Driving ROI from social media
during a global pandemic.
The challenge
As with most businesses during the pandemic, strategy and campaign plans were immediately stopped and changed. Consumer movement was greatly inhibited and the propensity to spend on non-essential items or those food moments considered a ‘luxury’ was dramatically reduced.
Pizza Hut Ireland thankfully fell into the governments list of essential services and businesses, so by making some structural changes it was able to continue, albeit at a reduced capacity.
The challenge was to make sure hungry people knew it was open for business with informative, engaging, and entertaining content, and drive them to purchase in an effective and measurable social media activation.
In doing so we kept the phones ringing, the order buttons clicking and the tills ticking over.
How we did it
We approached our campaign strategy like we do any of our client campaigns – with in-depth audience research, followed by smart content that relays vital information in short digestible pieces. Pizza Hut is regarded as a fun, welcoming and reliable food brand which appeals to all ages, so we needed to create two content strands; one to build awareness, and one to push sales. We split the spread of these pieces of content across main brand, and geo-targeted franchisee ads.
1
We segmented our audiences accordingly – our main audience covered the whole Pizza Hut brand and every store location. This audience segment was used to build general brand awareness, relay COVID-19 update information to the masses, and to jump on topical/relevant food moments allied to general circumstance.
We created 9 other different audience segments for specified Pizza Hut locations whose franchise owners needed hyper-targeted ads, tailored to location and offers available in those stores. These were more product and offer focused – designed to shorten the consumer journey from view to purchase.
This blend of general awareness and targeted “dark” social allowed us to deliver multiple touchpoints with consumers and increase sales.
2
We created a suite of content which was used to deliver vital COVID related business restrictions, adaptations, and revisions. Pizza Hut was extremely quick to implement social distancing and contactless measures in its stores, we relayed this information with high-quality animated assets to a mass audience – aligning with all government announcements and recommendations throughout.
3
Using our social listening tools and various research pieces we jumped on trending and topical moments and inserted ourselves into the conversations of social media users.
We found research showing that Facebook Gaming was seeing over 500% increase in Ireland, with “Words With Friends” the most used, so we created bespoke assets that mirrored this.
We watched in awe as a video of marbles running down a track on a beach in America trended worldwide, so we create a short-form video asset set with a gentle nod, replacing the coloured marbles with delivery drivers in coloured helmets.
We leaned on research that put pizza as Ireland’s no.1 comfort food for people during stressful times, so we created simple clean imagery which put pizza in the position of trust and support.
We noticed the growing conversation around home-schooling and keeping young kids entertained was becoming a strain on parents – so created a pizza design activity sheet where kids were asked to draw on the toppings, turning it into a competition to win a meal.
4
We supported our social outbound marketing with a tailored SEO/Adwords campaign built from the ground up. We reshaped the conversion tracking for all the Irish market which drastically improved pin-point revenue reporting for the brand. In doing do we reduced our client’s Google Adwords spend by approx 55% while improving the recorded conversion rate.
The impact
We created +70 posts and ads over 3months
We created 12 segmented social media audiences with tailored messaging for each; delivering hyper-targeted geo-located ads to 7 individual franchisees
We achieved an average cost per video view of €0.01
We achieved an average cost per click of €0.16 and average purchase value of €27.50
We achieved a monthly 85% PPC market share vs our competitors
We achieved a monthly CTR of 43%