Campaign Summary

Using a robust data set to create more than 3,000 targeted ad variations, M&M Food Market created a highly personalized, geotargeted campaign to help break through the holiday season noise and drive business results during a critical timeframe.

Strategy

Objective

The holiday season is a critical time of year for M&M Food Market, as a substantial amount of the company's annual sales are concentrated in this timeframe. The company experienced tremendous growth during COVID-19, making the 2022 holiday period challenging from a year-over-year growth perspective.

M&M wanted to continue the company's growth trajectory, so it was looking for a new and innovative digital campaign aimed at driving in-store and online sales. The brand sought an approach that would achieve the following:

• Increase awareness about M&M products with new potential customers
• Re-engage past customers to encourage them to consider M&M during the holidays
• Convert awareness and interest into online or in-store sales
• Ensure the approach is measurable to assess the business impact

Context

The 2022 holiday season was looking to be a particularly difficult one, as M&M's sales were trending below last year due to the strong demand during COVID-19. The brand knew it would need to be very creative to deliver strong results.

Target Audience

M&M was looking to re-engage past customers and attract new customers during a critical time of year for the business. The brand had an extensive customer database, which could be used to develop detailed custom and lookalike audiences to both retarget past customers and find new people who matched the characteristics of the existing customers — including on factors like age and buying habits. The brand would leverage its data to geo-segment ads around each of M&M's 300-plus locations, allowing for maximum impact and helping to drive in-store foot-traffic.

Additionally, the brand implemented an integration with its point of sale (POS) system that would automatically match in-store and online sales data with advertising efforts, allowing for easier attribution. With a robust level of data, the brand was able to continually optimize its ad targeting to maximize sales.

Creative and Media Strategy

M&M developed a multi-platform digital campaign designed to reach holiday grocery shoppers and encourage purchases. The campaign included programmatic display and YouTube ads designed to maximize reach, raise awareness, and create interest in M&M's products. This interest was then converted into online and in-store purchases through targeted Facebook, Instagram, and search advertising.

To help breakthrough the noise of a busy holiday season, the brand implemented high-impact creative and innovative new ad units.

Execution/Use of Media

The campaign was entirely digital in nature, including Google display ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Search. This was done to maximize measurability and enable cross-platform integrations, audience building, and retargeting.

M&M also implemented several new ad units and creative that it had not previously employed:

• To encourage new customers to try M&M's delicious food, the brand created social media ads highlighting real customer reviews to provide social proof as to the quality and tastiness of M&M's products.
• To showcase the products and drive sales, M&M deployed Meta's new digital flyer ad unit across Facebook and Instagram, which featured a collection of M&M products on sale during the respective timeframe with a click-through to the company's website to make a purchase.

Although the creative plan was very strong, M&M knew it would need another "edge" to create impact during the holidays. As such, the brand decided the best way to do this was to incorporate local information such as store name, neighborhood, and pricing into the ads to increase customer relevance and recall.

M&M implemented this "local" approach in two ways:

• The brand developed a Facebook and Instagram conversion campaign specifically for its local franchisees. Through this approach, each of M&M's franchisees could quickly and easily activate a pre-built campaign for their location that was designed to work in tandem with the company-wide campaign. The ads were highly local in nature, including local store information and messaging to increase relevance to local customers and inform them that there was an M&M Food Market nearby.
• Nationally funded Meta ads were targeted around M&M stores with a custom radius for each location based on population density and catchment area. The brand incorporated localized information and cross-platform retargeting to ensure the interest created by the awareness campaign was converted into store foot-traffic and/or online purchases.

In total, M&M deployed more than 3,000 ad variations across 300-plus locations in December of 2022.

Business Impact

The campaign was a huge success, well surpassing all expectations. During December of 2022, M&M invested $195,000, which created 53 million impressions and 358,000 clicks at an impressive CPM of only $3.68 and cost-per-click of $0.54.

The campaign generated $1.9 million in direct-attribution sales, which is an incredible ten times return on investment. This does not include any ancillary sales generated through the increased exposure, which is estimated to have increase the ROI to about 20:1.

M&M's Meta rep informed the brand that its campaign had a huge impact on the market, leading all Canadian grocers across several metrics, including conversion percentage, consumer consideration, and spend effectiveness. The campaign was very well received by consumers, generating many clicks and sales, plus positive comments, likes, and shares on the ads themselves.