When we took over Vienna Beef’s social accounts in April 2023, we set out to make their social feeds as iconic as their Premium Beef Hot Dogs. Our content goal for the brand’s social is to make people hungry for Vienna Beef. From craveable Chicago Style Hot Dog content, to features of favorite childhood hot dog stands, there were multiple ways we could make people hungry for Vienna Beef.
Our primary objective for the brand was to organically increase followers and grow our social community across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter/X. Primary success was measured on year-over-year follower growth with a secondary objective to optimize post engagement rates. In addition, we overhauled their video strategy to shift towards a focus on engagement with more culturally relevant videos.
We started with an insight: You can’t be in a bad mood when you’re eating a hot dog. We wanted Vienna Beef’s social pages to have the same effect on their fans as their hot dogs. To see what kind of content would put our fans in a good mood, we defined the Vienna Beef brand attributes. From there, we developed a tone of voice: casual, confident, enthusiastic, fun and quintessentially Chicago. Then we used that tone to create a look that would unify our content across our posts and platforms: strong use of the bright, bold Vienna Beef brand colors with a slightly over-saturated filter. We also created content pillars that would guide what we created to enable timely development of regular content.
For social post planning, we landed on a three-pronged approach consisting of pre-scheduled content, UGC reshares and quick-turn trends. Our strategy worked immediately; our content generated a quick uptick in engagement numbers across all platforms.
Within the first month of taking over the Vienna Beef social accounts, we created the highest performing organic social video in the company’s 130-year history based on total number of engagements. And we would soon go on to beat the record we’d set.
Over the period prior, we nearly quintupled the number of video views and, by the end of 2023, our total net audience growth organically across all channels increased by nearly 90% YoY with an increased engagement rate of over 20% across all channels.
