Client Success: Attracting New Customers for a Multi-Market Food & Drink Franchise

With new food & drink products hitting store shelves on a near-constant basis, success in this product vertical requires a strong marketing and publicity strategy to call attention to your brand, drum up local interest, and convert new customers who will make repeated and regular purchases of your products from those retail locations.

The challenge of building product awareness repeats itself as businesses expand their presence from local product sales to regional, national and even global retail footprints. Even national franchises require a targeted and cost-effective go-to-market strategy when rolling out their products in new markets and regions.

When one national franchise decided to bring its line of healthy, handcrafted drink and snack options to more than a dozen local markets across the American southwest, that company knew it needed to invest in a marketing strategy that would build brand awareness at scale among its target audience.

The Goal

With products hitting store shelves at 80 locations across 13 markets, the national food and drink franchise faced a geographic challenge in promoting the arrival of its new products: While the products were arriving in a large geographic area, the audience for those products would be greatly affected by their proximity to local stores where those products would be purchased.

Cox Media’s challenge, then, was to identify ad strategies that would reach a relevant audience of likely consumers while controlling advertising costs to maximize ROI potential. Broad advertising campaigns like network TV advertising were too unfocused and expensive to meet the clients’ needs.

In addition to these geographic challenges, the company also had a clear target audience that it wanted to reach, consisting of health-minded consumers who were already engaging in health and wellness activities aligned with the benefits of their drink and snack products.

The Solution

After consulting with the client to identify its goals and the best metrics to measure success, Cox Media developed a multi-channel marketing strategy that spanned top-of-funnel goals, such as building brand awareness, as well as lower-funnel goals of motivating target consumers to purchase their health snack and drink products.

This marketing strategy included geofencing and geo-conquesting to focus digital ad spending on locations trafficked by a health-minded audience—including yoga studios, fitness facilities, lash studios and other health retailers—located within a five-mile radius of retail locations where the brand’s products were sold.

Cox Media also developed search and category contextual remarketing campaigns to connect with consumers with relevant search queries and behavior, and to re-engage interested consumers through multiple points of contact with the brand’s marketing campaigns.

In addition, Facebook advertising was used to reach a relevant social audience based on each user’s interests and behaviors.

The Results

Over the course of an initial eight-month campaign, Cox Media blew away the clients’ performance goals, delivering the following results:

• More than 5.3 million impressions across 13 markets;
• More than 269,000 social media users reached;
• An overall CTR 40 percent higher than the average industry benchmark;
• A total of 12,102 impression conversions driven by the campaign.

To top it off, the campaign was so successful across all 13 markets that the campaign was eventually paused after the client sold out of its products at many of the 80 retail locations where they were sold.

When your business growth depends on effective go-to-market strategies and regional marketing campaigns, you can’t afford to waste any resources in helping your brand connect with local consumers. A digital advertising partner can help you optimize these campaigns for instant success while making sure ads connect with your target audience.

Harness this success for your own products today—contact Cox Media to find out how.