Stein IAS: Ingredion ‘You Are How You Eat’ campaign beating all targets for digital metrics

Ingredion is a provider of product formulation insights and ingredients to the food industry.

Their unique way of controlling sensory factors in food, gives their product-development service an edge, helping producers create foods which consumers are more likely to buy again and again.

The 2017 ‘You Are How You Eat’ campaign shifted the industry’s focus to the consumer and how they behave, not just in the supermarket, but when they are actually eating.

Inspired by seminal work by The Understanding & Insight Group, the Ingredion team conducted their own research into the preferred eating styles of consumers and how these relate to product preferences. Armed with powerful insights, the team planned the ‘You Are How You Eat’ campaign.

This was followed by a carefully designed sequence of content which validated the concept and introduced messaging around Ingredion’s offering before overtly selling their solution.

The campaign integrated web, PR, display ads, PPC, social and email. All this was orchestrated by Eloqua marketing automation, in concert with Adobe Experience Manager and the Salesforce.com CRM system, to nurture prospects and deliver hot leads to the sales team.

Campaign objective

The campaign objectives included generating sales revenue, as well as a number of individual digital metrics.

The strategy

Success was enabled by starting with a ‘pre-awareness’ initiative promoting the very idea of multi-sensory food enjoyment through the educational and entertaining ‘Ultimate Crisp Experience’ video. This was promoted via a targeted multi-channel campaign using web, PR, display ads, PPC, social and an outbound email campaign targeted Ingredion’s high quality database.

Having introduced a completely new way of thinking about the eating experience, the campaign laid out a compelling narrative with a sequence of high quality content. Following the ‘Ultimate Crisp Video’ the awareness course was the ‘Eating Styles Flickbook’ accompanied by the ‘Talking Senses Video Series’, which introduced the four main mouth-behaviour types.

These were followed by the meatier report, ‘Eating Styles: The Complete Guide to our Unexpressed Love of Food’ with its summarising ‘Sensory Infographic’ as the side dish. This ‘interest-stage’ content is more detailed and begins to subtly introduce messaging around Ingredion’s product formulation offering.

The campaign

Automation

The whole campaign was orchestrated using the full power of the Eloqua marketing automation platform. This awesome piece of software is part of Ingredion’s cutting edge tech-stack which also integrates Adobe Experience Manager to monitor web content interactions and the Salesforce.com CRM system.

AEM recognises people on the Ingredion main website and captures their data in exchange for content. The Eloqua system builds a profile of individual users based on data from AEM and other sources. This profile includes job role, market segment and a ‘lead score’ which are used to determine which content is most likely to move that particular prospect along their buyer journey, and whether to target them with outbound campaigns

Eloqua automates multi-stage integrated email and display ad campaigns, all the while listening to AEM to know exactly which prospects are interacting with the website, as well as campaign hubs and content. Eloqua and the Salesforce CRM system are engaged in a constant two-way conversation to keep their respective databases in sync.

All contact and lead information updated in Salesforce in automatically passed across to Eloqua. Any new contact that submits an Eloqua form is automatically created as a new lead in Salesforce. Any contact that reaches a high enough lead score in Eloqua to become a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), gets created or updated in Salesforce and auto-assignment and notification rules are set up in Salesforce to ensure the lead is passed across to the relevant salesperson and they are notified to follow up.

Closed Loop Reporting has been set up to allow revenue to be attributed to particular campaign activity being executed in Eloqua. This allows unequivocal calculation of campaign ROI.

The end Game

The learn stage of the You Are How You Eat campaign, promoted the ‘4 Eating Styles: Yoghurt Case Study’ webinar. This is where Eloqua comes into its own, efficiently pulling in registrations from the most likely prospects with retargeting and automated sequences of emails. The webinar is designed to convert interested prospects with an explanation of the eating styles theory as it applies to product formulation, and the story of a real life project.

The hottest leads, typically people in product marketing and technical development roles, who had consumed multiple pieces of content including the webinar, were automatically fed by Eloqua into the Salesforce.com CRM system to be followed up by sales.

The Results

The 2017 Ingredion ‘You Are How You Eat’ campaign generated unprecedented results, comfortably beating all targets for digital metrics, delivering spectacular ROI in the form of new accounts won and measured sales revenue.

This campaign demonstrates a highly-efficient synergy between engaging content, an automated digital marketing platform and fresh insights into the needs of the target audience’s target audience. The use of these elements individually is noteworthy but getting them to work together is the result of long-term strategy and loads of hard work and dedication.