3x increase, just wait)

76%

% of users who are likely to recommend the brand due to friendly service (not to brag, but friendliness is kind of our thing)

Follow us on Twitter: @traderjoes

We will utilize Twitter to communicate brief messages with our customers such as fun nutrition facts, new food items, or responses to customer complaints (not that our customers would ever have any, right?). We plan to use Twitter as our most communicative tool to engage with our audience on a deeper level than other platforms that focus more on sharing information or images. Here are some examples of the conversational style we plan to use on Twitter.

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Why Snapchat? Snapchat has completely changed the dynamic of social media capabilities. Unlike other platforms that allow accounts to post and share content with users, Snapchat focuses on engaging with users. Users can send pictures directly to a brand (perhaps of them eating their favorite Trader Joe’s dinner) and companies can use this information to get a better sense of how their brand is perceived in everyday life. Snapchat also has expanded their platform to include news stories and fun features like quizzes, which attracts more users to the platform who can essentially “one stop shop” for all their social media needs. Snapchat has created a sense of urgency in society to share and post more of their daily life than they would on other platforms. And food is always urgent.

26,000,000

Active users in the United States...that’s a lot of

people.

60%

% of active users under the age of 25, but more than half of new users are above this age point.

30

Average # of minutes users spend on the platform each day

10,000,000,000

# of videos users watch on this platform daily. That’s a lot of zeros.

Add us on Snapchat: @traderjoes

We want to have our social channels act as an integration between our in-store presence and online persona. Our hope with Snapchat is to encourage customers to snap us their favorite items as they shop, and use our geo-filter in each store location. We plan to feature customer snaps on our own account to further show our dedication to customer engagement. On holidays we will use filters in our stores that are relevant to that holiday food (for example, a Turkey face filter with our logo in the corner on Thanksgiving).

Our biggest use of snapchat will be dubbed TJTuesday Takeover, where TJ employees will be designated to takeover our company’s account for the day and show was a day looks like at Trader Joe’s. We think this will help customers relate with us on a more personal level.

Snapchat is a fun way for users to engage with our brand in real time. Our score is zero right now, but don’t hold that against us.

Trader Joe’s traderjoes Score: 0

VOICE, TONE, STYLE We want our social media rhetoric to match our in-person communication methods. In our store, we are very approachable, talkative, energetic and informative. We hope to extend this same method online by using a casual voice, tone and style. We will address our customers online by saying something like "Hey there, TJ lovers" to seem as though we are talking directly through the screen. Our audience is young individuals and young families who are interested in healthy, organic groceries without a large price tag.

Voice: Our voice will express a quirky and humorous personality. Again, similar to our in-store employees, we want our social channels to encompass a bubbly and inviting nature. Our voice will also be as personal as possible. We never want it to seem like we are blindly talking to the audience at large. We want to try to hone in on as many individual consumer groups as we possibly can (kids, moms, dads, teens, etc.) and directly target certain content to them.

Tone: Our tone will be the focus of our objective in engaging with consumers on a conversational level. We will post content that sounds as if we are talking directly to a consumer rather than the social platform at large. Our tone will also appear casual and calm, to reflect our laid back store persona. We will empathize with users by saying how much we also like a certain product, or that we understand any frustrations they may have toward our brand.

Style: Our verbiage will be typically quite short and to the point. We will use series of short sentences rather than detailed paragraph styled writing. We think short, witty sentences will add to our overall humorous and personable voice.

CONTENT SCHEDULE ◦ Recurring Trends: ◦ Planning is important. We have planned out next month’s content calendar to guide our social

team. We will incorporate a weekly recurring post on Tuesdays, called TJTUesday Takeover. This takeover will highlight a Trader Joe’s employee each Tuesday and start their takeover of the channel for that week. Throughout the week the employee will document their day in the store, showing their interaction with customers, and giving customers an inside look on what it is like to be apart of the TJ team. Their posts will accompany the planned brand posts on the content calendar, which will be posted by another member of our social team.

◦ Overview: ◦ Our complete content schedule can be found on the next slide, with example posts included earlier

in this deck in respect to each platform. In our calendar, we have planned for posts to align with fun days of the month or major holidays; we plan to follow this technique for all the months that follow as well.

◦ Consistency: ◦ We will post on social at least once a day on a minimum of one channel , but never the exact

same content on different platforms. We will be sure to post to each platform an equal amount and capitalize on each platform’s best practices.

May 2017

Content Calendar: Facebook traderjoes

traderjoes

traderjoes

Sunday-Funday snacks!

