Applegate Improves Marketing Through Quality Engagement

From the very beginning, Applegate (www.applegate.com) has always been about relationships. It started with founder Stephen McDonnell, who had developed a conflicted relationship with meat. He first posed the question, ‘What if you weren’t afraid to read the ingredients on a hot dog package?’ Fast-forward to today, and the company’s growth is built on relationships with consumers – people who have believed in Applegate for nearly 30 years and continue to feel good about serving Applegate products to their families.

“As a brand we’ve focused on connecting to our consumer via our social and digital media channels as well as TV and radio. We’re interested in quality engagement, which for us means being informative, transparent and compelling,” explains Krista Sharlin, digital media manager for Applegate, who oversees all things related to Applegate.com as well as other digital properties and its e-mail marketing strategy.  
 
In summer 2013, CGT first covered Applegate for the relationships it was building with its digital consumers. Applegate’s digital audience was attracted to the brand’s personality in addition to its great products.

Here, we particularly take a look at its ‘What’s In Your Hot Dog’ campaign, which Applegate has been running for five years now. Using RevTrax (www.revtrax.com) technology to gather actionable data to improve the campaign year over year, Applegate has been able to optimize both on learnings from tying in-store redemptions back to specific media tactics, as well as optimize the user flow based on learnings from previous years.
This year, Applegate has also introduced a new mobile flow to minimize the steps that a consumer needs to take in order to make the most of mobile traffic.

Sharlin explains, “We have several goals associated with What’s In Your Hot Dog. The first, is to drive awareness of the Applegate brand in new and existing markets, and educate our consumers on the benefits of our products. We have found this campaign to be very effective in differentiating Applegate from other brands based on our product offerings and standards.”  

The company also aims to drive trial of the featured products (Natural and Organic Hot Dogs), and encourage consumers to leave a review after they have tried the products.

Sharlin adds, “Honest, unbiased product reviews tell an authentic story of other users’ experiences. Collecting the e-mail addresses of new users for ongoing engagement is also a part of this goal.”  

Lastly, given the size of the media buy these campaigns require, Applegate wanted to measure the effectiveness of its different media efforts in driving in-store sales as a way to accurately measure online-to-offline media performance.

Since running the campaign now for multiple years, Applegate has been able to look at how different media tactics drove in-store sales year over year. The data and strategy recommendations from RevTrax has helped Applegate to uncover insights on everything from content placement to mobile versus desktop, and how to allocate paid media dollars.

“RevTrax’s ability to tie engagement to a specific user allows us to re-market to these consumers and ask them for feedback on the products we know with 100 percent certainty they purchased,” says Sharlin.

The solution provider has also been Applegate’s coupon provider for the last four years. So, the platform has a unique capability that allows tracking on engagement (coupon prints and redemptions) in two main ways: The first is the ability to measure engagement by the sources of traffic (media placements), and the second is being able to tie the engagement back to an actual individual consumer.

The consumer goods industry has always had trouble accurately measuring the effectiveness of online tactics on in-store sales. 

Sharlin says, “Sales lift studies are helpful and provide general trends from which brands can extrapolate online media effectiveness, but there is something unique about the RevTrax platform: The fact that they can provide a true 1:1 measurement between a specific placement and a specific sale.”

For example, the ability to know that a 728 x 90 leaderboard ad on publisher X drove Y% of all coupon redemptions allows Applegate to build an all-encompassing ROI model for media and see the effectiveness of each media placement on in-store sales.

Sharlin reveals that the company is looking at success for this campaign from two different viewpoints. The first is to drive traffic to Applegate’s landing page in order to aid brand and product awareness.

“We want consumers to spend more time on the page engaging with the different pieces of content we generated for this specific program,” she says.

The second is to make sure that Applegate is driving trial and getting enough consumers to convert in store to drive positive ROI.

When it comes to the future of the campaign, Applegate is going to continue to use the technology for re-engaging with consumers who have purchased its products in store, as well as moving away from user-level data to focus on media efforts.

Because of the solution’s ability to track engagement by different media tactics, Applegate has seen the most success across social media channels, and has seen high engagement from e-mail campaigns. Since there are established benchmarks across verticals, Applegate can see how it is performing against industry averages as well as Applegate’s own historical performance.  

“Offering discounts is a standard business practice that is often viewed as tactical point solution and not a strategic effort. My advice would be to use discounts as a vehicle to gain strategic insights about what is working and what is not. The discount shouldn’t be given for the sake of giving a discount; but rather as an opportunity to gather insights, and create an ongoing relationship with new, and loyal repeat buyers,” concludes Sharlin.