Mastering Social Media Content for Multiple Audiences

When using social media for the hospitality industry, most brands face a big challenge. Content needs to speak to both potential business partners and event planners who book large venues and contracts, while appealing to those individual guests who will actually stay at your property or dine in your restaurant. It’s like running two different marketing campaigns simultaneously: one focused on ROI and business value, the other on experiences and emotions.

How do you strike that perfect balance without diluting your message or confusing your audience?

If you’re wrestling with this challenge in your hospitality marketing, you’re not alone.

Here to help us master this bouncing act is our Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition guest Michelle Fan, an innovative social media strategist who’s revolutionizing dual audience content at Felfel. She’s here to talk today with Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton and share her winning strategies with us.

[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]

Michelle’s Journey

Share a bit about your journey and how you found yourself managing content for some of those multiple audiences.

Michelle Fan: Most of my experience comes from working in a nonprofit, actually. And that’s a really interesting space to work from because you’re asking the audience to take a lot of different actions, like website visits, newsletter registrations, event RSVPs, petition signatures, and, of course, donations all without being able to offer anything supertangible or self-serving in return.

So, when you see an ad for coffee, it’s super-simple. If it sparks your craving, you go and buy that coffee or for a service rather than an item like an amazing hotel, a really nice location. And if you know you still have time off, you just go and book that hotel, right?

But in the world of non-profit, we’re asking our audiences to do a lot of different things in exchange for usually the betterment of the community or the rest of the world.

And, even more, it’s something that takes time to show results. So, there were a lot of unique challenges there, but I learned a lot because we were navigating different audiences. People who felt passionate about mass incarceration or environmental protection or women’s rights and, of course, the bigger donors and board members. Especially when you work for a larger nonprofit, you have to be super-mindful of juggling all those different interests while maintaining the same organizational voice and brand throughout.

That laid a helpful foundation for me when I switched to a for-profit startup where we’re talking B2B for decision makers and B2C for all the other stakeholders and general brand awareness.

Dual Audience Strategy

What would you say was your biggest “aha” moment in transitioning from the traditional B2C approach?

Michelle Fan: I don’t know if there was ever one exact moment where all just clicked like a light bulb or solidified for me. I think it was a lot of little learnings and a lot of disappointment, honestly, when you think you’re creating really high-quality content and just see that it’s not landing.

When I was trying to sell more on emotion, like a more traditional B2C approach, it wasn’t moving the needle with decision-makers.

So at Felfel, what we do is we serve this amazing chef-crafted, curated food, the kind of fancy stuff that actually tastes good and the opposite of what you’d be getting at the office cafeteria. And it’s all super convenient because it’s grab-and-go from our Felfel fridge. The idea and the need for something like that translates easily to the average employee who’s sick of eating the same thing every day or even skipping lunch because they can’t leave their desk to go and wait in line.

But photos of incredible food and a fancy smart fridge don’t say anything about business goals and ROI for the actual people who sign on the dotted line with us.

I realized that for a dual audience strategy, I needed more of a layered approach. We started leading with more like data, productivity metrics, and cost savings, and then also pairing that with that emotional appeal of seeing happy teams having chef-crafted meals and things like that. And then those campaigns started clicking because they can address both of those audiences’ priorities without feeling like something is missing from the equation.

Are you doing that kind of messaging in different posts or are you layering it into the same post?

Michelle Fan: Yeah, this is something that took me a while to realize. And also—especially when you have a lot of different people who are invested in what goes out on social media—I’m sure I’m speaking to a lot of social media managers here with the levels of approval and things like that. I’m very grateful that I work at a startup where we’re able to like be nimble and pretty quick with things like this.

But not every post has to do everything. Like, I think you can. It’s always great when you can strategically layer stuff. This is something that I try to do where you blend that so that if someone’s interacting with your online presence for the first time, they don’t get the completely wrong idea about what your company or service or product actually is.

But at the same time, I feel like this is. It can sometimes become this unnecessary pressure where it’s, “Hey, your digital presence is a curated collage of all of these different things that you’re putting out online.”

Not every post has to do every single thing.

Successful Examples of Dual Audience Approach

Walk us through maybe a specific campaign where you successfully engaged both business decision-makers and users, and what made that work.

Michelle Fan: Yeah, for sure. So it’s always best when we have a great client launch. And, obviously, that put some pressure on the sales team to get us a great client first.

But it’s amazing because then everybody’s happy. It just checks all the boxes. Like, it’s newsworthy. It shows that it’s a working product in real life with real users, and it aligns us with really great logos that we’re proud to support.

So, depending on how savvy you are with content capture, and the way you tailor that copy, you can get so much out of that. You get product education and testimonials on top of brand awareness. And it makes things easier on my end when we have a great launch that’s planned and choreographed really well because a lot of this work is already done for me. Almost. I just have to be strategic about maximizing the storytelling there without boring our audience.

But it’s perfect because it shows the value of Felfel feeding your teams and keeping everybody happy to decision makers. You see an actual company that maybe your values align with, or you see the president or the CEO or someone who’s leading that company. Put into words why it’s been valuable for them, while getting end users excited because they’re seeing people like themselves engage with our services.

