Our clients, Mother Raw, were on a mission to prove that salads are anything but boring. When the client approached us with the challenge of shifting the narrative around salads, we saw #NationalSaladMonth in May as a perfect opportunity for the brand to dominate the conversation around salad.
With a shoestring budget and tight timelines, we developed a unique, creative, first-of-its-kind influencer campaign that not only celebrates salad and plant-based cuisine but also celebrates diversity and hometown pride.
The central idea behind #CitySaladShowdown was showcasing the distinct flavors and cuisines that represent a city and how those can be incorporated into a salad - whether through bringing in various multicultural elements, flavors, and textures, or acknowledging the history or geography of a city through the salad’s ingredients.
Our vision was a coast-to-coast competition inspired by reality TV cooking competitions, featuring diverse influencers, each representing a different North American city. With a core objective being to drive social media engagement, contestants were asked to create salads that represented their home cities, each running their own contests in the competition lead-up to engage their followers for support and input. Engagement was built into every layer of this campaign.
In sum, #CitySaladShowdown aimed to celebrate culinary diversity, local city pride, promote brand awareness, and foster community engagement. We successfully leveraged influencer partnerships and strategically timed the campaign for maximum impact. Through innovative storytelling and engaging content, we successfully proved that salads are indeed anything but boring!
Campaign Metrics of Success:
Engagement
Reach
Growth
Our strategy for our creator partnerships required multiple touchpoints between creator and brand:
The Lead Up: Each hand-selected creator crafted 1 collaboration post with the brand before the showdown, utilizing their community ties—an integral criterion for selection. This garnered feedback for their salad entries and spurred audience engagement through hosted contests.
The Showdown: Our 6 creators created collaboration reels with Mother Raw, showcasing their custom salads inspired by audience ideas and reflecting their cities' diversity, charm, history, and flavors. Posts tagged other creators, maximizing campaign reach.
Ongoing support: Creators engaged with multiple organic Mother Raw posts beyond the campaign, reinforcing their trust and rapport with the brand.
Barriers and Challenges:
Budget: The budget for this ambitious campaign was minimal. With influencer fees skyrocketing, there was very little allocated for promotion through paid social. Since this would be a primarily organic campaign, we needed to rely heavily on the talent, reach and influence of our creator partners to drive awareness and engagement. We knew the success of the entire campaign relied on finding the right mix of influencers... but with a shoestring budget we had to really sell the concept and vision to convince high calibre influencers to participate.
Timelines: Timelines were tight from the time we got approval to our launch date of May 1st, the start of National Salad Month. We had to move extremely quickly to identify suitable creator partners and secure participants who were available for the campaign duration
Creator selection: We had a challenging list of criteria that participants had to meet: geography - we needed one participant for each of the 6 North American cities we selected to feature; identifying participants who reflected the diversity of Mother Raw's customer base; they needed to be food and lifestyle creators with culinary interest/talent; and plant-based or plant-forward. AND we needed a vibrant judge with culinary clout and social media influence.
Wins:
Creator Selection: The creators we approached all loved the concept, stating it was refreshing, original, a complete departure from their typical brand partnerships– and they loved the competitive element. They were especially excited about the opportunity to represent their hometowns and honoured to be "selected" to compete on behalf of their city. For this reason, we were able to work with high calibre creators with influence and reach that would normally be way out of our budget.
Authentic connection: We worked closely with our participants to ensure they truly rallied the interest and support of their local followers - a key mechanism to drive engagement. Our participants were the heart - and the secret sauce - of this campaign.
Our Judge: "Singing Chef" Gabrielle Reyes was a standout star - she recreated all the salad submissions and created impactful content in which she judged the submissions and selected a winner.
Long-term Ambassadorship: All our participants were incredible ambassadors, but our winner in particular was a huge champion of the campaign.
Creative Execution: Inspired and excited by our creative concept, the creators ALL went above and beyond.
Our team's objectives were to achieve significant reach, engagement, and growth, all of which were met and exceeded by the campaign's results. With a tiny budget, we achieved 1.2 million people reached across Mother Raw and Influencer profiles.
The 400K+ video views demonstrate strong audience interest and retention. Moreover, the high engagement metrics clearly demonstrate the active participation and interaction with our content:
16K total organic engagements,
1,800 comments,
2K saves, and
500 shares,
3x average engagement per post
3x average reach per post
2x monthly clicks on Instagram
Additionally, gaining an estimated 600-1000+ new followers signifies successful audience acquisition and community expansion. Overall, these metrics illustrate that our efforts were not only successful but also surpassed our initial objectives, demonstrating the campaign's effectiveness in achieving our goals of reach, engagement, and growth.
Beyond this campaign, we collaborated again with the winner (who represented Chicago) for Pride Month. There have since been discussions about the winning salad being featured on the menu of an award-winning Chicago restaurant.
Additionally we fostered a deep relationship between the judge, Gabrielle, and our clients. Gabrielle went on to be a brand ambassador and ongoing content creator partner for Mother Raw in 2023.
