The objective of the Horizon Organic Back To School Campaign was to drive trial and awareness of new Horizon products through social buzz and engagement during the back-to-school drive period. Additionally, the team endeavored to test a consumer facing partnership with our newly acquired sister company, Earthbound Farm. Tactics included: social game and sweepstakes, CRM, an influencer program, a Twitter party, and a paid Pinterest test campaign. The campaign achieved 9.4 million impressions and had an Earned Media Value (a calculation based on what we would have paid if we had bought these impressions) of $1.1MM which nearly quadrupled the goal.
This campaign was based around consumer insights, seasonality, and new product launches. Horizon is a brand committed to finding win-win solutions for mom. We know that she loves finding products she can trust to give her children the nutrition they need but are still great tasting and desirable so it's a win for her and for them!
Back to School (BTS) is a season that fully consumes our Horizon mom's mind. Whether she is incredibly organized and has weeks to spend making sure her child is fully prepared, or she is frantically trying to keep up with the "crazy" and can barely get them out the door in the morning, our Horizon Moms have Back To School on the brain from late July – September. Horizon was also launching some new products right around this time – Mac & Cheese, Cookies, and Crackers to add to the full range of lunchbox solutions, which included the Horizon single serve milk cartons, string cheese and other kid favorites.
This was a fully integrated campaign across social, digital, shopper marketing, and consumer promotions. It featured a social game and sweepstakes, promotion in the Horizon CRM newsletter, an influencer program, a #Back2School Twitter party, a paid Pinterest test campaign, in store tactics, print and a surprise and delight program on Twitter.
The social "spin to win" game, hosted on Facebook, gave Horizon consumers a chance to win various BTS prizes including a backpack, Horizon lunch box, water bottle, coupons for Horizon and Earthbound Farm snacks, and coloring books. This game received more than 37K entries and resulted in 183k game plays. This component of our campaign exceeded KPIs by 120%.
The game/sweeps was promoted across Horizon's social media platforms, website, CRM newsletter database, and blogger network to a digital community of more than 1 million consumers. Our CRM newsletter exceeded open rates by 5% and exceeded click thru rates by 23%. The campaign had a CRM opt in rate of 56% which is 87% above our goal and industry benchmarks.
An influencer campaign enlisted bloggers to create and share custom and relevant back to school content featuring Horizon products. This blogger-created content generated 851K impressions, 135K engagements and performed 627% above our KPI goals.
Horizon was invited to be one of 13 brands to test a beta version of the newly rolled out Pinterest ads platform. The content created by our bloggers to drive our Back To School campaign was used in a pilot paid Pinterest test campaign that generated 6.7MM impressions, 22K repins, and had an earned media value of $130K for a modest investment of $10K.
The Back To School campaign also featured a Twitter Party where our consumers interacted with both the Horizon and Earthbound Farm brands and our bloggers using #HorizonB2S. This party generated 48K impressions and trended on Twitter for just under an hour.
Overall, our Horizon Organic Back To School Campaign achieved an ROI of more than 1000% exceeding all of our expectations!