Common Pitfalls

What are some pitfalls that you’ve seen when brands are trying to do this juggling act that of talking to different audiences at the same time on social media?

Michelle Fan: I feel like it’s such a balancing act.

• One common pitfall is being way too generic to appeal to everyone. And then obviously that ends up resonating with no one.
• But then also being too specific can make it feel like I’m witnessing what should be a private text exchange or an email or something.
• I also feel like sometimes who you’re targeting is also what you’re saying about the brand—even without explicitly saying it.
• Super exclusive luxury brands are clearly catering to a certain audience, and there’s an element of that unattainability and inaccessibility that actually works for them, but it can also turn people off, especially if it’s done in the wrong way.

It’s a balancing act.

For example, at Felfel, our B2B efforts are targeting decision-makers like CEOs and heads of different departments, as I mentioned before. But we also believe in the democratization of food, right? And we’ve always been a people-first company. So we don’t want employees to see all of our content and feel like we’re ignoring them. And we’re just another culture initiative or office initiative or something that leadership puts in that the average employee doesn’t care about. And we want them to know that we’re really there for them.

So the key is, I guess, segmentation and purpose so you have to really know which audience you’re addressing with these posts and tailor the tone and content so that you don’t miss the mark.

But again, not every post has to do every single thing, so I think it’s always good to have a mix of things in there, and then always fall back on analytics and see what’s actually performing.

Are you doing employee advocacy at all as part of that mix of posts?

Michelle Fan: We’re definitely trying to build out more of an employee advocacy program at Felfel. My colleagues are quite shy. So it’s a lot of me being behind the camera and encouraging and directing a little bit more, but employee advocacy is a huge thing.

I also think—especially on LinkedIn and for B2B audiences—we’re seeing so much more EGC. Not just UGC but EGC (employee-generated content). So it’s an interesting growth.

Mike Allton: We’re seeing a lot of the same things. We have an actual advocacy tool baked into the Agorapulse that brands are using to encourage employees to post natively to LinkedIn.

One of the cool features is when brands can post to their company page and then invite their employees to go to that post, engage with that brand post, expand the brand presence, and just quadruple, 10 times engagement and that sort of thing. Which then has that wonderful ripple effect because the LinkedIn algorithm loves that engagement and doesn’t care where it comes from.

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Approach for B2B AND B2C Content

How are you approaching things like choosing which social network, which platform, and how you’re distributing content differently when you’re targeting both B2B and B2C audiences?

Michelle Fan: So, for B2B, we prioritize LinkedIn.

That’s where decision-makers are sometimes scrolling just to scroll, but more often, actually looking for professional solutions. We highlight more business updates and media mentions there. With our business, since it is a B2B business, we do end up having end users, but we sell more B2B. LinkedIn feels almost like our hub. I would say it’s our most important platform.

And then B2C we use Instagram and Meta. Not quite on TikTok yet. And I’ve been seeing that Twitter or X engagement rates aren’t great, especially for links. Engagement rates aren’t great for links across all platforms, except for Blue Sky. I haven’t decided how I feel about Blue Sky yet. But we’re not on X for that reason. Like I was saying before B2C, we do more Instagram and Facebook food content, pictures of specific people, or of the team that lives there, even though team photos also do really well on LinkedIn.

In all honesty, in terms of content distribution, I feel like we’re not yet at a place where it makes a big difference which platform shows what.

However, I tailor the copy to make it more LinkedIn or Instagram-friendly.

But more than the platforms making a difference, I feel like it’s more of a difference between paid versus organic social media. So with paid campaigns, I feel like you can be so much more direct. You can be kind of blunt sometimes with your messaging since it’s so targeted. So it’s a great place to call out your audience directly. Like, hey, are you a team member? Who’s working past cafeteria hours, or are you an HR lead who’s looking for new ways to motivate people to get back to the office? On LinkedIn, you can be pretty granular. And then when you think about content distribution based on platforms, it’s also not always a super clean divide because everyone still has access to everything, even if it’s not their main platform. The messaging still has to be super consistent.

Juggling The Balancing Act

Talk about the role that timing plays in your content strategy. How often are you posting back and forth between each segment? How are you balancing it from that perspective?

Michelle Fan:  I think I could balance it better. That’s a really great question.

B2B

I look back at our editorial calendar week-to-week and see what actually performed quite well, what we were originally planning to post versus what ended up getting posted. I will say, even when I feel like I’ve been posting a lot of B2B content, I still naturally prioritize it.

I definitely have a bias toward B2B content currently because of the stage that our business is in where we’re growing and trying to take over New York City. But I think it’s also really important to sprinkle some B2C content in there where it’s just pure fun or human interest stories, or photos of the team having fun or photos of the team eating, or pictures of the food. Because, at the end of the day, we want people to remember that our whole mission is good food at work and that we’re here for the employees.

