Evolve Pet Food is a family owned and operated line of affordable, grain-free pet food and treats sold across the US. In a world full of choices between quality and price efficiency, Evolve is determined to prove that you don’t have to compromise to feed your pet high quality food.
As Evolve grows in national recognition, Parachute Media, the digital agency representing them, has led multiple viral engagement campaigns. The most successful engagement campaign to date was the “Bark Madness,” campaign implemented in spring of 2018, which resulted in over 3 million impressions, 148,000 post reactions, 55,000 comments, and 5,700 shares.
The Problem:
While Evolve has high brand affinity and a loyal customer base, the pet food brand’s primary goal for 2018 is to build brand awareness across the US. Compared to its competitors, Evolve has a lean digital marketing budget and Parachute Media must develop national brand awareness campaigns in a highly competitive market.
The Solution:
Parachute Media created a grassroots campaign targeting specific interest sets of passionate communities, and had them do the viral work for us. We launched the campaign during March Madness to play into the timeliness of bracket-oriented content.
The Creative:
We created a campaign focused on specific dog breeds and the communities involved with them. By getting specific dog communities involved, passionate owners would share posts, increasing our viral reach. Since the NCAA Tournament is in March, we created “Bark Madness,” a tournament of our own where dog owners were encouraged to vote for their favorite breeds. We created blog posts mimicking a sportswriter’s tone, imitating the style of ESPN “Bracketology” blogs with predictions, and specific facts about the dog breeds competing in our tournament. Our bracket had seeds #1-#16 with a new matchup every other day. Our theory was that by targeting owners of specific breeds in Facebook Ads Manager, we could get them to vote, and share our contest into owner-pages and groups for specific breeds.
The Results:
Our “Bark Madness” campaign was highly successful. From this campaign, we garnered over 3,000,000 impressions in 42 days, 82% of which were organic/viral impressions. Our page audience size grew by 40% during the time of the campaign, and we received over 7,000 clicks to our website during the campaign, showing that people were engaged with our brand and were opting in to stay in touch with our content. All of this was done with a budget of less than $2,500.
Our campaign was featured on pages with millions of followers and shared to groups with thousands of members. People were passionate about the campaign, to the point of finding the phone number of Evolve Pet Food’s CMO and asking him about how votes were calculated!
BARK MADNESS RESULTS:
