In a few words
Ye Olde Oak and Bunlimited are two of the UK’s favourite hot dog brands. While both had explored digital marketing before, neither had struck upon a coherent long-term strategy to drive growth. Fresh off the back of a brand revamp and brand new website for Ye Olde Oak, Struik Foods asked Fablr to cook up a content-rich campaign to delight new and old customers alike.
Key challenges
For Ye Olde Oak, the key goal was to reposition the brand in the mind of consumers as the No.1 choice for everyday mealtimes. For Bunlimited (a relative new entrant to the UK market) it was to grow brand awareness and introduce new audiences to their range of premium hot dogs and delicious toppings.
To get there, Fablr needed to focus on rapidly generating the insights we needed to develop a digital marketing strategy that would help drive long-term sales growth.
For any brand, gaining a deeper understanding of their customers is critical: their online behaviour, their buying habits and what content resonates with them. Since both brands were physical-only retail products there were additional challenges in analytics to overcome, such as how to attribute campaign success to in-store purchases.
Another vital piece of the campaign was developing enough engaging content for both brands during the entire year. This required Fablr to take two approaches to content generating. Firstly by creating a range of high-quality video and photographic assets before the campaign began, and then secondly in developing an on-going strategy to generate additional content throughout the year.
Customer engagement was a clear priority for both brands. To that end, we used our advanced social media technology to respond quickly and accurately to both brand engagement (such as a comment on a post) and also to social customer service requests (such as product queries). This was measured through several metrics and KPI’s to keep the client informed of progress, from the number of queries to the average response times each month.
"Fablr were able to understand the needs of each brand and delivered above and beyond our expectations."
Willem-Jan Dekker
- Brand Manager
Approach
Fablr’s first task was to commission a video and photography shoot to generate the initial set of campaign brand assets. The challenge with this shoot was to run the asset production for both brands simultaneously due to time constraints. Each brand has a very different look and feel, so the challenge was to keep this distinction throughout the shoot.
In parallel with the content production stage, the Fablr marketing team engaged in an analysis phase to assess which channels would provide the right sort of insights and engagement. Fablr also commissioned Full Volume PR to target relevant publications and influencers.
From the outset, one of the key goals of the campaign across both brands was to gather as many customer insights as possible. We needed to monitor the brands and the campaign closely, allocating plenty of time for our analytics work. Being able to adapt our approach and create new content at a moment’s notice would be vital in maximising the effectiveness of the campaign.
To capitalise on key trading periods throughout the year, Fablr planned microcampaigns to hit each one, which included custom paid ads targeting and creative. We planned several smaller campaign streams, covering everything from the summer BBQ period through to bonfire night and Halloween later in the year.
With COVID-19 taking its toll on public activities throughout the world, we postponed several PR-focused public events, such as a planned road tour for Ye Olde Oak. We then reimagined activity around the postponed UEFA Euro 2020 and the Olympics to focus more on summer lifestyle in the BBQ period once the lockdown lifted.
Fablr’s flexible approach and adaptability proved critical in responding to these rapidly changing circumstances, and allowed us to keep up the campaign momentum throughout the 2020 disruption.
Delivery
As with any successful digital marketing campaign, running it successfully required the Fablr team to manage multiple parts of the campaign simultaneously, from the editorial calendar and content creation, through to customer support and analytics.
To support our primary content, Fablr optimised both of the brand websites for social sharing – from social cards to Open Graph metadata. These changes gave us the ability to easily share recipes and other site content and to leverage the existing content on these websites.
Fablr started to deploy multiple test campaigns through the Facebook Ads platform with a variety of messages, creative and audience targeting. By analysing the results of these, we were able to quickly pinpoint high-performing combinations and use these learnings to create effective and powerful social strategies.
We found that the most effective strategies in optimising spend was to leverage ad creative that more closely matched the purchasing journey of the customers. We quickly arranged additional in-house photography to capture the products in shopping baskets and “on the kitchen side”. This imagery led to a 47% decrease in cost per acquisition for our follower campaigns.
A seasonal highlight was a micro-campaign titled ‘Summer Lifestyle’, and featured multiple product giveaways, competitions and more. We produced a series of stunning Instagram Story ads and promoted these to both owned and new audiences.
We needed to keep a close eye on customer messages, using our social technology platforms to give us real-time updates so we could quickly respond to over 500 consumer queries this year so far.
We realised that some customers needed answers during out-of-office hours, so we developed Facebook bots to provide this information immediately. Any queries these bots could not deal with would be raised with a member of the team once they were online to help. This dramatically reduced the time we spent on answering the most common questions while keeping customers of both brands happy.
The campaign has been highly successful, exceeding all of its goals by a considerable margin. By iterating monthly on the campaign strategy, we have been able to consistently drive performance across organic and paid social media. Our partners, Full Volume PR, have been able to secure significant coverage in relevant outlets, both in print and online, and this has helped the campaign connect with a wider audience where ads can often struggle to reach.
Do you want digital marketing that makes a real difference to your bottom line? Get in touch with us at hello@fablr.co.uk and we’ll show how we can bring the same creativity, drive, and innovation to your brands.
"We've been impressed by both the creativity of the content and the performance of the ads across both campaigns. Fablr know how to engage our customers and drive the KPI's that are important to us as a business."
Bryn Scadeng
- Head of Marketing and Innovation