Central Market
Holiday Hotline
With only nine locations, all in Texas, Central Market caters to food lovers and offers customers the highest quality one-stop-shop for gourmet selections and entertaining options, extensive chef-prepared offerings as well as everyday grocery shopping. Like its competitors, it knew it had to strengthen its e-commerce offering to retain its customers against the rising tide of online grocery competition.
Services
70x
Increase in holiday orders
4M
# of times holiday video was viewed
75%
Social engagement rate
Challenge
Every year since 2006, aspiring hosts, time-strapped parents, and everyone in between could call Central Market’s meal-order program, “Holiday Hotline,” to reserve their Thanksgiving meals, sides and desserts, all cooked and prepared in-store by chefs. Central Market turned to PMG to drive more orders and revenue to the hotline, but primarily through its e-commerce channel.
Strategy & Approach
PMG’s strategy was to maximize reach and engagement in Central Market’s key DMAs to increase awareness and consideration, and then use SEM to convert shoppers into customers throughout November.
Upper funnel tactics were adopted to create a groundswell of awareness behind the Holiday Hotline. Paid social was used to amplify content such as video and recipes, and well as increase social engagement. Display banners and streaming audio rounded out the campaign’s brand media vehicles.
These fed into a search program that was set up to maximize conversion among shoppers. Key SEM tactics included restructuring campaigns to increase relevance and cost-effectiveness, reconfiguring keyword match types to streamline bidding, expanding keyword coverage, and using geotargeting to improve reach. Holiday Hotline copy and sitelinks were regularly updated with strategic messaging points to deliver more site clicks.
Results
The campaign performed so amazingly well that, quite possibly, only the turkey pardoned by President Obama that Thanksgiving was happier than Central Market. Search drove a 70X increase in orders, helping the grocer easily beat its goals. Its holiday videos were viewed more than 4 million times, and the overall social campaign saw engagement rates as high as 75%.
In addition to holiday transactions, Central Market also benefited by acquiring thousands of new customers to its database. Not only did PMG help Central Market sell more meals, it also set the brand up for enduring success with customers.
