Digital Market Analysis: Enhancing Consumer Engagement Strategies

7-1 Final Project Milestone 3: Digital Market Analysis Matthew Berard Digital Marketing Master’s Program, Southern New Hampshire University MKT 665: Digital Storytelling & Brand Professor Timothy Cigelske November 5, 2023

Consumer Engagement Understanding a company’s current level of consumer engagement is integral to understanding how to improve a business’s digital presence. This is no different for a local grocery store like Dave’s Fresh Marketplace. Dave’s utilizes several different channels to encourage consumer engagement including organic search, paid search, social media, and email. Dave’s monthly average web visits currently sit at about 64,000 visits (SimilarWeb, 2023a). This is a fairly good figure, however when analyzing where most of this traffic originates it becomes clear that Dave’s is far too reliant on direct traffic and organic search traffic. In fact, Dave’s organic search traffic makes up about 35% of the total traffic to the website while its traffic from its social media platforms only accounts for about 4% of its total traffic (SimilarWeb, 2023a). This extremely low percentage of traffic originating from social media shows a clear need for improvement across all of Dave’s social platforms. When taking a closer look at Dave’s social media pages the reasons for the low percentage of traffic becomes apparent. For example, several of the posts on Dave’s Social Media pages receive little engagement, especially the posts that do not utilize any hashtags, do not contain a call to action, and are not Dave’s original content, such as posts that include recipes from other websites but do not utilize hashtags or call to actions. These posts also lack any link to Dave’s website which is hurting its traffic and engagement. The posts that perform the best are posts that include original content and hashtags, such as the recent posts of employees who dressed up for Halloween (Dave’s, 2023). However, even these posts could be improved as they utilize far too many hashtags which can make posts appear untrustworthy and spammy to the consumers and the algorithms used to rank the posts (Rechberg, 2021). Social media posts across all platforms should use between 1 and 5 relevant hashtags (Macready, 2023).

The textual content of Dave’s posts is well-written and relevant to the brand but frequently lacks clear calls to action and links to the company website hurting its web visits and overall engagement. Using calls to action and links to the company website is integral to increasing engagement and web traffic (Johnson, 2018). Dave’s does a decent job of replying to comments on its social media posts specifically on Facebook and Instagram where they see the most engagement. However, Dave’s only seems to reply when a question is asked which is sparingly. Instead of just replying to questions Dave’s should attempt to engage with its audience more often whether the comments are good, bad, or neutral. Responding to comments will make consumers feel engaged with the brand and will cultivate brand trust among Dave’s audience (West, 2021). Through analyzing Dave’s consumer engagement efforts, across its many digital platforms, it becomes clear that Dave’s biggest issue is the formatting of its posts. Dave’s posts do include relevant content that resonates with the brand message; however, they lack integral components necessary to increase engagement and reach including the correct use of hashtags, calls to action, and links. By fixing these issues and increasing the rate at which they reply to comments across all social platforms Dave’s should be able to significantly increase engagement and brand exposure. Initiatives Of Competition Dave’s Fresh Market’s main competitors are Brigidos Fresh Market and Seabra Foods. Brigidos Fresh Market’s digital presence includes its company website and Facebook page (Brigido’s, 2023). The company also has X and Instagram pages but has not used either in quite some time. The company website is extremely minimal and mainly highlights its online shopping options and its store brands. Savings on store-brand items seem to be the focus. The content on

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its Facebook page focuses mainly on the products and sales offered in its stores. Unlike Dave’s Brigidos does not post recipes or content that includes its employees. The content does not seem to convey any specific brand message and feels generic. With a name like Brigidos Fresh Market, one would expect a focus on fresh and local products to be a priority but that is simply not conveyed through its digital initiatives. Seabra Foods digital initiatives include a company website as well as several social media platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok (Seabra Foods, 2023). Seabra Foods brand messaging on its website is a little confusing as it uses words like fresh and local, yet it mainly focuses on marketing its imported Portuguese products. Seabra’s social media content is quite similar to that of Dave’s including posts about product offerings, recipes, and posts that include employees. The main difference between Seabra’s content and Dave’s content is that much of Seabra’s content focuses on Portuguese products. In fact, many of the company’s posts are even written in Portuguese showing the company's commitment to targeting the Portuguese community. After analyzing the competition's digital initiatives, Dave’s can easily differentiate itself. Dave’s message of providing fresh and local products from local vendors across Rhode Island stands out from its local competitors. Dave’s should continue to promote its links to the Rhode Island community and the fresh, local products it offers in its stores. Dave’s can also differentiate itself by highlighting the healthy and organic products it offers in its stores as neither of its competitors are targeting consumers looking for organic products. Dave’s has a clear competitive advantage over its competitors when it comes to fresh, local, Rhode Island produce and products.

