Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is back talking with the current Chief Executive Officer of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, Greg Hanes, about promoting beef to today’s consumer.
Marketing and promotion of the beef product has changed dramatically over the years, Hanes said, as social media now plays a large role in helping to see insight into which consumers are being reached.
“It makes it much easier to leverage those messages and target very specific groups and change their behavior,” Hanes said. “That is where I think we have seen really good results where these targeted groups are buying more beef and consuming more and expanding their knowledge of it.”
On the flip side, Hanes said, because much of the advertising such as Beef Checkoff promotions, are not seen by producers, many producers have questioned the effectiveness of these promotions. These efforts are still successful and reaching the correct audience, Hanes said, but producers are not that audience.
“That is because we assume they are eating the beef, so they are not seeing it,” Hanes said. “I can assure you that it is going to those consumers who are buying it.”
The Beef Checkoff focuses on many different targets when marketing, Hanes said, including those metropolitan areas with a lot of people and not many cattle producers. Urban areas provide many protein options, Hanes said, so it is important to remind people that beef is a great choice.
“We put a lot of effort and resources in the last few years really on kind of that evaluation and review of the programs,” Hanes said. “No matter how good a program is, it always can get better, and things are changing.”
Each program within the Beef Checkoff, Hanes said, has goals in place to make sure they stay on track.
“We are also doing what we call a kind of deeper dive, third party evaluations of programs, so we are going in each year and picking kind of two, three or four areas to really dive in and see what is working here, what we can learn from it and what we can improve,” Hanes said.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
