Quorn: Identifying the content gap in vegetarian Christmas

Background

Quorn offers a meat-free source of protein for anyone trying to live a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. We proactively seek new SEO opportunities for our clients. Our keyword research identified a seasonal spike in vegetarian Christmas recipe searches. This demand wasn’t being met, as Quorn had virtually no festive recipe content.

We saw an opportunity to ‘own’ vegetarian Christmas that would chime perfectly with the brand, and we used influencer outreach to create content and build awareness quickly and cost-effectively.

Our brief encouraged bloggers to be creative and create traditional or adventurous Quorn festive recipes. We wanted a particular aesthetic to fit the brand, so we provided a mood board and guidelines to set the visual tone.

We were inundated with 80 submissions, from which we selected the best eight recipes for Instagram. Several bloggers amplified their social efforts with blog pieces that generated a lot of positive engagement and brand sentiment.

Finding the gap

Quorn is the most widely available meat alternative in the world. It’s sold in 15 countries and is the market leader in most, including the UK and Ireland. Quorn offers a meat-free source of protein for anyone trying to eat healthier, be more sustainable and reduce meat waste.

We always proactively seek new SEO opportunities for our clients. While planning ahead for Quorn, our keyword research identified a persistent and growing seasonal spike in vegetarian Christmas searches in the festive period, for search terms like 'vegetarian Christmas dinner' and 'vegetarian Christmas'. With the data showing a precise, predicted spike in late November to early December, timing was going to be a crucial success factor.

Objectives

Our brief from Quorn was simple. They were excited by the opportunity we’d identified to meet unfulfilled audience demand for vegetarian Christmas recipe content, but they didn’t have any additional budget to create content in-house.

They asked us to come up with innovative ways to generate content to fill this gap and to make a big seasonal visibility impact.

Strategy for success

We decided the best opportunity to create the content we were looking for, with a challenging timescale, was through influencer outreach. Our goal was to create unique, high quality user generated content that would help build the link in audience perception between Quorn and Christmas.

Our lead time was short, as content had to be ready for the seasonal spike in search demand to grab the opportunity. Quorn confirmed the brief in first week of November and we aimed for all content to be live by the end of November.

Our historic data identified that people start searching for ideas in November and searches hit a peak in December. We briefed the campaign in early November, so we could roll out content in a staggered approach in late November and the first week of December, to stay at the forefront of our audience’s minds in this orientating stage.

We aimed to create an outreach campaign that would:

• Fill a gap in quality content for vegetarian Christmas recipes
• Be repurposed by Quorn for extensive use on their website and social media channels
• Raise brand awareness of Quorn as the healthier vegetarian Christmas dinner option

Influencer brief

We created a brief called ‘Get Festive with Quorn this Christmas’. We wanted influencers to be creative and interpret the brief their own way, to create fresh, unique Christmas recipe content with Quorn that could either be traditional, or seasonal with a non-traditional twist.

Influencers were asked to create a Christmas recipe that the Quorn website didn’t already have, and capture it with a festive and artful aesthetic to fit the brand. We provided a mood board to set the right visual tone and gave them guidelines, which included:

• How to incorporate Quorn in the recipe
• How to take the best picture, with the mood board as a guide
• #Quorn and #QuornChristmas hashtags and linking URLs.

Our brief produced a huge response of over 80 recipe submissions, from which we selected the best eight recipes and content for Instagram. Several bloggers also amplified their social efforts with supporting blog pieces that generated a lot of positive engagement and brand sentiment.

All recipes were checked by Quorn’s in-house nutritionists/food economists to make sure they met the health-conscious values of the brand.

Instagram was our main target channel as it’s the most efficient with the lowest threshold for influencers to participate, and because images are the most shareable content on social media.

We successfully advised Quorn to create a new ‘vegetarian Christmas’ category landing page for the festive recipes ahead of the campaign going live, to help boost search rankings, visibility, authority and traffic.

Results

Our eight influencers worked with us to collaboratively produce eight pieces (one each) and we repurposed the top four innovative recipes for Facebook and the Quorn website, which can be found on the new category page: www.quorn.co.uk/recipes/vegetarian-christmas.

We saw an 18% increase in organic visits to the category on Quorn’s website (in Nov-Dec 2017 vs. Nov-Dec 2016), very likely due to the content and awareness created by our influencers.

Audience reached

• Total engagement: 8,768
• Social reach: 558,923
• Likes: 8,391
• Comments: 377

Keyword ranking improvements

Quorn had no visibility at all for Christmas-related vegetarian terms before the campaign.

The first content piece went live in mid-November, and within a few weeks Quorn rose from zero visibility for 'vegetarian Christmas' to rank on the third and then second page of Google.

The highest position reached was #19 in the week of 20 December, a peak pre-Christmas period when consumers were searching for vegetarian Christmas ideas.

Increased search volumes

Our campaign also helped drive up searches for vegetarian Christmas terms, which spiked markedly in November-December 2017. The term ‘Vegetarian Christmas dinner' saw a 66% year-on-year increase (2017 vs. 2016) in relative search demand, while 'vegetarian Christmas dinner ideas' increased by 25%. 49,500 people searched for 'vegetarian Christmas dinner' in December 2017 alone and 12,100 for 'vegetarian Christmas'.

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