Content Calendar: Twitter

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Trader Joe’s @traderjoes

Content Calendar: Instagram

Content Calendar: Snapchat- TJTuesday Takeover

What does the future look like?

When To Post

We found that our customers mainly shop on the weekends so a good time to post about featured food items would be Thursday or Friday to get consumers thinking about their next shopping list.

We also found this handy cheat-sheet on particular times to post on Facebook and Twitter. We will revise our content calendar to reflect these suggestions as much as possible. Thanks for looking out, Google.

DISCUSSION OF PLANNED CONTENT As seen in our detailed content calendar for May, we plan to post at least once per day on any given platform. We don’t want to post too much more than this because we don’t want to flood our customers’ channels. We have discovered that Social Media is a tricky algorithm; if you post too much, customers get annoyed and may start to negatively view content but if you don’t post enough, customers’ may think you are not engaged with them. Therefore, by starting with one daily post, we will gauge our audience and the post’s interactions to see if we need to revise our posting schedule.

We expect that our Instagram will be our most popular platform. Our brand is food, and people like to see pictures of their food (yes, we’re looking at those of you who snapchat every meal before diving in). Instagram is becoming increasingly popular among older generations so the potential here is huge. We think that our plan to post aesthetically pleasing and appetizing images will draw in our widest audience on social media.

CUSTOMER SERVICE We get it, interacting through a screen can be frustrating and we don’t want that to happen to our customers. Social media will allow us to be even more responsive to consumer’s dissatisfactions and respond quicker than we could if they had to interact with us in a store. Although a dissatisfied customer is never what we want, we know it happens and we will do everything we can to correct a problem. After all, there’s nothing a free jar of cookie butter can’t fix, right?

We will hire a team of loyal customer service reps to attend to particular social channels and monitor the type of content coming in. They will respond to both positive and negative comments to show that we are always listening to our customers. On our social platforms, we will have a 100% response rate and you can hold us to that.

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY- On social media, we will never use offensive or derogatory language. We will consider all points of

view before posting any content that may be considered controversial to any audience. - Employees with access to the social accounts will be held to the highest standards to ensure any sort

of post is in conjunction with our overall brand image and voice. Employees will not be permitted to post anything related to politics; doing so will result in termination of social media access.

- Our social media team will have a 100% response rate. Every comment, positive or negative will receive a reply from our team.

- Our social team will never delete a negative comment from a customer. We want our customers to know that even if a customer is dissatisfied, we will do everything to correct their problem rather than hiding it.

- While employees who are involved with TJTuesday Takeovers are encouraged to document their day in the store, other employees are not permitted to be on social media while on the job. Trader Joe’s employees are fully committed to provided a pleasant in-store experience for our shoppers.

- Any content that Trader Joe’s employees post while off the job is up to their discretion. The personal accounts of our employees are not our business and we don’t believe them to have any association with our brand.

- Confidential information about our corporation or our customers shall never be shared on social media platforms. Confidential information includes, but is not limited to, profits, operations, finances, and legal documents.

ANALYSIS OK. So we have this all planned out perfectly, but how are we going to measure our success as we are born into this social media world?

- Followers: - We will monitor our following to compare it to our competitors’ accounts and ensure

we are keeping up steadily with our competition - Google Analytics:

- We will track our post performance on Google Analytics to see how our posts are ranking in terms of keywords, images, titles, etc.

- Our customers!- The most important of all. We will periodically ask our customers in the store whether

or not they follow our brand on social media. If we do, we will ask for a brief description of their perception of our online presence.

Sources of our knowledge that made us seem smart: Gillett, Rachel. "The Best (And Worst) Times To Post On Social Media (Infographic)." Fast Company. Fast Company, 06 Jan. 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Golen, Bobby. "Millennial Marketing Top Brands: Trader Joe’s Wins Big With Trade Up/Trade Down Mindset." Millennial Marketing. Future Case, 2017. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Greenwood, Shannon, Andrew Perrin, and Maeve Duggan. "Social Media Update 2016." Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. N.p., 11 Nov. 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Newberry, Christina. "Top Snapchat Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers." Hootsuite Social Media Management. Hootsuite, 23 Aug. 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Parker, Sydney. "A Long List of Instagram Statistics That Marketers Need to Know." Hootsuite Social Media Management. N.p., 13 Dec. 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Smith, Kit. "44 Astonishing Twitter Stats and Facts for 2016." Brandwatch. N.p., 16 May 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

"Trader Joe's Shopper Insights and Demographics." Infoscout.co. InfoScout, 2017. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

Willis, Audrey. "5 Ways Snapchat Is Changing the Way We Communicate." Higher Ed Marketing Journal. N.p., 12 July 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.