Agricultural News
Beef Checkoff Creating a Bigger Beef Community and Love for American Beef
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 14:52:30 CST
The nation's beef checkoff is targeting those that love beef in this country. In recent years, the checkoff shifted from using traditional forms of media like radio, television and print to more actively engage directly with beef lovers through social media and digital platforms. At the recent Cattle Industry Convention, Radio Oklahoma Network Farm Director Ron Hays caught up with Cattlemen's Beef Board Chief Executive Officer Polly Ruhland. Click or tap on the LISTENBAR below to listen to today's Beef Buzz feature.
In making this shift, Ruhland said the results have been more profound than just shifting from a traditional platform to a digital platform. She said when the operating committee agreed to build a beef community that included beef eaters and they started engaging with customers in a way that hadn't been done before. Ruhland said they have had phenomenal success with a 360 percent increase in website traffic over the past year.
This is a result in moving from one media form to another, but Ruhland said it is also a philological shift in the way the checkoff reaches and engages consumers. She said millennials especially appreciate that attitude change as much as the platform change.
"I really believe that in today's environment, consumers want to feel like they are part of the product," Ruhland said. "They don't want to feel like they are being sold to, they want to feel they are being included in. So when I talk about the beef community, to me the community involves people who make the food and people who eat the food. Shifting our thinking toward including our consumers, our customers and our eaters in our community, in what we do, is really important I think to the future of our product and especially to the future of the millennials way of thinking about what we do."
Through this shift to the consumer, Ruhland said they have learned the millennial audience loves food. She said they are "foodies" that love the food experience. In reaching that target demographic, she said they have learned instead of providing them with a written recipe, they offer recipe videos where they show them what to do step by step. That provides an experience different from reading a recipe card.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network- but is also a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today's show- and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
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