California Giant Berry Farms in Watsonville, CA, was one of the early adopters of using social media as a marketing tool. The company has learned much over the past several years and continues to hone its efforts and experience.

“We are pretty strong in connecting with the consumer through social media,” said Cindy Jewell, the company’s vice president of marketing. “We are talking directly to our brand loyalists and trying to turn them into brand evangelists.”

Cal Giant is doing this through a software platform called Hubspot. Jewell calls it a “permission-based” communication tool with individual consumers.

“We know each person, what they like and how to communicate with them,” she said.

On a regular basis, these brand loyalists and evangelists receive individualized messages from Cal Giant reinforcing the brand and giving each person the type of information that they want to receive.

Jewell explained that Cal Giant uses contests, sweepstakes and other mass-marketing efforts to bolster its database of strawberry enthusiasts. She calls it the “funnel” approach, where names of interested consumers are gathered and placed in the top of the funnel, and Cal Giant communicates with those people and tries to create individual connections. Each time Cal Giant receives an email or an inquiry from a consumer, Jewell or a member of her staff responds personally.

Once the connection has been made, these consumers are quizzed as to their buying habits and what they like to see on the website, in the various social media platforms and at store level.

Jewell said Cal Giant participates in all the social media platforms including Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter, but it customizes its message on each site to correspond with the type of consumers on that site.

For example, the company has discovered that Facebook has lots of people looking at it every day but not actually participating, while Pinterest is highly interactive. Cal Giant targets its message to these two distinctly different type of users.

The payback is very good, Jewell said, but the company is still learning as to what it can find out and how it can use it.

One immediate way, she said, is to inform retailers of potential customers in their marketing realm if Cal Giant berries aren’t available. On a daily basis, consumers communicate with Cal Giant as to where can they find the firm’s berries.

“If a consumer bought our berries one day at a store and the next time she came back she couldn’t find our brand, we let the retailer know,” Jewell said.

This is a very direct payback that allows Cal Giant to make a specific pitch to a specific retailer — and it happens all the time. Jewell said interaction with consumers is constant and ongoing. The company has more than 30,000 consumers that regularly communicate with the strawberry producer.

“In January we had 230,000 people visit our website,” said Jewell.

The company is currently redesigning its website to more closely reflect the messaging it sends through its social media connections. In launching the redesign, the firm communicated with its database of brand loyalists and had 2,000 different people offer ideas as to what the new design should look like. Jewell was blown away that that many people wanted to help.

Though Cal Giant is seemingly ahead of the social media curve in terms of the produce industry, Jewell said the company has much more to learn.

“At this point we are still getting much more information in than we are giving out,” she said.