Managing the Saf-moment communications with care

Lesaffre is a French yeast manufacturer whose flagship product is the Saf-Moment yeast. Our task is to manage digital communications of the Saf Club — a community of home-bakers.

The brand is well known on the market: consumers buy it and recommend it to others. It has a good reputation, but until recently the brand had no website or social media , and all the communication with the customers took place on third-party platforms.

Lesaffre has accumulated an impressive amount of knowledge about yeast, dough and baking process and is ready to share with other enthusiasts. The company states its mission like this:

So it was necessary to create channels for digital communication and attract people to them. The solution was the Saf Club — a community of home bakers.

We have chosen recipes as the main content for the Saf Club. Then we created a whole channel system in which one can find this content: a website, Instagram, and a Youtube channel. We also took care of the ways to attract people to these channels: SEO traffic, special projects, and contextual advertising.

We never wanted to become just another series of inexpensive, popular, but identical video recipes. Moreover, yeast dough is something that requires perfection. If you are into it, forget about saving time — yeast activation, kneading, and proofing will take more than one hour. This is how a concept of a cozy bright kitchen appeared, where a woman tenderly bakes pastries for her family.

We shot ten videos, twenty step-by-step recipes with pictures, and thirty pictures of cooked meals in five sessions.

The Saf-Moment website is the audience’s first point of contact with the brand. It aims to provide useful content created by experts, and this was the base element of the website information architecture, design, and development.

The blog, a major section of the website, contains full information about Saf-Moment yeast: a detailed page entitled “About the Yeast” and articles about baked goods. Users can ask questions by filling out the “Ask the Club” form. These are then answered by specialists from the Baking Center.

If a recipe is too long to fit on the screen (they mostly are), then as users scroll down the page, the ingredients list moves down too, remaining in view on one side of the screen. This makes it easier to check the quantities required for each step of the recipe.

The steps are presented in a grid layout, an unusual format for cooking websites, but one which helps users keep their place in the recipe as they go.

A bright but not distracting corporate color and logo are a great fit for the simple, contemporary design. The website has no ads and never will: the focus is entirely on the content.

Instagram is the main channel for Saf Club communications. Saf Club is a community of people who appreciate high-quality baking, the comfort of the home, and a no-rush lifestyle.

Yeast baking demands lots of effort. Our target audience is people who have the time and spirit to get into all the details. These are mostly young and middle-age women, young men/husbands, and children. People who want to take care of their loved ones and treat them with food. They like to spend time with their family, cook several sets of food for dinner, and decorate the house.

That’s why we chose a friendly tone of voice in all the texts — we talk to customers about values, ask them questions, and encourage communication. We indulged in community management — answering every comment, asking follow-up questions, and always responding to DMs. Live communication with subscribers is more endearing than manipulative ways to raise engagement like “bird emoji if you agree”.

To increase engagement and coverage, we launched special projects on special occasions.

We launched three contests for three different groups of customers — mothers with children, housewives hosting Easter, and women who bake an easter cake (it takes up to six hours and is a real challenge). Each contest was supported by an Instagram blogger with a similar audience. We held a short quest with a printable postcard as a reward, and introduced the most active readers to each other.

We also encouraged our social media subscribers to visit the website, thus increasing the traffic, by posting previews of the recipes with the full version available via the link in the profile. Sometimes the website was an essential part of a special project — in order to participate in one of the Easter contests, it was necessary to hunt an artifact on the website.