April 27, 2021
SUMMARY: Digital
transformation leveraging the latest technologies. Omnipresence through
omnichannel marketing. Automation fueled by databases all to capture more
mindshare! Phew. We
step back from the buzzword-driven hype and strip marketing down to its
essence with examples from a food producer, 5-star hotel, and food delivery
service in this article. |
by Daniel Burstein, Senior
Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute
This article was originally published in
the MarketingSherpa
email newsletter.
There are only four parts to marketing…
·
The Sender
·
The Receiver
·
The Message
·
The Means
…according to Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director,
MECLABS Institute in Design Layout: How to structure your web page or email for
maximum conversion.
So in this article, let’s take a look at successful examples of
each of the four parts of marketing. While any good marketing effort (including
these) leverages all four parts, we’ll call out one part specifically for
emphasis in the following case studies to give you ideas for how you can tackle
that part of marketing for your own brand.
Quick Case Study #1 (The Sender):
Organic food producer generates 76 million impressions with influencer
marketing campaign
The Sender is the communicator of The (marketing) Message. This is
often the company itself – through a newspaper advertisement or on a landing
page.
But it doesn’t always have to be. To get you thinking outside the
box about who the sender can be for your marketing messages, let’s take a look
at a case study in which the brand found an external sender for its message.
Laura’s Lean is a provider of lean, all
natural, and organic beef products. The company realized its core buyer was
aging. Yet, it had a goal to increase market share. The team at Laura’s Lean
decided to try to leverage influencers to boost awareness and consideration,
hoping to increase household penetration with both their core buyer audience
segment and a younger target audience to help power the growth of the brand.
“We knew using influencer marketing could be a powerful way to
introduce people to Laura’s Lean and drive brand awareness. Influencer
marketing is sometimes looked at as a more ad-hoc, quick-turn marketing
initiative, and not as often used in the food and beverage space, but we view
it quite differently,” said Jeff Tanner, Chief Digital Officer and VP of
Marketing, Laura’s Lean.
The program relied predominantly on micro influencers
(20,000-250,000 in total reach) in the recipe, food and lifestyle categories,
as well as a few macro influencers (up to 2 million in total reach.) The
influencers were engaged in a long-term, ambassador-building effort to create
meals featuring Laura’s Lean ground beef and plant-based burger products.
Influencers were specifically chosen for their propensity to focus on
“better-for-you” food options, and to have an audience that aligned with one or
both of the brand’s target audiences.
Before engaging, each influencer prospect was thoroughly vetted.
The first analysis was a quick check against three key data points used by
their influencer marketing agency to create an audience quality rating:
·
Audience Authenticity
(percentage of their audience made up of real accounts vs. bot or spam
accounts)
·
Engagement Rates
·
Growth Rate (follower
growth)
All these metrics were compared to other accounts of similar size
in similar categories. To participate, influencers had to score on par or above
average on all three data points.
Additional vetting criteria included:
·
whether their audience
matched the target audience
·
having a low saturation
rate (percentage of content that is sponsored)
·
the quality and
authentic feel of the sponsored content they create
·
how well the
influencer’s personal brand aligned with the Laura’s Lean brand
That last point isn’t only important for Laura’s Lean, it’s
important to the influencers as well. While the influencers are paid to create
the content, most influencers only participate in a campaign when it’s
something they’re authentically passionate about and fits into their personal
brand.
“Choosing the right influencers, determining what the KPIs are,
optimizing on what works is critically important to success – and our partners
and us were thorough and methodical by design,” Tanner said.
Hand-picked influencers were then tasked with creating compelling
visuals and video content that was seasonally relevant and offered a solution
to their audiences’ challenges, such as quick and easy family dinners, creative
twists on a hamburger, internationally inspired recipes and kid-approved
dishes. In every post, influencers highlighted Laura’s Lean beef as a premium,
healthier beef option, educating audiences about Laura’s “Never Ever” promise
(the cows never ever receive antibiotics or added hormones) and encouraging
their audience to trade up the next time they’re shopping for beef at a
highlighted retailer.
Creative Sample #1: Social media post by influencer sharing an
easy family dinner recipe while promoting organic food producer Laura’s Lean
Every piece of published content was evaluated using the
influencer marketing agency’s content scoring algorithm. The most important
factors that go into this score are:
·
engagement rate
·
share rate (virality)
·
content quality (hand
scored)
Top-scoring content was turned into social ads running from the
creator’s handle. This unique approach to content boosting ensured that only
the content most likely to generate positive results received the media
investment. From there, each ad was optimized regularly by manipulating the
creative format, calls-to-action, platforms, placements and audience targeting
– all in response to real-time performance.
