Social Media Marketing: Multi-tiered giveaway increases site visits 288% for Star Fine Foods

SUMMARY: The multi-tiered "How Do You O-live" giveaway gave Star Fine Foods’ olive-loving customers three different ways to enter: photo submission, recipe vote or quiz. A combination of website, social media and in-store efforts educated and engaged customers to keep momentum up after the peak holiday season.

Using this giveaway, the brand was able to increase website visits by 288% compared to the previous year. Learn how this effort received more than 21,000 entries and produced an increase in traffic to olive recipes on the website.

by Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content

THE CUSTOMER

The Star Fine Foods brand, part of Borges USA, encompasses a majority of Mediterranean food products. The brand’s three main categories are olive oils, vinegars and olives, with olive oil and vinegar being its largest categories.

"Star also offers other specialty items, like sundried tomatoes, cherries; these make up a smaller part of our portfolio," Crystal Moritz, Product Marketing Manager, Star Fine Foods, said.

The Star Fine Foods brand is sold nationwide and was started in San Francisco in 1898. The strongest customer base is in the Western part of the United States, Moritz said, and most of the bigger campaigns are focused in those areas.

"I would say our customer base is pretty far reaching because of the many different types of products we offer, but generally speaking, our demographic skews toward women, middle to upper income," she said.

CHALLENGE

Moritz and her team had launched a three-month "Passport to the Mediterranean" campaign two years prior, which included weekly prizes of olive oil and a trip as the final prize. That campaign had a "Like" gate on Facebook, where contestants had to "Like" the Star Fine Foods Facebook page to enter.

"We had a lot of success as far as entries … it really increased our fan base," she said. After the success of that campaign, the team was looking for a way to engage those new fans.

However, the cost was "much higher … than what we did for this olive campaign," Moritz said. "When we were planning [this campaign], we knew what our budget was and we weren't going to be able to justify spending as much as we had on that other campaign," she said.

Her team wanted to do a campaign that would have a lower cost but would also serve as a way of educating consumers. Around the holidays, sales spike and then usually taper off in late January and February. Moritz said they wanted to lengthen that period.

The team also wanted to educate their customers on other ways to use olives, outside of the way they always had.

Prior to this educational campaign, the team had run a similar one to promote a new product — butter flavored olive oil.

"We wanted to help people understand how they could use this olive oil instead of butter — a healthier alternative, and we wanted to give them ways to use it," she said. "So we partnered with bloggers and we did recipe examples they could go check out to give them inspiration prior to them submitting their own recipe."

However, there were issues the team wanted to avoid with this new campaign. For the butter olive oil promotion, the main way people entered the contest was by creating a recipe using butter olive oil, taking a picture of it and uploading it. The other way to enter was through voting for those entries.

"But what we had found doing that campaign was that we didn't get a lot of people submitting recipes because the barrier to entry was high. We obviously got a lot more people voting," she said. "We should have had a longer time for people to vote because that was the easiest thing for people to do."

CAMPAIGN

When developing the plan for the olive campaign, the original idea was to launch an image-focused campaign, which featured people submitting pictures of themselves using olives. This idea is where the title "How Do You O-Live?" came from.

"But, having learned from the butter olive oil [campaign], the more work you make people do, the less likely they are to enter. We decided that just [requiring people to submit olive pictures] probably wasn't going to get the type of engagement we wanted," Moritz said.

Keeping the original campaign name, the team decided to create three different tiers for entering, some easier than others. This way, customers could enter the way that was best for them.

"You could take a quiz based off the information we have about olives for an entry. We have bloggers that created recipes, and you could just pick your favorites and get an entry, or you could submit a picture for an entry," she said.