Perfect Bar Case Study

Perfect Bar debuted its refrigerated nutrition bar eleven years ago and now sells its products to nutrition-conscious consumers at more than 5,000 retail locations. Using Rival IQ, the company is fueling continued growth by gaining a deep understanding of their social media landscape, identifying the sweet spot for their social audience, and developing new content concepts to drive increased engagement.

Perfect Bar began with a consumer-centric marketing strategy eleven years ago, and established itself in Facebook and, later, Instagram as popular consumer social channels.

Their initial social media content strategy skewed slightly male and targeted consumers who were focused on endurance and high-intensity sports. At the start of their social marketing efforts, the content of social posts centered mainly on lifestyle, with an occasional brand-focused post. As the company matured, they sought to extend their reach and increase engagement. The two-person social team wanted to update their strategy based on hard data, rather than intuition.

“To do what we wanted to do meant scrolling through thousands of social media posts by competitors, manually writing down topics and engagement numbers,” says Jessica Windell, marketing communications manager, Perfect Bar. “We didn’t have the time or resources for that.”

The Perfect Bar team knew what they needed to do to compete via social: study their competitors’ content, examine engagement levels, and then look at their own posts to develop a strategy that set them apart. They also knew that to do so manually would be extremely time-consuming. Upon learning about Rival IQ, Perfect Bar recognized the solution would allow their small team to develop a robust strategy and compete with larger competitors.

Upon reviewing their baseline social landscape in Rival IQ, Perfect Bar’s social marketing team quickly saw that their content strategy, while different from the competitors’, had a great opportunity to optimize. “We were shocked to learn that the brand posts in our social landscape had greater engagement with our audiences than lifestyle posts,” Windell explains. “Based on the data, we began changing our approach immediately, and now almost every post is about Perfect Bar.”

Just as important, Perfect Bar leveraged Rival IQ insights to better target their audience. Whereas previously they focused on a more male, endurance-sports audience, the Perfect Bar team learned that their most engaged audience is females age 25 to 44 who are nutrition-conscious and lead an active lifestyle. “With our improved strategic decision-making, we have seen a significant increase in consumer-generated posts.”

Perfect Bar also makes use of Rival IQ reports to keep the leadership team up to date on social media growth, allowing the social marketing team to segment the nutrition bar category. “Rival IQ makes it easy for us to provide executives with the insights into what competitors are doing, and provide the context they need to understand the direction we’re taking in social,” says Windell. “With Rival IQ we are able to show how Perfect Bar’s overall growth and relative engagement stacks up against other brands in the category,” Windell explains.

The combination of strategic validation and content inspiration continues to drive growth at Perfect Bar. Windell says, “Rival IQ helped us set and validate our strategy by identifying our most passionate and engaged audience, and then helping us focus on content that we know they will want, like and share.”