Digitally-led Content Marketing | Promotion | Awareness and Edutainment
Wimpy and Engen have been South African road trip staples since the 80s. After the turbulent, lockdown-ridden year we had in 2020, this past December holiday was more important than ever – both for the brand and for the consumer. Local travel was the only option left for lockdown-fatigued South Africans.
Challenge
Wimpy had several messages that needed to be communicated over this period: Their kids’ promotion, the main burger promotion, the Wimpy/Engen partnership, as well as drive consumers to the restaurant. All these factors made a single-minded message difficult to communicate. We also had our budgets cut drastically, so there was no chance of ATL support. Furthermore, we knew that consumers were still nervous to go back into restaurants, so we needed a way to communicate the brand and product without showing it in a restaurant.
Solution
By looking at the road trip occasion, as well as our target market (families with small children), the team realised that when you’re travelling as a family, the kids actually determine the schedule. They determine where you go, how far you drive, where you stop, and how often you stop. Through this line of thinking, we decided to centre our campaign around the kids’ promotional offering (World of Animals AR), speaking to parents and their experiences on a road trip. To achieve success we opted for a digitally-led campaign. We filmed one digital video piece, which was structured in a way that would allow us to cut it up and reuse what we needed when speaking to a variety of occasions (takeaway, road trip, and promotion). We also needed to bring in some of that iconic Wimpy humour when talking to parents. To achieve this we decided to feature a trending nature icon, Sir David Attenborough… or at least someone who could be his double. With this one central piece of creative, we built an entire integrated, seamless user journey around the consumer to ensure that all content added value to their journey and always kept them in the Wimpy ecosystem, both physically and digitally.
To further position Wimpy as a brand that helps facilitate family road trips, we created an interactive map to help consumers plan their road trip. This also highlighted all the Wimpy Engen sites along their route, and pointed out interesting pit stops throughout the country. These stops were always family friendly, reinforcing our promise to consumers that we’ll help them get the most out of their road trip. All of our content was housed on a dedicated landing page on our website, which became the end-goal of our user journey. This map page turned out to be so successful that it’s now an evergreen piece of content that we constantly update with interesting road trip content.
ON ROAD-TRIPS, KIDS ARE IN CHARGE
We also used our kids’ promotional messaging to further prompt consumers to stop at multiple Wimpys in order to collect all the different World of Animals AR cards, which helped to keep the kids entertained throughout the drive. This messaging was reinforced through an engagement-focused social media content plan, which prompted consumers to submit UGC to us regularly from the supporting Wimpy Engen forecourt activations.
This campaign was further supported by 83 unique restaurant location webpages, creating an easy way to get directions to any one of our restaurants from their smartphone. To further drive SEO and occasions in the mind of the consumer, we also published several road-trip focused PR articles linking back to our website. This interactive content, social media plan, digital PR, and interactive website content led to a consistent content stream that kept our consumers engaged and exceeded all client KPIs and objectives for the period.
COLLECT
THEM ALL
Results
- Our Engen page started ranking in position 2 for the search term Engen, right underneath the official Engen website.
- For more specific locations, the optimised Engen-specific restaurant location pages for Wimpys at those sites appeared just below the Engen website.
- The Engen partnership page got 26 398 visits, which accounted for 12.29% of all web traffic over the 6-week period.
- Our 83 Engen Wimpy Restaurant location pages got close to 6 000 views with almost 300 people clicking on our CTA button to get directions in 6 weeks.
- We also started ranking organically for the term ‘Animal AR’, and quickly found ourselves in position 4 on the 1st page of Google Search results.
- For the term ‘World of Animals’, our video took the top spot in the organic Google video card results on the 1st page.
- ORGANIC (UNPAID) SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS (OVER 6 WEEKS):
1.5 mil Facebook reach | 5 000 Facebook engagements | 3% Facebook engagement rate (per impression - benchmark of 0.1%) | 3.5% Twitter engagement rate (per impression) - PAID MEDIA RESULTS (OVER 4 WEEKS):
9 576 604 Reach | 53 392 010 Impressions | 2 105 406 Engagements | R9.76 CPM (cost per 1 000 impressions - benchmark of R31.89) | R0.25 Cost per engagement
