Competition among the better-for-you beverage market is fierce and spans juices, teas, coffee alternatives, diet sodas, and a variety of waters. As evidenced by global sports drink brand Gatorade, which lost nearly 10% market share from 2015 to 2020, no brand is immune to losing ground.
So, how does a leading sparkling beverage brand retain its #1 position in the better-for-you category?
This zero sugar, zero carb beverage brand sought to drive efficient awareness and maximize reach within specific audience segments to improve household penetration.
The journey begins
In order to remain on top, this brand used illumin® to compile digital advertising creatives that would tell a story across each stage of the consumer journey: awareness, engagement, and conversion. Using the journey canvas, all campaign creatives were sequentially aligned to reach consumers through Connected TV (CTV), Online Video (OLV), and display ads.
The illumin team helped to determine the most effective creatives for each stage of the journey in order to move prospects through the funnel. Targeting was set at both the full journey level, and individual creative level to deliver the right message at the right time.
Three-pronged approach
Social Data
Our proprietary Blended Interest Graph helped us develop custom audiences based on publicly available data. Using the data found among social media users, we’re able to build targetable personas from commonalities. These insights are used both pre-campaign for targeting as well as post-campaign for new and potentially unexpected audience learnings.
Using our social technology, we discovered unique audience personas that indicate the interests of users who reacted favorably towards seeing ads from this better-for-you beverage brand. The highest performing audiences with the highest delivery were considered “ecommerce shoppers”, “fitness enthusiasts”, “health help”, and “TV streamers”.
Search Performance
Leveraging artificial intelligence, we’re able to predict future actions and build “propensity-to-convert” audience profiles in real-time. Our Site Search System gathers data including the top indexing keywords that indicate the most intent and allows retargeted ads.
This better-for-you beverage brand’s audience searched keywords related to Diet & Weight Loss, Health & Fitness, Family, Entertainment and Food & Drink, which indexed high for campaign engagement.
Content Categories
As the campaign ramped up, we continued to generate learnings on the target audience and were able to gain more engagement and viewership for the better-for-you beverage brand. illumin was able to identify low-viewability sources across the campaign inventory and remove them to improve performance. During the course of the campaign, illumin revealed:
- Males comprised the largest share of known user clicks. The 35 – 49 age range was top performing in terms of CTR for both Male and Female groups.
- CTR was highest on Phone and Tablet devices. With larger screen real estate, it is not surprising that the largest share of video completions occurred on Desktop computers.
- Users browsing content relating to Home, Health, and Cooking were most engaged with the campaign.
Measurable outcomes
The campaign was a success, focusing on driving engagement and overall awareness in the better-for-you beverage category. illumin executed a campaign targeting users through social interest, demographics, and search data to identify diet beverage drinkers and increase website traffic via CTV, OLV, and display ads.
- We developed custom personas based on social, search, and interest-based insights to determine the most engaged audiences with a high propensity-to-convert, leading to 8.3 million video completions.
- The campaign primarily leveraged prospecting and act-alike modeling based on users who visited the brand’s website. A combination of manual optimization and machine learning helped identify the most relevant prospects, resulting in an 84% video completion rate (VCR)!
- A target viewability of at least 60% was set to ensure videos were immediately viewable when browsing site content. However, illumin beat that benchmark, resulting in 75% of ads being seen instantly.
See for yourself!
With illumin, anyone can advertise online. We highly recommend reaching out to us to learn more about your audience and how to light up your digital ads. Click here to schedule a demo today!
