The marketing and advertising spending for food companies in the U.S is expected to increase from $5.18 billion in 2018 to $5.37 billion by the end of the year 2020. That is a clear indication of how crucial it is for food and beverage companies to grab the attention of their increasingly busy consumer base.
However, making an imprint on the customer’s consciousness is easier said than done and requires business owners to tailor their marketing strategies in this highly competitive industry consistently. It requires them to meet the ever-changing tastes and behaviours of their target audiences, which was done by these three food companies in close association with Pinterest.
1. Birds Eye
Birds Eye is an American frozen food company. At a time when people were rapidly moving away from frozen foods, the company wanted to make frozen foods appealing to the people who had switched to fresh and organic produce.
Objectives
Birds Eye wanted to underline the significance of frozen foods by introducing new products and helping people understand the different ways they could put Birds Eye products to use in nutritious and versatile recipes.
Approach & Solution
Owing to their previous successful collaborations, Birds Eye partnered with Pinterest. For this, they decided to showcase the different recipes that people could make by using their products.
To that end, Birds Eye highlighted the versatility of waffles and the nutritional value of peas and launched its own “peas and waffles” campaign, which ran on TV, Facebook, and video-on-demand.
Birds Eye worked in tandem with its agency, Recipe, to study what kind of creative had the best impact on Pinners, which helped them come up with recipe Pins illustrating ingredients, thereby, easing the shopping process. To boost the consumer’s familiarity with the brand, they added text overlay to image and video Pins.
Also, the campaign saw the use of ‘hero’ pictures to indicate certain food preferences like gluten-free and the addition of popular Pinterest hashtags and keywords in the Pin description. Moreover, the team kept doing away with low-performing Promoted Pins and continued with only the high-performing ones.
The Result
The Pinterest campaign resulted in a massive 50% view-through rate, which included everything from purchases and site visits to click-throughs. Also, it generated a good cost per thousand impressions for image-based Pins and a low cost per view from over 5.5 million video views.
2. Blédina
The French baby food producer, Blédina, wanted to highlight the diversity of its baby food products for children aged above six months, while simultaneously recommending breastfeeding.
Objectives
Blédina wanted to bring its extensive range of products to the attention of its target audience, while also highlighting the diversity in their recipes, flavours, and textures.
Approach & Solution
Blédina joined hands with Pinterest and a marketing agency, iProspect, to follow a two-pronged approach that involved driving traffic to Blédina’s website and increasing its in-store sales.
Blédina used both Pinterest’s standard ads and their Promoted Carousels for demonstrating the diversity of its products. Also, their segmentation approach helped them reach specific audiences on the basis of their priority themes- nutrition and parenthood.
The Result
The Pinterest campaign helped Blédina reach an audience of 3.2 million people at an average frequency of 9. Their targeting strategy was particularly successful by notching up a 7.4 percentage hike in ad recall among parents with children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years.
Also, Blédina’s in-store sales registered an increase of 23%. The customers’ average cart value also saw a growth of 18%. The campaign helped Blédina achieve an excellent return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) of 145%, which means that for every euro spent in the campaign, they generated a revenue of €2.45.
3. Boursin
When cheesemaker Boursin began planning for Holiday 2019, they wanted to have a more extensive presence amongst the younger generation.
Objectives
With Holiday 2019 approaching, Boursin wanted to make inroads into the younger lot, for which it needed to stand out in a big way to capture the target audience.
Approach & Solution
Boursin teamed up with Pinterest to create a combination of branded ads from their account and celebrity content for maximum awareness.
The branded campaign showcased holiday appetizers, paired with close-ups of bite-sized snacks with calls to action. The celebrity content featured popular food influencer and star of Netflix’s Queer Eye, Antoni Porowski. Porowski not only shared several original recipes but also appeared in a mix of ad types showcasing elegant and attractive appetizers.
The Result
The Pinterest campaign delivered a 2% increase in Boursin’s brand awareness. The Boursin team also found that the Pins featuring Porowski outperformed the ones that didn’t feature him. Also, celebrity content resulted in higher brand recall and preference on Pinterest than it did on other social platforms.
So, How Do You Plan to Boost Your Brand Recall and Preference?
There’s obviously no hard-and-fast approach to it, and different brands may see success trying different methods. Eventually, it all comes down to how well you can highlight your brand’s values and your knowledge of your audience’s taste. Customers today don’t only look for a quality product but a brand that they can relate to, believe in and stand for. And if your brand isn’t up to it, customers are likely to take their “appetite” elsewhere.
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