“Through a unique combination of influencer partnerships and a
paid syndication plan designed to invest only in getting proven content in
front of our target audience, we were able to increase awareness, brand
favorability and intent to buy among an important growth audience for Laura’s
Lean,” said Erin Ledbetter, Sr. Vice President, Carusele (Laura’s
influencer marketing agency).
Insights around content performance, audience segmentation and
influencer efficiency were leveraged to continually adapt the program. Content
performance insights were analyzed to determine how to tweak the creative brief
provided to influencers.
To date, the campaign has delivered 76 million viewable
impressions, 285,000 engagements and earned more than 7 million minutes of
audience attention. With 97 activations in just the first year, influencers
published more than 1,500 pieces of content about the brand and generated more
than $350,000 worth of original content now available to the brand for use on
their own channels.
However, the team felt the real results should come from a custom
brand lift study to understand the impact of the influencer program on consumers
– specifically, how it made them think, feel and how their intent changed.
A control group and a group of consumers who had been exposed to
the influencer campaign were asked brand awareness, consideration and purchase
intent questions. The groups were segmented by demographics that were in line
with Laura’s growth and core buyer targets.
“Impressions and engagement rate are important to monitor but they
only tell marketers so much. The fact is, if your influencer marketing doesn’t
revolve around an online conversion then a brand lift study is the best way to
understand if your initiative achieved its specific goals. And today’s brand
lift studies can go past just simple brand awareness and favorability. They can
be extremely robust, capturing the lift in KPIs up and down the marketing
funnel,” said Gary Zucker, Co-founder, Group RFZ (Laura’s measurement partner).
The results of the brand lift study were positive. Some of the
highlights include:
·
Lift in both unaided and
aided awareness was well above benchmark for both audiences at +7 and +18
points, respectively.
·
The lift in brand
favorability was also strong, with an impressive 18-point lift over the control
groups.
·
The core buyer also
reported that they were willing to pay more for Laura’s Lean, showing a
13-point lift above the control audience.
·
While there was a modest
3-point lift when it came to purchase intent across both audiences, the lift
among the growth target respondents reporting they would definitely buy
increased by 6 points.
·
The growth target also
saw a positive swing among those reporting they definitely would not buy, with
a -6-point delta compared to the control group.
Overall, the study showed the campaign’s content to be effective
at increasing awareness and moving both target audiences down the purchase
funnel.
Quick Case Study #2 (The Receiver):
Food delivery platform’s OOH campaign helps it grow to 15,000 users
The Receiver is the one who the marketing message is intended for
– often a potential customer or sometimes a person who influences the purchase.
One of most important (and difficult) elements of marketing is to
truly understand The Receiver and use that understanding to craft your message.
Here’s an example of a company that used customer research in inform its
campaign.
WoodSpoon is an on-demand food delivery
platform. Co-founders Merav Kalish Rozengarten and Oren Saar built the platform
to fill the void they saw in the marketplace for delivery of authentic,
homemade food.
“What guided our campaign was the research we conducted. We
listened to our customers to better understand their preference and buying
habits, and focused the campaign around their needs,” said Rosengarten,
Co-founder and CMO, WoodSpoon.
“After spending a year at home, and suffering from ‘cooking
fatigue,’ we realized that those returning to the office would still be looking
for healthy, home-cooked food for themselves and their families,” Rosengarten
continued. “That was one of the many conclusions reached by an internal
property research project we concluded in mid-February. That survey showed a
preference for eating healthy when ordering in, especially from working parents
who are looking for homemade food when they don’t have enough time to prepare
their own meals.”
As the city emerged from the lockdowns and isolation of the
pandemic, WoodSpoon launched an out-of-home advertising (OOH) campaign
featuring digital ads with motion running in 20 highly trafficked New York City
subway stations. Based on the research, the subway ads positioned WoodSpoon as
a way to connect with the healthy cooking of home without having to put in the
work necessary to create it.
The ads read: “Miss home? We deliver it.” “As New Yorkers are
starting to get back on the subways as the city reopens, we saw an opportunity
to welcome them back and remind them they can enjoy WoodSpoon anywhere – even
on the go,” said Rosengarten, Co-founder and CMO, WoodSpoon.
