Seasonal campaigns for CPG clients pull together efforts across different aspects of digital marketing: blog content, social media, paid ads and email. Using data to understand the audience and careful planning, a Lightspan client saw year-over-year web traffic improvement that contributed to surpassing holiday sales goals.

Challenge

One of Lightspan’s clients produces CPG in a niche market: candy that is safe for those with food allergies or other dietary restrictions. The candy industry, overall, is driven by seasonality and our client is no exception. Marketing tactics in the past included traditional PR, trade shows, product donations, paid advertising and social media. Lightspan entered the mix as the client made moves to more cohesively and strategically combine all marketing efforts. This presented us with the challenge to improve their year-over-year web performance, especially during high-sale holiday seasons. They identified Easter as one of their most important holidays, especially for sales of jelly beans in particular, so Lightspan developed a seasonal campaign strategy for 2015.

Strategic Solution

Seasonal Goals

• Drive awareness and interest (traffic to the website)
• Support retail sales

Implementation

Digital Marketing Strategy

• Spring crafts blog post that used jelly beans
• 2 emails
  • Early one promoting the blog and jelly bean sales
  • Later one promoting the giveaway and jelly bean sales
• Social media calendar that eased into sales-oriented posts
  • Started with focus on engagement and content promotion
  • Worked in messages about product value
  • Shared “social proof” of Easter coverage by strategic partners
• Paid ads
  • Facebook
  • Google

Facebook Contest

Contests and giveaways can be an effective marriage of lead generation, awareness and community engagement. Lightspan noticed that in 2014, the client had multiple giveaways during the Easter season, but none that actually addressed the holiday itself.

We couldn’t let the opportunity pass by. To tie everything together, Lightspan developed a simple contest wherein visitors voted in a poll for the best place to hide Easter eggs. A tool called Woobox allowed us to inexpensively host a poll with pictures of the client’s product associated with each voting option, easy social sharing and email collection. After submitting their answer, users were encouraged to visit the client’s website to learn more about the products. The contest was promoted through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and email. Included in the prize was a product of a strategic partner (in-line with audience’s needs) who also promoted the contest.

The giveaway had high value for the target audience, showcased the product as a part of the audience’s holiday experience and collected email addresses. In addition, we timed the giveaway so that it was close enough to the holiday to be relevant, but ended early enough to 1) ship prizes to the winners and 2) give the rest of the participants time to purchase on their own.

Results

YOY Easter Web traffic

March 8, 2015 – April 5, 2015 vs March 23, 2014 – April 20, 2014

• 93.24% increase in social + “other” traffic
• 80.27% increase in pages/session (5.23 vs 2.9) This indicates that visitors were interested in learning about the brand or products and in buying.
  • Highest performing sources were Instagram (8.42 pages/session with an average duration of 2:14) and email (7.2 pages/session with an average duration of 5:45)
• 120% increase in search traffic for “surf sweets jelly beans”
• 185.71% increase in search traffic for “surf sweets organic jelly beans”

Giveaway

• 456 new emails for $0.13/each

Sales

The 2015 Easter season saw higher sales than any previous year with the client proclaiming we “blew last year out of the water.”

2 Keys to Success

• Know what motivates your target audience to purchase (pain points and values)
• Plan strategically
  • When to push brand vs sales
  • When your audience is online
  • Use a mixture of content types and sources
  • Perfect your messaging, tone and voice