JBS Beef

The Challenge

JBS USA is a leading global food company providing diversified, high-quality food products for sale to customers in approximately 100 countries on six continents. This includes meat and poultry products, a portfolio of recognized brands and innovative premium foods. The JBS Beef Marketing team recognized an opportunity for a campaign that celebrated the nutrition and variety of tasty beef. At the same time, pre-pandemic research unveiled that younger demographics – particularly Millennials and Generation Z – are underdeveloped consumer segments for beef. Lack of knowledge and confidence plagues younger shoppers, as they are afraid to mess it up, don’t know how to cook it, or how it will taste. Given these two trends, JBS and their integrated marketing agency Element knew that to cut through the noise and the growing consumer hesitation, the brand needed a creative campaign that would celebrate the variety of tasty beef as well as educate consumers about cooking and nutrition. In response, Element created the campaign, Beefitarian, which celebrated and united beef lovers in addition to providing educational resources in an easy-to-consume fashion.

CAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS

• 41.5% View Thru Rate (29% stronger than TikTok’s 32.2% benchmark)
• 102% increase in mentions
• 160.4K Products Transferred to Cart
• $2.8 MM Carted Value
• +5.2% ad recall as measured by TikTok Brand Lift Study

BAYER: A LEGACY BRAND THAT STILL FEELS FRESH

Founded in 1863, Bayer is one of the longest-lived companies in the world, yet the brand is as relevant today as it was nearly 200 years ago. Their endurance and success is the result of their scientific innovation in the pharmaceutical space, but it is also due to their willing enthusiasm to adapt and evolve with changing times.

WHY BAYER CHOSE LINQIA

Linqia and Bayer have worked together on dozens of campaigns and the ongoing partnership drives business results that outperform previous benchmarks. “What sets Linqia apart is their entire sequence of capabilities. Unlike other influencer marketing companies who just offer creative, or measurement, Linqia has everything—there are no gaps in the chain. They stole my heart with strategy, but kept my loyalty with their measurement and results. Everything is best-in-class,” remarked Vitola.

The Solution

To bring this concept to life, Element developed an integrated campaign with a fresh new approach – putting influencers front and center. JBS and Element turned to Linqia, an expert in influencer marketing, to design a custom program that leveraged influencers to generate awareness of Beefitarian, as well as enhance beef knowledge. The test campaign was centered around a key DMA for JBS based on distribution and the opportunity to drive awareness and sales – Nashville. Knowing the selected location was Music City, Linqia built a program not only around beef but also around what gets its residents excited most – music. The concept involved influencers telling their one-of-a-kind stories with beef’s most popular meal – the burger – in custom designed recipes with a musical flare. Linqia’s AI technology helped identify the 7 optimal influencers to create the most compelling content to conceive and construct 7 delicious recipes inspired by a Nashville musical artist, song or venue

The heart of this integrated campaign centered around the Burgers & Beats challenge, housed on Beefitarian.com. In addition to appearing in their stand-alone blog posts, influencers’ unique recipes were also posted on Beefitarian’s website to garner votes to be named the best burger in Nashville. And, to help get out the vote, influencers promoted their recipes and the contest on their own social channels. The influencer who got the most votes was incentivized with a gift card, named the winner on Beefitarian’s Instagram channel and owning the bragging rights amongst the other influencers. The added gift card incentive for the winning influencer helped to drive additional impressions and engagements. Each time someone voted for their favorite influencer recipe during the Nashville Burgers & Beats challenge, Beefitarian and JBS donated $1 back to a local non-profit, The Nashville Food Project. The Nashville Food Project brings people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food, with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in the local community.

WHY BAYER CHOSE LINQIA

Music is a core component of any successful influencer campaign, and for the 50+ audience on social media, familiarity and nostalgia win. So Bayer’s One A Day team and Linqia decided to remix the famous “Teach Me How to Dougie” song from the 90s—but with a twist. For the newly minted “Teach Me How To Gummy,” Linqia developed a dance challenge that featured seven creators on TikTok including Alfonso Ribeiro (@alfonsoribeiro) to lead the campaign.

THE RESULTS

Each of the seven influencers created unique recipes, featuring a wide variety of cuts on their own blogs and promoted the recipes via videos, Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, Facebook posts and tweets. The content created by the influencers also went through our LinqiaLift™ technology to create and implement 6 tested and proven ads targeting the 18-34 year old audience in Nashville on Facebook and Instagram. The Beefitarian campaign drove incredible awareness! Between the paid and organic campaigns, Linqia garnered 1.6 million potential impressions, in a city of 690,000 people, saturating the market. The #beefitarian hashtag was also trending and the website is now the first result in Google when searching “beefitarian”, setting up JBS for success to launch in other markets. This influencer campaign outperformed the Linqia Food benchmark by 20%, and delivered amazing engagement with 95% of all comments being either positive or neutral. In fact 80% were classified as positive and included comments like “YUM! That looks so good!! I’m heading to vote now!” and “Love this and love beef!” and “This is such a good cause!” The campaign also caught the attention of local news outlets with coverage in 14 articles and a feature on local NBC’s Today in Nashville where they featured the winning recipe live on TV!

Supported by Linqia’s applied learnings, the campaign saw better performance on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook delivered more efficient awareness and impressions, with CPMs averaging 32% cheaper than paid TikTok impressions. Linqia also saw stronger CTRs on Facebook when compared to TikTok, with a 13.1% CTR compared to a 1.6% CTR. All in all, the campaign drove a 1.7% increase in purchase intent, a +2.5% lift in unaided brand awareness, and +5.2% lift in brand favorability.

Comment threads blew up with enthusiastic people, many of whom took on the challenge themselves, and One A Day sales jumped with $2.8MM worth of carted value driven from the campaign.

Awareness

brand loyalty

Consideration

Intent to purchase

The campaign hit every high-level business objective, while staying true to Bayer’s brand values. Combining pop-culture nostalgia with a trending dance challenge, Bayer showed that age is just a number (for companies and consumers) and authentic content wins every time.

let’s work together

We know that the influencer space can be overwhelming, but it’s a must-have for every brand looking to scale in today’s social media space. Want a local tour guide to lead your brand through the complexities of the influencer ecosystem and come out on top? Look no further than Linqia. Click here to request a custom influencer marketing campaign consultation today.