Hopsteiner
// What'd I Do?
// What'd I Do?
// What'd We Do?
// What'd We Do?
One of the world's leading providers of hops to breweries small and large, Hopsteiner is well known among established industry players, but smaller breweries and new customers found them inaccessible. I developed social strategy and creative for a series of campaigns designed to build their audience and establish an open communication channel for prospective customers.
To explore what was possible with the voice and assets of the brand, I created a branding tree, a sort of throw-stuff-at-the-wall method of determining what the brand can speak about authentically and what's relevant to the audience:
From there, I organized those thoughts into content silos to make sure we are meeting the demands of each of our audiences and keeping our topics varied (see above).
// Did It Work?
// Did It Work?
The resulting social campaign culminated in a series of #CraftBeerWeek posts with an organic reach of over 25,000 Twitter users, thousands of interactions on Facebook, and recognition by Twitter for being in the top 30% of effective campaigns within our targeted audience.
// What'd I Learn?
// What'd I Learn?
Research always wins. No matter how much you think you know about your audience, or how much a brand has relied on old models or assumptions in the past, there’s no substitute for learning more yourself, challenging those assumptions, and looking at a problem from a new perspective. Hopsteiner had no problem building relationships with big breweries, but the smaller brewers required a different approach, one that we were only able to really understand after doing our own research -- talking to the brewers themselves and going to conferences and industry events. New insights came from new thinking, and you don’t get that just going through the motions.
