How Sprouts Farmers Market is Serving Up Social Retail Success

Find the Love

Sprouts Farmers Market is growing quickly. With 25 new stores opening this year, this natural food grocery chain has a lot to be excited about. Dana and her team use social to make these launches as successful as they can possibly be.
One of their challenges that social can help overcome comes from expanding to new regions. When Sprouts is opening its first store in Atlanta, for example, how does Dana and her team get current customers in Arizona to share their positive experiences with prospective customers in Atlanta? Dana’s team has put together the Sprouts Love Expansion campaign.
“On our main [Sprouts Facebook] page, where we see a lot of that great feedback and conversation from our fans, we’ve noticed that they use the ‘L-word’ a lot when they talk about Sprouts.”
Dana leveraged the conversations happening around the brand to create a campaign around the “love” idea. Her team wrote some quirky and kitschy lines like, “Where will love happen for you at Sprouts?” and used the answers that Sprouts lovers gave.
“When I found chocolate covered cranberries by the scoopful.”
“When the store manager opened his favorite salsa for me to try on the spot.”
These little moments that customers share can inspire others who have never visited the store to try it out.
And of course, there is no shortage of natural food tips, recipes, and photos on Sprouts’ social feeds.
Sprouts has a Pinterest campaign this summer called Great Summer Grillin, where they are giving away 10 stainless steel grills. Contests like this one get customers involved and active, both in the social sphere and in real life.
As Sprouts continues to grow, they also foster the relationship with their vendors, who are growing with them. “A lot of our vendors have started out being very localized mom and pop shops. Now, due to Sprouts’ growth, they have grown tremendously.” Working with those vendors, Dana never has a shortage of great content to share with Sprouts’ followers.

Social Media Number of the Week: 63%

The TV is the top device of choice for FIFA World Cup viewers to follow the games, but smartphones come in second. 63% of smartphone owners say they will be viewing the World Cup on their televisions, according to eMarketer. Television will remain important to soccer viewers because the large field means that a larger screen is helpful to see what’s going on. But smartphones aren’t far behind, with 48% of smartphone owners worldwide saying they’d use their mobile device to follow the action.

We will likely see an increase in smartphone use to keep up with the games but also to engage with each other about what’s happening on the screen. “The interesting thing about the World Cup and a lot of sports is that they bring people together, whether it’s a bar or restaurant or these viewing parties,” Jeff says. “That’s an untapped part of the face-to-face social that we don’t explore.”

Holy Social

Budweiser and Twitter have teamed up to present the 2014 FIFA Man of the Match. The voting system tallies tweets to determine the #ManoftheMatch for each game. Participants can vote for a player during the game, and at the end, the winner is presented with a trophy.

Nick loves this idea. “By Twitter enabling folks to actually create this conversation inside of one shared space, they’re trying to keep that all within the context of social networks,” he says. “Not only are you consuming your information from Twitter about the World Cup. You can also turn around and complete that cycle of conversation by putting your input into it.”