Organization: Urbery
Industry: Grocery Delivery Service
Contact: Mudit Rawat, CEO mudit.rawat@urbery.com
Web References: Urbery, Post City Magazine, City of Toronto
The city is getting bigger, people have busier lifestyles and multiple activities engulf your free time: family, kids, school, swimming and hockey lessons, work, commute, and that little time to go to the gym, read a book or simply visit a friend is nonexistent. If you identify with any of these issues, maybe you should visit Urbery. Companies that do all those things that you are not able to started to populate the market years ago to serve a clientele that simply need more than 24 hours a day or extra hands to accomplish their daily chores.
Urbery is a same day grocery delivery service that uses a fleet of personal grocery shoppers who buy and deliver your groceries to your doorstep! Urban + Grocery = Urbery.
I had the opportunity to talk to Mudit Rawat, Urbery’s CEO, and Shannon Kelsall who works in the Marketing Department. Urbery is a start-up and they are implementing their phase 1. Their area or coverage goes from High Park to Victoria Park and from Lake Ontario to Eglinton Ave.
Shannon explained how Urbery manage metrics, social media strategy and campaigns. They consolidate their social media strategy in four different channels: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. As any other business, customer engagement is a priority for them and they use social media as the tool to achieve this goal.
Measuring the number of impressions is important, but “likes”, “comments” and “shares” are one of their focuses. How many people see you and interact with you is essential.
According to Shannon is not only about seeing how many people are seeing your tweet but also how many of those are likely to respond to it, share it with someone else, or somewhere else. She also mentioned that one of their ways to measure how people are engaging with them through social media is by giving giveaways. This is a very useful technique to see how your social media affects your sales directly, how many people come to your business through social media channels and it lets you interact directly with them. By doing this you have access to one-on-one chats with customers, send information about the company, prices or product reviews with the objective of improving as a company.
Shannon also mentioned that another way to use social media metrics could be checking what other companies are doing, how it is working or not for them and taking the lessons from that information.
“Social media is extremely important for companies, one thing that we really focus on at Urbery is to not just post to post, we know that everyone says that social media is important but it is valid to look at how many people are engaging and responding to what you are posting, so looking at the different metrics is very helpful, I know for myself that when I can see the metrics it influences what I do in the future, so, I think that making sure that if you are doing adds on-line seeing what actually works and making sure what you are targeting can have a better impact on what you are putting out there”. –Shannon Kelsall
According to Shannon, it is important to build calendars. They will help you to plan ahead. The importance of doing this is to be able to measure: what time do you post, what do you post, what channels or streams do you use. She also mentioned that according to her experience, Instagram has a much better impact at night because is when people are connected.
When I think of Twitter or Facebook, I understand that people are more likely to go to those sites as you can find a lot of content, from daily news, stories that you usually follow or information that could be related to your career, job or personal life. Instagram for example is more about images but no content. When it is time to relax, people are not likely to feel like saturating their minds with more information. That may be a reason why Instagram may have a better impact at night.
To finalize the idea of having calendars, it is important to say that they let you track previous campaigns, and see the impact they had. Lets say that people commute to work using public transportation, which allows them to interact on the social media channels while they travel. If that happens between 7 and 9 am and that’s when people have access to your posts rather than doing it at 3 or 4 pm when people are not connected, your ads will have a better result. It is very important to track that information with your metrics.
Mudit also added that Google analytics play an important role at Urbery, overall on retargeting ads, seeing who is coming to your platform, and how to you engage people with your platform using the right sort of keywords: for example, if someone is typing grocery delivering on Google, they have to make sure that they come first on the results. It is also important to retarget adds based on the information that your cookies have captured once someone enters your website. This works when you are in another website and suddenly you see an add saying “get groceries to your door”. This is an important tool in today’s world and is actually driving a lot of transactions.
In summary, Urbery’s point of view is very clear: social media is important, but social media without metrics is simply not the same.
How demographics and social media metrics meet
According to Post City Magazines, in Forest Hill, one of the areas covered by Urbery, 52% of residents hold a university degree or higher, those families spend annually $110 million on recreation, sports and vacations, $48 million on house renovations, $7452 per household buying and maintaining their clothes, $4258 on schools and camps for their kids, $11 million on their pets and have an average income of $200k per family in some areas. This may be one of the wealthier areas in the city but there are many neighbourhoods with people who have a comfortable lifestyle, and those that have busy lives that may benefit from the Urbery service. According to the city of Toronto website there is an average weekly cost for food for a family of four in Toronto and is $138.28 or a month average of $590.09. This last statistic may not reflect all the neighbourhoods covered by Urbery, but the point here is the type of population that you have in the downtown core in Toronto and in closer neighbourhoods to this area.
There is something that everyone has in common here – City living. Very likely many people in the previously mentioned areas will spend a considerable amount of time on public transportation. That is probably the perfect time to do your on-line shopping, so by the time you get home, you will have your groceries at your door. By analyzing the trends, demographics and lifestyle of all of those living downtown and putting that together with your social media metrics, you will get right to where you want to be with your business.
Demographics may vary from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and from family to family, but what it is certain is that there is a big market there and it may be important to consider that those numbers beside your social media metrics are the clue to maintain and grow your presence in the marketplace.
More about Urbery
At Urbery, we go to great lengths to ensure the food delivered to your door is of the freshest, highest quality possible. Grocery Gurus buy groceries from multiple stores including the big stores like Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, etc*. and deliver it to the customer’s doorstep at a time convenient to them. Our Grocery Gurus won’t settle for anything less than perfection – if they’re not satisfied with the quality of food in one store, they’ll visit other stores and keep looking until the ideal piece of produce or cut of meat is found.
Unlike competitors, who shop for customers all at once and leave food sitting in delivery vans all day, we shop individually for each customer right before their order is delivered. This ensures perishables such as meat and dairy spend as little as 1 hour in transit from the store to your home.
If you’re apprehensive about allowing someone else to choose your groceries, rest assured that each and every one of our Grocery Gurus takes great pride in the quality of the food they select for your order. Our Grocery Gurus receive comprehensive training in food selection, ensuring the food that gets delivered to you is as good as or better than what you would buy yourself.
Lesson for Others:
Urbery is a great example of how to run a business using a good social media strategy. When Shannon Kelsall started working for Urbery they had 1 follower on their platforms. Now they have a healthy growing community on their social media channels.
With a little investment on advertising and marketing Urbery knows how to do business using social media the way it should be used.
Those days of expensive contracts with advertising agencies may see an end soon if you use your creativity and a good social media team.
Submitted by: Fernando Gomez, Social Media for Business Performance program. University of Waterloo. Video and audio created by Fernando Gomez and worldcommunications.ca
To contact the author of this entry please email at: Fernando@worldcommunications.ca
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.