Del Real Foods is an authentic Mexican Food company that distributes delicious cuisine to nearly all food markets including restaurants, grocery store delis, club stores and retail stores. These delicious foods are created to help all incorporate them into the creative Mexican recipes and served on the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables of families searching for real, authentic flavor.
Recognizing the increasingly dynamic digital landscape, Del Real Foods came to us in 2013 looking to update and bring their digital presence to the forefront of the food industry. The main challenge the company faced was a to first improve a website that needed to be modernized from both a design and development stand point. After the website was updated, the next imperative company initiative was to increase social media engagement across all social platforms as well as develop an engaged community of brand evangelists endorsing the delicious and authentic tastes of Del Real Foods. Although, the company social channels had been started no substantial social media campaigns to build this engaged community had yet been put into action.
Enhancing the digital presence would need to start by updating Del Real with a new website design, enhanced user experience and make the back end CMS more user-friendly allowing their marketing team to make edits internally, without requiring an in-house development team. So we designed a new, custom site design that highlighted the rich tradition and mouth-watering flavors that would help showcase the authenticity of the Del Real Foods brand. The new, mobile-friendly site displayed both the food services and consumer side of the brand which highlighted the vast product line available in retail stores as well as the hundreds of unique breakfast, lunch, appetizer and dinner recipes that Del Real provides to help their customers become the star in their kitchen. We also created a custom back end of the website that allowed the Del Real team to make any edits site wide without having to know any css or html programming languages. All edits would be able to be made in the back end CMS using the WYSIWYG editor tool only.
The digital marketing team performed an extensive keyword, industry and competitor analysis identifying gaps in the goals of the clients as well as short and long term opportunities for us to take advantage of. These opportunities created a framework to implement through search, but most of the recommendations for this particular campaign were centered around building an engaged community on social media. We developed a series of social media campaigns centered around establishing new relationships with food bloggers and food chefs on the West Coat to help promote the Del Real Foods brand.
Although there were a series of social media campaigns and contests created, the main social media campaign was The 2016 Del Real Foods Blogger Recipe Challenge. In this exclusive Blogger Recipe Challenge, we partnered with select food bloggers where each blogger created his or her own unique recipe using one or more Del Real Foods products as the base ingredient. The bloggers were then instructed to publish their unique recipe on their social media channels and personal blog encouraging their fans and followers to go and vote for their recipe on the Del Real website during a one month fan voting period.
The Del Real website housed the Recipe Challenge voting pages and leader board where all fans and followers came to vote for their favorite blogger recipes. We selected three winning bloggers: one with the most fan votes, the second and third with the best tasting appetizer and main course recipes (voted by the Del Real Foods executive team). These winning bloggers were rewarded with a full winners package valued at over $10,000, with up to $7,500 in cash as well as a custom video production package where the blogger would film the cooking of their recipe with the Del Real Foods team, being featured on the Del Real Foods website and social media channels as well as their winning recipe being featured on in store product packaging nationwide.
The Del Real Foods Blogger Recipe Challenge Campaign received very favorable quantitative and qualitative results.
Quantitative
In the month during the Blogger Recipe Challenge, we saw an increase in website traffic by 307% compared to the 2016 monthly average. This analysis did not account for any increase in paid traffic. The traffic sources that saw that largest increase in traffic during the campaign were lead by social media traffic with a 1,749% increase, direct traffic with a 760% increase, and referral traffic with a 447% increase respectively. The campaign received thousands of brand mentions on social media with positive brand sentiment. This Blogger Recipe Challenge combined with other digital marketing initiatives helped lead to an increase in social media followers and brand awareness market research testing on the West Coast from 27% to 33%.
Qualitative results
In addition to the increase in website traffic and engagement on social media, we took great leaps forward in creating a compelling experience for our fans and followers to interact with that possessed aspects of influencer marketing and user generated recipe content. We also established new, long term relationships with food bloggers that will be pivotal for future co-content creation and promotion in subsequent social media campaigns. We will be inviting the winnings bloggers to Southern California this year to film them cooking their recipes and getting some exclusive, behind the scenes footage. We will also be putting together a more elaborate campaign open to all fans and followers of the brand in Q4 of 2016 so stay tuned for more extensive campaigns to come with Del Real Foods.
