How Talenti Grew Views by +366% Through Entertaining Short-form Videos

Talenti’s Challenge

Talenti, the #1 best-selling gelato brand in the U.S., truly embraces the culinary world and communicates the quality and richness of its ingredients through its social media channels. While video-centric social media platforms offer food brands great opportunities for creating appetizing and mouth-wateringly appealing content, one of the industry's biggest challenges is communicating the taste, texture, and flavor of these creations to non-brand triers. Additionally, food-related content does not always feature the brand as the main protagonist, which is often overshadowed by the recipe itself. As a result, Talenti had to turn to creativity and focus on showcasing its craftsmanship, tapping into trends, and growing its UGC content focus. With Dash Hudson's insights, Talenti's social team is developing a video-first social strategy to produce relevant and engaging content to increase brand awareness gradually.

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Leveraging Insights To Create Entertaining Short-form Videos

Over the last year, Talenti's social team noticed an interesting shift in the content of its social media channels. With the advent of social entertainment and consumers' preference for short-form video, its static imagery no longer generated the desired engagement. Talenti's Instagram platform demonstrated the most notable shift, with Reels outperforming all other content formats. To tackle these evolving trends, the brand turned to Dash Hudson to gain deeper insights, which led to producing more video content. Thus, Talenti's organic video views on Instagram have grown by +366%.

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One of the most significant learning curves for the brand was understanding that one size doesn't fit all. While high-quality recipe content on Instagram performs well, it leads to little engagement on TikTok. As a result, Talenti started experimenting and quickly discovered that the most effective content for TikTok is lo-fi, behavior-based content that is less curated. This approach meant that success measures also had to adapt. On Instagram, Talenti uses Dash Hudson's Effectiveness Rate — which has seen a +134% increase — while on TikTok, it relies on Dash Hudson's proprietary Entertainment Score, which has led to a 63% boost. These measures give the Talenti social team all the information they need to understand whether the content they create resonates with their audience across platforms, allowing them to make more informed decisions resulting in higher effectiveness.

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The brand's primary focus moving forward is to fully invest in video content. This may mean posting less content, as video is more difficult to produce, but the brand will continue its meaningful growth trajectory on social media by catering to consumer preferences. In fact, this approach is supported by Dash Hudsons' recent social media benchmark report, which found that the CPG, Food, and Beverage industries only post two times a week on average, but earn the second-highest Engagement Rate (6%) among all sectors analyzed.

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“Our approach to entertainment-based content is deliberate but also organic. Fans already provide amazing content, but it's also a valuable insight we actively tap into. Ultimately, people want to see cool food content and learn how to make something. As a result, how we show up in that content is by recreating what we see—it's holding up a mirror to what people are already saying. The goal is to generate engagement through entertaining content that people will want to share and create.”

‍Stephanie Zhang,
Associate Brand Manager (Operations) at Talenti

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Identifying the Best UGC To Drive Awareness and Sales

A big part of Talenti's success is understanding the importance of UGC and nurturing good relationships with its fans. Using UGC is essential to the brand's social strategy, whether it's a simple video of caramel being drizzled on its products, or recipes created by its fans using its gelato or sorbetto. Talenti has found the most success in UGC content with Instagram Reels.

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With Dash Hudson’s sophisticated Vision AI that identifies posts with the most potential, Talenti saves time searching for UGC and never misses the most influential posts featuring its brand. Following the insights provided, Talenti put UGC Reels content through a testing process to assess how it would perform in Feed—a decision the team were initially hesitant to make. However, they soon discovered that the Reels posted in Feed would boost engagement and gradually increase effectiveness by giving the content an added boost.

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The brand benefited from UGC and creator content in more ways than increasing social engagement. In the last 12 months, Talenti witnessed a strong correlation between social media virality and sales. When a creator's TikTok recipe featuring the brand's Alphonso Mango Sorbetto went viral, the product's sales figures skyrocketed simultaneously, a trend that continued for many months after the TikTok went live. To return the favor, Talenti spotlighted the creator during Hispanic Heritage Month, not promoting its own products but the creators'. As a result, the brand gained more exposure, demonstrating the power of long-term creator partnerships.

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"Every time we look at UGC through the Dash Hudson platform, we love that it also suggests similar content. This is really valuable and reduces the time we spend looking for this type of content on our own. We can set up different boards to facilitate the population of UGC, stay organized, and maintain visibility by having a central place for it all." ‍

Alberto Morales,
Senior Social Strategist at Mekanism