e-FOOD wanted to develop a strategy to reach specific audiences that matched the brand’s main buyer personas and to build valuable connections with male and female consumers ages 18 to 44.
THE GOALS
Reach specific audiences matching the brand’s main buyer personas
Build valuable connections with consumers
THE APPROACH
Partnered with YouTube creators to launch native advertising
Created unique video content
Served videos as ads at relevant user stages
THE RESULTS
Second largest branded channel in Greece
More than 39,000 subscribers
60% average video completion rate
15% ad view rate
Brand Lift survey showed uplifts in branded queries of up to 550%
e-FOOD wanted to develop a strategy to reach specific audiences that matched the brand’s main buyer personas and to build valuable connections with male and female consumers ages 18 to 44. As a way of addressing these goals, e-FOOD collaborated with selected popular YouTubers known for producing humorous content to seamlessly place native advertising in videos to increase ad relevancy and reach users who had installed ad blocking software on their browsers.
As part of its own video strategy, e-FOOD also produced three unique videos per week. With a focus on entertaining, funny and educational subjects, the content included promotional videos for restaurants. This approach helped the performance team by providing a powerful arsenal of videos that could be used as ads. The team used advanced remarketing segmentation to break down user groups into different steps of the funnel and time ranges, creating storytelling experiences of videos to tie in with users’ intention.
By dividing the videos into these distinct categories, e-FOOD could then serve them as ads at relevant user stages. For example, a TV commercial would be served to new users, while a “How it works” video could be served to people who visited the brand’s website without having completed an order. Meanwhile, the brand’s vlogs were served to existing users who were already familiar with the brand.
These measures helped e-FOOD to become the second largest branded channel in Greece with more than 39,000 subscribers. By targeting the right audience and providing relevant content, the brand’s videos have an average completion rate of 60%, while the ads produce a 15% view rate. A Brand Lift survey helped measure results on two occasions. In both cases, the studies showed an uplift in branded queries. While one campaign demonstrated a 29% uplift, another produced an uplift of 550%.
To further assess performance, e-FOOD uses a variety of intelligent techniques. First, they use exit polls, then assign a net promoter score (NPS) by asking each user how likely he or she would be to recommend the brand. These measures show that YouTube is one of the best channels from a performance standpoint, the impact of which and can can be directly compared to TV performance – although budget for TV advertising is higher. By combining soft metrics with performance metrics, the results show YouTube is one of the leading channels across the overall marketing mix and that the platform provides one of the brand’s most valuable audiences.
