Success Story - Fonterra

How Fonterra engaged Fi Europe 2022 ingredients buyers with Smartcore’s Event Packages Fonterra, the renowned New Zealand dairy co-operative, ran a strategic digital marketing campaign to promote their wellbeing nutrition solutions brand, Nutiani, to Fi Europe 2022 attendees.

In this Success Story, Alexandra Williams, Marketing Manager – Europe, explains how the exporter of dairy products selected the digital tools relevant to its goals and the significance of having a pre-event marketing campaign.

What were the goals of your marketing campaign?

“Our main goal was to raise awareness about Nutiani, a wellbeing nutrition solutions brand under Fonterra, which we introduced just prior to Fi Europe 2022. We aimed to highlight the brand as the primary activation at the Fonterra booth and invite people to visit us at the event. While our audiences were already familiar with the Fonterra brand, Nutiani being new to the market meant there was less awareness among relevant audiences.

“To address this, we aligned the messaging for Nutiani with Fonterra’s visual identity through promotional content and graphics, showing a connection between the two brands and helping people become familiar with Nutiani.”

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Which promotional products did you se

Online Display Ads

Custom Branded Email - Targeted

“First, we featured three Online Display Advertisements on the Vitafoods Insights website: a top banner, an MPU banner, and a floor ad.

“Next, we sent a Custom Branded Email to a highly targeted audience, segmented by job function, product interest and industry interest. The audience was carefully selected from preregistered and potential inperson ingredients buyers attending Fi Europe 2022.

“We selected Vitafoods Insights based on its valued reputation and impressive count of over 248,000 annual visitors. This enabled us to position Nutiani alongside credible content, generate brand awareness among the right audience, and reach a high volume of relevant ingredient buyers.”

“This approach allowed us to introduce Nutiani to highly relevant buyers before the event and extend them an invitation to visit our stand.”

“We sent a Custom Branded Email to a highly targeted audience, segmented by job function, product interest and industry interest. The audience was carefully selected from pre-registered and potential in-person ingredients buyers attending Fi Europe 2022.”

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elect and why?

Sponsored Article “Shortly before Fi Europe 2022, we showcased our new Sponsored Article on the Ingredients Network newsletter. While we have a strong database of contacts, we opted for Email Newsletter Advertising to promote Nutiani since it was a new brand. And for new brands, building a subscriber database could take time.

“Partnering with Smartcore provided us access to contacts we otherwise wouldn’t have reached.

This gave us the chance to share our product information with over 83,000 newsletter subscribers, significantly enhancing our thought leadership and boosting brand visibility and awareness.”

Targeted Ads “We also ran a month-long Targeted Ads campaign. This allowed us to reach valuable visitors of the Fi Europe website and direct them to our exhibitor profile online.

We invited them to visit us at the Fonterra booth through our banners. Since audience retargeting uses cookies to track visitors of one website and then displays your ads to them when they leave to browse other websites and apps, it ensures you reach only the specific audience you’re looking to target.

“This worked out well for us, and having a combination of various promotional products provided a great opportunity to reach our targeted audience.”

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What was the benefit of using several marketing tools within the same campaign?

“Well, we discovered that there could be different users across various platforms when we analysed our channels.

Sometimes individuals may not have opted into email communication but still visit websites, and vice versa.

By utilising a combination of marketing tools, we were able to effectively reach these diverse audiences through different media across multiple platforms.

“Another key factor was the creative freedom we had to repeat and repurpose our assets, despite the distinct specifications for email campaigns and website promotions. As a result, if the same audience encountered our brand on both channels, we could establish a sense of familiarity and generate increased brand awareness.”

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Why did you decide to target both Vitafoods Europe and Fi Europe audiences?

“We see our customers go to both events and we see similar competitors at both events, so we know there is a natural overlap there. We felt that people in the industry who were attending Fi Europe were also familiar with Vitafoods given that it’s part of the same event organisation, and if they are looking for trends and the latest news, Vitafoods Insights would be one of their main channels to get that.”

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Could you describe the effectiveness of using a Custom Branded Email campaign to generate brand awareness and meet your campaign goals?

“The Custom Branded Email is one of my favourite digital products that we chose, and I would choose it again. I thought the unique open rate of 27.57% that we achieved was super impressive. As far as I’m aware, it surpasses industry benchmarks.

“It was fantastic to see individuals outside of our database opening and engaging with our email. This was really promising for us in terms of generating brand awareness. Since Nutiani was a relatively new brand at that time, we used the custom email to set up and explain the brand.”

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Custom Branded Email Performance

1,149

Total opens

2,513

Total sent

127

Total clicks

691

Total unique opened

27.57% Unique open rate

“We also utilised it to talk about our consumer wellness research since science is an important part of the Nutiani brand. The custom email gave us space to have this extra copy and share our message. And of course, there’s visual - you get the chance to use logos and images and start to familiarise people with your brand. We also implemented audience segmentation in this email, which was highly beneficial.”

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What was the impact of your pre-event marketing campaign on your presence and on the promotion of your new brand at Fi Europe 2022?

“I think it is hard to measure that. But I would say we had a lot of people coming over to our stand to ask about Nutiani and talk about the brand. They knew where to find us based on our booth number, something they saw in our explicit banner messaging.

“It’s evident there was a natural interest that was most likely supported by having pre-event communications.”

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How did this campaign meet or exceed your expectations?

“The campaign certainly met our expectations, and working with your team was great! It was clear what we needed to provide, the timelines to follow and we received an excellent follow-up report. You don’t often get that level of attention to detail.

“I would say our most successful investment was the Custom Branded Email.

It was my preferred product and would be something I will continue to purchase, particularly around events.”

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What advice would you give another company planning a Boost Your Event Package marketing campaign?

“My main advice would be to maintain a consistent message across all channels.

Having a mix of channels or digital products worked very well for us, so I encourage using a blend of strategies. It’s crucial to consider the type of message you want to convey.

For example, we chose to have an Advert in the Event Trend Guide. The reason for this decision was that we had recently produced consumer research with the launch of Nutiani, and we wanted to promote that.

The trend guide, being a go-to resource for trends, offered us the perfect place to display our wellness report.”

“I would advise other companies to select products that align with the message they want to share and, whenever possible, maintain consistency in messaging and visual identity because it created a compelling package for us overall.”

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