Marketing and promoting beef to consumers has changed in recent years because of social media and its different platforms, according to one expert.
“It makes it much easier to leverage those messages and target very specific groups and change their behavior,” said Greg Hanes, chief executive officer of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board. “That is where I think we have seen really good results where these targeted groups are buying more beef and consuming more and expanding their knowledge of it.”
On the flip side, successful social media advertising campaigns such as Beef Checkoff promotions are not seen by producers because they’re not the target audience.
“That is because we assume they are eating the beef, so they are not seeing it,” Hanes said. “I can assure you that it is going to those consumers who are buying it.”
The Beef Checkoff focuses on many different targets when marketing, including those metropolitan areas with a large number of people and not many cattle producers. Urban areas provide several protein options, Hanes said, so it’s important to remind people that beef is a solid choice.
“We’ve put a lot of effort and resources in the last few years really on that kind of evaluation and review of the programs,” the beef CEO said. “No matter how good a program is, it always can get better, and things are changing.”
Each program within the Beef Checkoff has goals in place to make sure the program stays on track.
“We are also doing what we call a kind of deeper-dive third-party evaluations of programs, so we are going in each year and picking kind of two, three or four areas to really dive in and see what is working here, what we can learn from it and what we can improve,” Hanes said.