So when I think about how I want to split that balance, I feel like it’s almost more determined by the calendar year. It’s very clear when offices are on vacation or closing for the holidays versus when business activities are super kicked up. So then we have to shift that content, right?

B2C

I don’t want to lose eyeballs talking about ROI and bottom line and things like that when nobody’s really thinking about it, and people just want to have a good time, and they’re just scrolling to see what everybody else is up to.

Then that’s a really great place to put in more fun, lighthearted B2C stuff that speaks to end users because it almost feels like, during the summer or during like winter holidays, even decision-makers don’t necessarily have their decision-making hats on. They’re also taking time off and just relaxing.

That’s when I like to sprinkle in more B2C content. And we try to go a little bit heavier with B2B. When we know that it’s the time of year where budget conversations and plans about new offices and things like that are being had.

I would say that’s an overall guiding principle. But generally speaking, I do try to always sprinkle B2B in there.

Individual Post Performance vs Actual Impact

How are you connecting the dots between individual post performance or performance over the course of a week or a month to actual business impact, particularly when you’ve got two different, very different audiences that you’re targeting with these posts?

Michelle Fan: I would say, if we want to narrow down the actual metrics that we’re looking at for B2B, it would be more lead generation, website visits, and actual inquiries.

We use HubSpot. I think it can get very granular, which is nice. It can get precise with where people are coming from what module they actually interacted with on the website, what caught their attention, and stuff like that. So it’s kind of nice there that I can be like, “Oh, I know that this inquiry came from our LinkedIn presence or this specific campaign.” And this led them to this blog post that we posted, which is great for B2C.

I actually think it’s a little bit harder for us to measure because there’s almost kind of a gap. We would look at likes, engagement rates, and sometimes sentiment analysis, although I haven’t done as much of that lately.

But where we engage with the end user at Felfel is when they actually buy something from the fridge. And we’re not tracking, oh, you purchased this culture pop, or you’re registered in the Felfel app as this user. And you also liked this. You know what I mean?

There’s a little bit of a gap there that can make it harder to measure B2C actually, but the goal is to tie both of them to actual sales utilization rate and customer retention.

Check out Mike’s conversation on the sister podcast, Retail Edition where he talks to the social manager for Five Below who is creating fantastic TikTok content.

Tools/Resources

What are some tools or resources that you found? You’d say are most helpful in managing and creating content for this kind of diverse set of two different audiences.

Michelle Fan:

• I use Canva a lot for super quick content creation.
• The Adobe Suite for Creatives, so Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro for video editing.
• A bit of Figma sometimes for drafting things up or other concepts when we’re not using Canva.
• Then I use Asana for our editorial calendar.
• Then we also use Google Analytics, Looker, and Ads for keyword research and website traffic and stuff like that to just see how things are like translating to actual sales activities and conversions.

Maintaining Brand Consistency

How do you maintain brand consistency while adapting your voice across all these different audiences? You mentioned earlier how, when you’re posting the LinkedIn, you’re tweaking the message versus posting to Instagram. How are you maintaining that consistency across all of that?

Michelle Fan: It requires knowledge about the different platforms. Like, you have to actually spend time there as a user. And I wasn’t super active on LinkedIn until maybe two years ago. But I think that that’s really valuable because then you can actually see how the people that you’re communicating to are using the platform as well.

You need to just know the platform, the lingo, the habits, and the grammar of using that platform. Generally speaking, people aren’t talking about ROI on Instagram, right? So, it’s pretty clear that even if we use the same piece of content (so the same carousel or the same photo album or something like that), you can talk about different things with it on LinkedIn or Instagram.

And that’s where that platform knowledge comes in. I will also say that clear brand guidelines are super, super important. I feel like we’re at a great place with Felfel because we’ve got 10, now 11 years of a really solid brand to work from in Europe. But also have the opportunity to refresh that for the U.S. market.

Trust me, there was definitely a lot of localization work on my end. Even though in Europe, they’re using English among other languages. European, English, and American English, it’s so, so different.

But, anyway, we’ve always been super clear about tone and brand pillars. I feel like that’s what matters most so you can apply the same structure to completely different topics as needed.

With the B2B audience, I’m definitely thinking more about like relevant keywords and industry buzzwords a little bit more. ‘Cause that helps stop the scroll and lends us more authority where it really matters. But what I’m really saying is as long as you know your brand and you know the platform, you can always tweak how many emojis or different types of vocabulary you want to use on each platform.

So the key is just ensuring that the values and personality of the brand still remain intact at every touch point.

Advice for Beginners

What would your advice be if they’re just starting to navigate this challenge of having a dual audience content or approach to their social media marketing?

Michelle Fan: Start with an actual understanding—a deep understanding—of each audience.

I had to put on some different hats and think through some different personas when I was starting out and [am still] trying to craft the perfect B2B tone for Felfel New York.

Think about: What does the audience value? What are their actual pain points? Why are they even on this platform in the first place? Are you looking for business solutions on Instagram, or are you just passing the time before your next meeting or something?

Think about how they’re actually consuming that content. You can map those journeys, and you can also find overlap, and that makes things easier.