Foothill Transit "Fast Foodies" Social Video Series
Target Audience: Primary: look-alike audience clusters (data sources: page data and website pixel data) Secondary: Current riders and existing FHT fans and followers
Strategy Objective:Multi-tiered objective: 1. attracting new audiences 2. identifying FHT's target audiences across platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) 3. growing/building engaged audience communities The "Fast Foodies" social media campaign was crafted as a "test and learn" opportunity. The data-driven campaign emphasized food-centric content as a "fun, soft intro" to the FHT brand. The campaign was rolled out in two phases: awareness and engagement. Both native and paid creative video assets were leveraged as data collection "devices" across platforms. With long-term strategy development and insight identification in mind, specific creative variables were isolated (visuals, CTA's, ad formats and placement) to reveal what drives the best results across targeted audience segments.
Situation Challenge: Breaking through and standing out in the social/digital "clutter" to attract new fans/followers and engage them as a brand is increasingly challenging, and as a transit system said challenge is often tenfold. Data analysis highlighted periodic stagnation with FHT fan/follower base engagement and growth across active platforms, despite year over year agency growth, introduction of new products and services; among others. Data inspired the development of a social campaign that would generate data to answer necessary questions for future strategies to fill in existing gaps. To begin consistently attracting new social fans/followers, an understanding of who FHT should target, how to best reach them (which platforms, types of content) and how to effectively engage them had to be gained.
Results Impact: Local brand equity leveraged from the featured local restaurants as well as the "talk-value" of the foodie culture significantly drove campaign success by extending the reach and generating significant awareness beyond the existing FHT audiences. Emphasis on video content within the integrated content mix proved to be a key driver in the overall success of the campaign across all platforms: ? increased of brand total reach from 18.2K to 44.9K across Facebook and Instagram ? garnered a cumulative total of approximately 650 new fans/followers ? engaged mostly women between the ages of 25-34 across all platforms ? garnered 1.1M impressions (organic and promoted) on Twitter ? garnered 282.1K 3-second video views across Facebook and Instagram.
Why Submit: This campaign serves as an example of how to cost-effectively leverage data for experimentation and learning purposes to achieve multiple objectives geared towards long-term performance and growth. Social listening data provided key insights regarding the types of content people wanted to see and engage with on social. With that in mind, the "Fast Foodies" episodic content series was created to penetrate the "white space" to attract new audiences to the Foothill Transit brand. Data generated as a result of the tests conducted during the campaign will be leveraged heavily for the development of future FY marketing plans and all other relevant strategic development.