Appropriate Keywords Utilizing appropriate keywords can be integral to the success of any digital initiative. Choosing the correct keywords for a campaign can be difficult as there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Keywords are something that will change and evolve based on the brand message and content. In the case of Dave’s Fresh Marketplace selecting relevant and appropriate social media hashtags will be integral in increasing reach and engagement across its social platforms. For a local business such as Dave’s, it is recommended that the business use a mix of general business hashtags and local hashtags. This allows you to reach a large audience with more general hashtags while reaching a more niche audience with your local hashtags (Carmon, 2020). For example, on Instagram Dave’s could use popular hashtags such as #shoplocal which is currently being used in 85 million posts. Dave’s could then couple this with #RhodeIsland which is used in 3.8 million posts. Finally, Dave’s could combine these into one hashtag #shoplocalri which has only been used in just over 35,000 posts. Dave’s should also use hashtags related to food in the same way such as #localfood (4.5 million posts) and #rhodeislandfood (36.1k posts). A solid mix of general hashtags and local hashtags related to the brand and its content will help Dave’s increase brand exposure and engagement over both the short and long term (Carmon, 2020). Within its blog content, Dave’s should utilize long-tail keywords. Longtail keywords such as “Rhode Island local supermarket” will help Dave’s rank higher in search results and will help local consumers find exactly what they are searching for (Subel, 2018). However, Dave’s will need to be careful not to overuse long-tail keywords as this can appear spammy to search engine algorithms leading to lower rankings. As for keywords used in SEO, Dave’s should focus on using keywords that rank well in average monthly searches but are still localized and relevant to the brand. These keywords include but are not limited to; dave’s marketplace, organic food

stores near me, dave’s market, local grocery store, dave’s fresh marketplace, and local groceries near me (Google Ads, 2023). These keywords are general enough to reach a large audience but are also localized enough to target local Rhode Island consumers.

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References Brigido’s. (2023). Brigido’s Fresh Market . https://www.brigidos.com/ Carmon, N. (2020, February 12). How to use small business hashtags to promote your brand – DBI . Digital Branding Institute. https://digitalbrandinginstitute.com/small-business- hashtags/ Dave’s. (2023). Dave’s Fresh Marketplace . Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/davesmarketplace Google Ads . (2023, November 5). Google Ads Keyword Planner . Google Ads. https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner/ideas/new? ocid=93052051&euid=89967451&__u=1916920899&uscid=93052051&__c=7538746299 &authuser=0&sf=kp&subid=us-en-awhp-g-aw-c-t-kwp-hero%21o2 Johnson, P. (2018, April 3). The Importance of Using Links on Social Media to Increase Website Traffic . Digital Marketing Blog. https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/pj79/2018/04/03/the- importance-of-using-links-on-social-media-to-increase-website-traffic/#:~:text=Without %20links%20on%20social%20media,product%20(Krasinski%2C%202018). Macready, H. (2023, July 19). How to use Hashtags in 2023: A guide for every network . Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use- hashtags/

Rechberg, A. (2021, December 16). How many hashtags is too many? . Digital Marketing Agency Orange County CA | Your Marketing People. https://yourmarketingpeople.com/blog/can-you-ever-have-too-many-hashtags/ Seabra Foods. (2023). Seabra Foods . https://seabrafoods.com/ SimilarWeb. (2023). Website Analysis. https://pro.similarweb.com/#/digitalsuite/websiteanalysis/overview/website-performance/ */999/3m?webSource=Total&key=davesmarketplace.com Subel, M. (2018, October 4). How to integrate keywords in blog posts for Maximum Seo Value . Two Wheels Marketing. https://twowheelsmarketing.com/blog/how-to-integrate-keywords- blog-posts-seo/ West, C. (2021, May 28). Your guide to social media comments: How to post and respond . Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-comments/

MKT 665 Final Project Milestone 3

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