For this week’s Thought Leader Thursday, we’re featuring Mallorie Rosenbluth of Grubhub – one of our most highly rated Social Media Strategies Summit speakers of 2017.

Prior to Grubhub, Mallorie held positions at Wegman’s Food Markets, Likeable Media, and Baked by Melissa. She joined the Grubhub team in 2016.

It’s an exciting time for the company. Grubhub works with over 80,000 restaurants, in 1,600 cities nationwide, and serve over 9 million diners. They also recently announced their partnership with Yum Brands, where Grubhub will be the exclusive online delivery partner for Taco Bell and KFC.

Establishing themselves as a staple in food delivery, they’ve also created an engaging, quirky online presence that Mallorie leads as Head of Social Media and Influencer Marketing.

In her talk at the Social Media Strategies Summit New York, Mallorie shared the recipe for success behind Grubhub’s content strategy, showing that there are real ways to effectively execute on content marketing initiatives without completely clearing out the budget.

Why the content game?

One important ingredient in their content strategy recipe: diversification. This means creating content across channels but also relying on various sources of content.

Amazingly enough, at Grubhub, only 30% of the content they use is internally created. They rely on influencers, user-generated content, and employee generated content. This not only keeps their content interesting but avoids exhausting internal resources – a problem to which small teams are particularly susceptible.

Grubhub’s social content mix

As influencer content gets around 450% more engagement than owned content, their mix of content creation efforts gives them reach they wouldn’t be able to obtain alone.

The case for going scrappy is a good one. At Grubhub, creating powerful but low-budget content allows them to test iterations, fail fast, and stay present in their feed. Scrappy means you can create fun content on the fly, as exemplified in their Twitter feed with quizzes and quippy, relatable foodie comments.

Grubhub creates social content on the fly

Listen to Mallorie’s full talk here, and check out the slides here.

Mallorie let us pick her brain a little bit further about her role at Grubhub and some of her favorite go-to marketing resources.

In terms of your career, what has been the most exciting part of leading Grubhub’s social media strategy?

Mallorie: At Grubhub, we’re all about testing, learning and optimizing our approach to marketing channels. Leading the social media strategy means taking the same approach to these channels — which often get overlooked at other organizations. The amount of new things I’ve been able to be a part of launching on social media during my two years here is more than twice as much than what I would be doing anywhere else. Being able to quickly adapt to the ever-changing needs of our diners and how we communicate our values with them has been thrilling and a great learning experience so far!

What are your top 5 social media tools, marketing blogs or resources that you couldn’t imagine living without?

– I subscribe to a ton of different AdWeek digests — I love it because I can peruse top headlines and read the things that are most important to me.

– SocialFresh – I’ve been reading the blog for years. It’s focused on the social media landscape and there are always amazing guest contributors. The perspectives here are interesting and the content is rich.

– Kissmetrics – whenever I Google a stat, I undoubtedly land on Kissmetrics. If you need a great data-driven marketing resource, this is a blog to visit.

– LinkedIn – The biggest day-to-day use I have for LinkedIn is great content shared by my connections. I’ve worked to build a network of professionals in fields similar to mine, so I find what they share to be incredibly insightful and from sources I don’t always check out on my own.

– Does Slack count? Grubhub is headquartered in Chicago and New York so I find Slack to be a great way to quickly share information between our offices and teams to disseminate big news. For instance, if one team member finds out about an Instagram update, and shares an article about it in our Slack channel, we can brainstorm how to apply this new feature to our brands. We used this approach as soon as Polls were launched in Instagram Stories. We were able to get content up the same day the feature became available.

What are some of the most exciting shifts you’ve seen over the years in how consumers interact with content? How is this informing your strategy at Grubhub?

The most exciting shift for me, as a content creator and distributor, is how many different ways people can interact with a single idea or moment. There’s a content type for everyone – and you can choose to engage in any or all of them. From photos to videos to quizzes — they’re not new content types. BUT (and this is the exciting but!), you can now watch a video on your mobile device that’s served to you because you’re watching a show on television. While you’re watching on both of those devices, you also might have a live stream going that features the show’s stars giving you behind-the-scenes info about what’s unfolding in the episode. Heck, you probably just shared a “Which character are you most like?” quiz with your friends in a group text, too.

The possibilities are endless! This makes it even more exciting for me as a marketer, a creative thinker, consumer and for Grubhub as a brand.

Connect with Mallorie on LinkedIn or Twitter.