Creative Sample #2: Out-of-home digital ad in New York City subway
station for food delivery platform
Creative Sample #3: Out-of-home digital ad in New York City subway
station for food delivery platform
For the subway campaign, the team tracked scans of the featured QR
codes, downloads, and purchases with coupon codes. They saw thousands of
interactions on a daily basis.
The campaign has helped the platform grow by more than 40%
month-over-month. It has more than 120 home chefs on its platform and more than
15,000 users. “We’ve received positive feedback from customers, who are
reposting and sharing pictures of the digital ads on social media,” Rosengarten
said.
Quick Case Study #3 (The Message):
Influencer marketing campaign for Conrad New York Downtown hotel garners 55,393
views
The Message is what you need your potential customers (The
Receiver) to understand about your product.
Take the travel industry, for example. What message is this
industry usually trying to communicate? Exciting or relaxing leisure travel? Or
productive business travel right in the heart of downtown perhaps? Maybe
sustainable luxury powered by green initiatives?
Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, another message became essential
as well – traveling is clean and safe. Let’s take a look at an example from a
hotel.
Conrad New York Downtown partnered with
Valerie Wilson (@TrustedTravelGirl) to showcase the hotel along with its
cleanliness practices to reduce the spread of Covid-19 as part of the Hilton
CleanStay initiative (the hotel is managed by Hilton).
Valerie stayed at the five-star hotel three times: July 6 – 8,
2020, August 7 – 11, 2020 and October 2 – 6, 2020.
With Wilson’s wide reach and following in the travel space, the
team was interested in accomplishing two goals. First, content creation. They
wanted to leverage Wilson’s ability to produce quality content highlighting
Hilton CleanStay and what the hotel is doing to keep guests safe (with Freedman
providing filming assistance) and outlined specific deliverables for Wilson to
create. And second, they utilized Wilson’s large reach to help garner hotel
exposure.
The team filmed and produced two Hilton CleanStay videos with
Wilson, editing and preparing the footage for social media. They also captured
content of Wilson around the hotel for static post use.
“Valerie shared more than 50 [Instagram] Stories tagging the hotel
over the course of her three stays. The coverage included a room tour, lobby
highlight, rooftop sneak peak, Work + Well download (our WorkSpaces by Hilton
offering) more about our Rocean Water Filtration system, Hilton CleanStay and
more,” said Kara Freedman, Assistant Director of Marketing and eCommerce,
Conrad New York Downtown.
Creative Sample #4: Social media post for hotel by influencer
Content through Wilson’s social feeds produced 55,393 views, 5,838
likes and 276 comments. Static posts had 1,946 likes and 140 comments. IGTV
(Instagram TV, a long-form video format) videos had 46,465 views, 588 likes and
112 comments and Instagram Reel (a short-form video format) had 8,928 views,
366 likes and 24 comments.
“The Hilton CleanStay video Valerie shared in July was one of the
first influencer-created and -shared pieces of content about safe travel. Based
on the 40,000 views the video received in the first 24 hours, we knew followers
(and travelers) were craving safe travel content,” Freedman said.
“Find good partners,” Freedman advised. “Valerie was flexible and
her brand aligned with ours. We do not go out and seek influencers with
millions of followers who’s followers don’t even engage with the influencer’s
content. Valerie has a brand, one that is followed by our ideal guest, and thus
working with her made sense. My number one piece of advice to other marketers
is to find good partners that make sense for your brand (not just an influencer
will a high following).”
Quick Case Study #4 (The Means):
Landing page layout generates 266% more leads
The Means refers to the mechanism used to get the message to The
Receiver. It could be a print ad in a newspaper. It could be an email. For our
next case study, it was a landing page.
MECLABS Institute split tested three landing page layouts in an
experiment as part of MECLABS conversion marketing services (MECLABS
is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa).
Creative Sample #5: Landing page layouts from marketing experiment
By simplifying page layout and objectives (reducing friction), one
of these landing pages significantly increased clickthrough and conversion
(leads) by 265.6%.
You can learn which layout performed the best, along with tips for
increasing the performance of your own marketing, in the MarketingExperiments
video Design Layout: How to structure your web page or email for
maximum conversion (MarketingExperiments is the sister
publication of MECLABS).
Related resources
What 2020 Has Taught Marketers: 8 essential marketing
lessons
Customer-First Marketing Strategy: The highest of the five
levels of marketing maturity
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