How a Small Franchise Uses Social Media: The FROGBOX Story

This is a story about FROGBOX – a small franchise transforming outdated industry standards.

Moving is still considered one of life’s most stressful events. Aiming to alleviate the stress of moving both on its customers and the planet, FROGBOX provides eco-friendly, reusable moving boxes as an alternative to wasteful cardboard boxes. Going beyond supplying environmentally friendly moving supplies, the business prides itself in following highly sustainable business practices at every step. But they don’t stop there. Besides changing industry standards to reduce carbon footprints, FROGBOX is a highly transparent social business – raising the bar for competitors worldwide.

In this story, discover how a small franchise business uses social media to share their brand message, spread awareness of ways to reduce environmental impact, provide excellent social customer service and reach more like-minded people.

A Business Plan to Reduce its Environmental Impact

Before diving into spreading brand awareness, let’s get to know the business. FROGBOX completed a Climate Smart program in an effort to significantly reduce their business footprint and greenhouse gas emission. In turn, they’ve become innovators in the moving industry and set a green example for many small businesses to come.

Chantelle Jones, Business Manager at FROGBOX explains, “While cardboard boxes can be reused perhaps three or four times, our boxes can be reused 400 times. Because cardboard and paper waste make up an estimated 18% to 26% of landfill material, this is a huge reduction in landfill waste, not to mention saving trees. When considering the greenhouse gas emissions of creating plastic vs. cardboard, we aimed to reduce our production emissions by 25% in 2013 and exceeded our goal by 10%.”

Changing an Industry Standard Using Social Marketing

So how is FROGBOX using social media to amplify their business mission and connect with its customers? Phil Harbut, Director of Sales at FROGBOX explains, “As a franchise it is important to connect with both a local and international audience of our customers and future customers. If we’re able to successfully streamline the customer experience across social networks, it doesn’t matter where the customer is located.”

“Our customer service, our story and our brand messaging is the same everywhere – one voice from coast to coast. That’s one way that we’ve built up our brand loyalty.”

Phil Harbut adds, “How does social media help spread our brand message? How doesn’t it? We aim to be transparent in everything from our core business values and our sustainability efforts to what type of content and events we care about. Social media makes all of that visible and amplified. On social media, we talk about things that matter to us and our customers – and not just our product. We’re interested in sharing stories or compelling environmental articles… But getting to know what resonated most with our demographic through metrics such as likes and comments was key to understanding what to share and how best to keep our audience interested.”

Coordinating Social Efforts Across a Franchise

Chantelle Jones remarks, “We make a conscious effort to minimize our carbon footprint and want to share our experience. We use HootSuite to help us share because its not only time saving, but also allows us to be more effective with our time on social. We’ve set up our dashboard to see what our local businesses are doing online and then amplify it across our main channels. HootSuite is especially helpful for our customer service, no matter the location. We can nip problems in the bud before they escalate into an issue and provide proactive support without being @mentioned directly. In short, HootSuite helps us keep everything together.”

Learn More about FROGBOX

Phil closes by explaining, “While we always aim to reduce the stress of moving on our customers and the planet, our core business values are integrity, achievement and fun. Firstly, integrity is a personal value for every one of our employees. Achievement represents our KPIs as a business. And fun is part of our culture and a way to reduce stress on the customer.”

Thank you Phil Harbut, Chantelle Jones and the FROGBOX team for sharing your story!

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