FOODIVERSITY: A look at the efood campaign that got students on board

This week we present a guest blog from our Heroes in Greece. Claire Cohen, Content Queen at efood, shares her insights and learnings from the successful student marketing campaign FOODIVERSITY, which has engaged university students in Greece on a wide scale.

People always tend to characterize efood as the rebel type of brand. The truth is, well, that this is a lie… or maybe not so much.
When marketing managers from other markets ask us about our revolutionization of the world of students we can only answer one thing: we never wanted to revolutionize anything! We just saw a need, we listened and delivered.

Love For Sharing

This is how it all started (give us a second and try to follow our train of thought):

Students are tech savvy.
Students are early adopters.
Students are in line with the efood brand voice.
efood + students = love.

The equation was pretty simple.
This is when we started creating all possible touchpoints to connect to our student audience and, man, over the years we’ve come a long way.In the beginning, we started writing for students on our blog. This was back in 2014 when people actually read blog posts. Don’t get me wrong, they still do, but their loyalty has shifted from reading to watching – we’ll get there in a second. On the efood blog you could find the latest food trends, lots of lists filled with Not Suitable For Hungry gifs, quizzes on how “Your coffee says a lot about you” and “What ice-cream is ideal for you,” food news and records and of course our videos that back then were being produced at the intense frequency of, well, one video per week. It was, is, and will remain a one-stop shop for students. The content was tailored to students and served an array of student needs.

Our second touchpoint that really gave us a boost in the student world was our interest in esports and gaming. We love the players and we love the game. We want to be part of the community and not just another brand trying to be into gaming because it’s a fad. This is why we host the biggest online League of Legends tournament in Greece with over 3K participants and 10K viewers of our live stream per tournament. Additionally we collaborate with gaming influencers who talk to their viewers about efood, maintaining our presence in the gaming scene. When it comes to social media, the third efood-students touchpoint we consistently follow is simple: love for sharing. We love to produce unique concepts and ideas and implement them across our platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter). We target both users that know and don’t know our brand, users that have ordered and those who have not, with both hard and soft sell content. Frankly, we prefer the soft or no sell approach if we don’t have something specific to sell.

We communicate with our (potential) users as we would talk to our friends. We reach and connect with them through our channels as well as influencers’ channels by speaking to their tummies and hearts. We collaborate with our influencer friends, creating content on both their channels and our own, driving traffic to our social media and increasing engagement with our content. We make content we like to watch, by representing all our brand values, showcasing our restaurants and at the same time, enhancing brand love and awareness.

Out-of-home advertising (OOH) is not something to ignore and leave behind. We want people to check us out wherever they are and order when they’re hungry – or hangry. We are present at a wide range of offline events in order to target as many people as possible. We’re there at Burger Fest, at Gameathlon (the biggest gaming event in Greece), Comicdom and many others. We love to expand to different cities and be present across each city we visit: on buses, on walls, on flyers given out in central spots, as well as at bus stops and on the radio. Never underestimate the obvious locations though: the universities. We’re there as well by distributing flyers on deals that they’d be interested in (Coffee 1+1, Coca-Cola Deals, City Expansion campaign), by supporting their events and communities (food sampling).

“And then what?” you may ask. Well… your bond is established. However, as in any other relationship, you need to maintain interest and you need to stay sexy. And this is what we did.

FOODIVERSITY (from food + university and not food + diversity)

We know Greek students. Oh, we know them well. They’re not the typical students some might say. But we know who they like, who they “stalk”. We know what they need because of our brand DNA and we’ll give them what they want. We wanted to create a competition that would make people wish they were students. We wanted the mechanism to be simple. Simpler than the daily attendance to college. This is how the first FOODIVERSITY competition was created: the more a student used the code FOODIVERSITY when placing an order at efood, the more the chances to win on the final draw.

But nothing happened overnight. Evolution was critical year over year. We learned from our mistakes. We saw what was missing and added it into the next year’s competition. On the following graph you can see the evolution of FOODIVERSITY:

We knew what we were doing, but we wanted to make it even better and this is why we did a survey right after FOODIVERSITY 2017. We needed to know what was really working and what didn’t. This is what we learned:

• The impact of different channels used to promote the initiative (influencers were the best channel)
• If people liked the initiative and if they would recommend it to other people
• If people were informed about the mechanism and the gifts
• Their favourite gifts
• Other gifts that they would love to win (trips were the favourite choice so we added 3 trips in FOODIVERSITY 2018)

The performance bit

Aside from the concept itself, it is crucial to share several facts – simplified for every marketeer (performance oriented or creative spirit) to understand. Trust me… If I get it, you can too!

Fact #1
FOODIVERSITY is the only marketing initiative that has been tied strongly to performance, that has been going for 3 years in a row.

Fact #2
FOODIVERSITY-related videos have more than 5,5 million views on YouTube.

Fact #3
The FOODIVERSITY coupon code is the most used code in efood history.

Challenges

After three years of doing and redoing FOODIVERSITY we’re at the point of keeping some things, dropping others and generally redefining the concept in the most convenient way for our brand. Thus, it is very important for us to clarify:

• Is OOH something that we want to continue doing, since students are out there, but are digitally targeted as well?
• What will we be doing with the gifts? Should we plan an all gifts sponsored campaign? This would help us give out even bigger gifts, but on the other hand we don’t want to compromise the gifts’ variety because of sponsors.
• How about the concept? Should we alternate, leave it as it is or try something completely different?
• How can we remain relevant throughout the year?

We are rebels

“No one cares about boring. We care about the extremes. When you make compromises before you ship (and you will), don’t compromise the edges that matter,” Seth Godin said. And we highly agree on that. Because we want to “ship”. We don’t want to compromise. And neither do students. And this is why they trust us. They follow us. They engage with us. Because we are rebels. And so are they.

Read more about efood’s (and our other global brands’) influencer marketing here: ‘When movie stars meet food delivery