The Recipe for Kraft Foods’ Content Marketing Strategy

Kraft Foods recently dished on its recipe for a successful content marketing strategy in an interview with Forbes.

Julie Fleischer, director of content strategy and integration at Kraft Foods, explains how her company has always put content marketing first. The company’s strategy includes relating to fans of its brand on social media channels and positioning itself on the cutting edge of the latest technologies.

A huge aspect of Kraft’s content marketing technique is its recipes, found on kraftrecipes.com. Fleischer said the brand’s chefs, which put out a third of the recipes, have “vast experience understanding how our consumers like to cook and eat, what pantry ingredients they keep on hand, how much time they have to make dinner or dessert, etc.” Users send in the other two-thirds of the recipes, and recipes even pop up on to Facebook to be featured as the Kraft Foods profile picture.

Along with the recipes, Kraft has proven to be an early adopter of new technologies. According to Forbes, its website was established in 1992, ithad a YouTube channel since 2005, and it’s been putting recipes up on Pinterest for a year now.

By letting users take the reins and create a large portion of content, Kraft is promoting positive association with its brand. As opposed to direct marketing messages, it drops in hints, such as using certain Kraft items in a meal.

Another brand that has been successful with a similar approach is Whole Foods, which posts its recipes on Twitter and lets users post their experiences with the recipes on its blog. Whole Foods is one of the largest companies on Twitter, with 2.3 million followers on its main account.

On Mashable, Co-Founder of COO and EQAL Greg Goodfried said, “It’s important to have some motive for people to create content on a branded social network. This motive doesn’t necessarily need to be a competition, but it needs to be strong enough to spark the community.” People post about what they’re interested in, and they like to hear feedback. Kraft enables consumers to do just that.

By pursuing the newest social media networks and using them — and their website — to encourage user input and interaction, Kraft will continue to have a strong content marketing strategy.