The role of social media marketing (SMM) in building frozen food brand loyalty

Social media platforms help businesses connect, communicate, and access information, boosting brand loyalty and awareness. This study aims to determine the relationship between social media marketing, brand engagement, and brand trust toward customer experience and brand loyalty. The focus is on the importance of the role of social media marketing for frozen food brands. The paper uses a descriptive research design and a quantitative approach where data were collected by distributing online questionnaires among frozen food consumers through Google Forms. The selected 250 respondents were located in big cities in Indonesia, such as Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bandung. The data were processed using SmartPLS v.4.0.0 to examine the results of the outer and inner models. The results show that social media marketing has a significant effect on brand trust. In addition, brand engagement has a significant effect on customer experience. Then, social media marketing has an insignificant effect on brand engagement. Brand trust has an insignificant effect on customer experience. Next, the customer experience has an insignificant impact on brand loyalty. In addition, a frozen food company’s social media advertising might not be able to reach its intended audience, which leads to little engagement. To preserve consistency and transparency, a brand should maintain open communication, a customer-centric strategy, and customer engagement through messaging, dialogues, and user-generated content.