Challenge
To activate their influencer marketing program strategically and efficiently, Kraft Heinz knew they needed to turn to experts in the space to help guide their approach, source the right partners, and effectively collaborate and track their work all in one place. In order to fully assess and understand the program’s effectiveness, Kraft Heinz and Popular Pays needed a clear understanding of its far-reaching impact on consumer’s perceptions and their intent going forward. Traditional metrics could not accurately demonstrate the program’s effect on the brand or enable Kraft Heinz and Popular Pays to understand if the messaging, both direct and indirect, truly resonated with consumers.
Solution
To solve the influencer challenge, Kraft Heinz tapped Popular Pays to help advise on their influencer strategy and support their multi-faceted marketing program with software.To fill the insight gap, Popular Pays commissioned solution partner, Group RFZ, to measure how the program impacted Kraft Heinz’s specific KPIs, helping them prove performance in a more relevant way.
The Pop Pays <> Group RFZ Partnership To ensure a full end-to-end evaluation of an influencer program’s performance, Popular Pays and Group RFZ work together to close the performance loop for customers. Popular Pays supports the campaign creation and activation while Group RFZ provides expert insight and actionable data to customers.
Popular Pays Results
KraftHeinz used The Popular Pays platform to activate, collaborate, and track two influencer campaigns from start to finish: “Realistically Gourmet” targeted toward millennials, and “Taming Life’s Chaos,” targeted toward millennial families.
Feature efficiency and thoroughness
Kraft Heinz relied on the Popular Pays brief builder to ensure they covered all of their bases when developing their creative direction. The thoroughness of this process brought them a select pool of applicants who were most qualified to deliver on their ask
“Ease of brief creation and the brief template make campaigns turnkey and simple to activate”
First-party data to ensure brand safety and campaign effectiveness
Multiple influencers were carefully chosen over the course of several months. Using Pop Pays first-party data Kraft Heinz was able to select partners based off of their audience demographics while also ensuring their selections had authentic and loyal followings.
“It was helpful to understand who certain partners reach to ensure our campaigns are most effective and understand who is most genuinely engaging their audience vs. buying followers.”
5.7%
Engagement Rate
Kraft Heinz achieved a 5.7% engagement rate across their influencer program, exceeding their brand channel’s average engagement rate by 103%
>8mm
Impressions
Kraft Heinz garnered over 8 million impressions by working with 12 influencers, generating mass awareness for My Food and Family.
Group RFZ Results
Group RFZ provided KraftHeinz with valuable insights that proved the impact of their influencer efforts to drive awareness and positive perceptions of My Food and Family.
What We Found
The results of Group RFZ’s unique brand lift study revealed that the influencer program had a profound impact. The lift generated by the initiative around awareness, favorability and specific attributes made it clear that the goals of the program were achieved, and that the investment paid dividends for Kraft Heinz.
One of the main goals of the program was to generate awareness of the site. To that end, the exposed group showed statistically significant lift compared to the control group in both aided awareness (11-point lift) and unaided awareness (5-point lift.) While the lift in both awareness categories was impressive, the fact that 8% of exposed respondents mentioned My Food and Family when asked broadly about food and recipe websites was extremely significant.
Impact on Perceptions and Brand Attributes
With a rise in awareness cemented, Group RFZ explored six different site attributes. Of them, “Provides helpful kitchen tips to make mealtime enjoyable” achieved the strongest lift with a statistically significant 19-point increase in net rating. Relevance to young families also performed well, generating a 13-point lift. In all, the rise in these attributes proved that the influencers were successful in forming positive perceptions of the site. Due to the program, over 65% of the exposed group agreed that the site was helpful, aided in making mealtime more enjoyable, and was relevant to them.
Impact on Parents
Parents were a particularly important group in the scope of the program. As a result of the influencer marketing efforts, unaided awareness among parents saw a three- fold increase.
The rise in awareness translated to impressive results further down the funnel as well. Likelihood to visit My Food and Family, a key intent metric, was 16 points higher in the exposed group than it was in the control group, with half of the exposed group saying they were likely to visit My Food and Family in the future.
Conclusion
The power of combining collaboration platform, Popular Pays, and measurement provider, Group RFZ, allowed Kraft Heinz to effectively execute their influencer program while clearly understanding its impact to their brand.
With this data, Kraft Heinz will be able to smartly optimize future efforts and prove the efficacy of influencer marketing as a tactic moving forward.
