Front-end planning is a strategic outcome marketing approach that ensures the plans, goals, and objectives we make are flexible and responsive to the needs of the businesses we serve. This is done through planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing.
Research has shown that front-end planning improves overall cost and schedule predictability, reduces change orders, improves operational performance, and helps the client meet business drivers.
In the following case studies when we applied front-end planning we were able to achieve the following:
Developed an overarching plan for the whole year ensuring all marketing goals were addressed
Planned all our components in advance to make sure they worked together and ensured that no campaigns conflicted with each other
Planned and allocated a future-proof budget knowing what was coming for the year
With a full understanding of the marketing plan for the year, we were able to measure and optimize to ensure the best possible performance.
Front-end planning also gave us lots of lead time to make sure our campaigns were designed and executed to the highest standards.
After a successful campaign in 2020, how do we expand That’s Cat For (TCF) in 2021 and retain strong audience engagement and trust? Our aim was to continue to provide additional support for pet parents while incorporating Royal Canin’s and Cat Healthy’s business goals.
Feline Fairytales was an integrated marketing campaign focused on encouraging cat parents to share the story of their cat’s adoption and to encourage others to open their homes to a new furry friend from their local shelter. This program included the always-on That’s Cat For website and social media community, where cat owners can learn and ask questions about their cat, as well as a calendar of activations to promote specific messages throughout the year and create engagement with our cat owner audience.
To ensure salient messaging and avoid audience fatigue, the Adopt-a-cat campaign was launched to maintain and optimize the That’s Cat For platform to engage audiences in discussion about their cat’s care.
Our front end plan included three marketing outcomes each with a strategic objective:
1. Community – developing a social media platform that includes entertaining and educational content and discussions as well as proactive outreach to cat parents and cat care communities.
2. Content – Creating multiple content types to maximize user interest and drive engagement with specific CTAs.
3. Activation – Develop a calendar of activations targeted to Royal Canin’s communications pillars throughout the year, incorporating content and CTAs to drive main site engagement.
In a 2 month period, we exceeded our KPIs by driving almost 13,000 visitors to the landing page. Our on-site audience had a 49% engagement rate, meaning users submitted a story, voted for their favourite tale, took a cat adoption-related quiz, or read an informative article. With 85 story submissions and over 4,000 votes, we exceeded expectations for participation in the story contest, in addition, the campaign enjoyed 4.7M in paid media impressions exceeding our KPIs by 500,000.
“Keep the Engine Purring” campaign was developed as part of the TCF mission to create a multi-channel activation that promotes responsible cat care and encourages regular visits to the veterinarian.
The goal was to educate our audiences about the importance of regular veterinary care and choosing a cat-friendly veterinarian while promoting regular veterinarian visits. The campaign also set out to create opportunities to support Royal Canin’s veterinary partners.
Keeping our targetted audience front and center, this campaign focused on a combination of the following tactics to ensure a seamless audience journey flow:
1. Landing page – a central hub where visitors can engage with the campaign content to learn more about taking their cat to the vet.
2. Paid Media – combination of programmatic banner ads, Facebook and Google ads.
3. Clinic Activation – Stickers w/ entry code and landing page URL, using a one-pager explaining contest/stickers, interactive clinic contest with hashtag.
Keeping with the TCF mission of creating a multi-channel activation that promotes responsible cat adoption and supports shelter partners through entertaining and interactive content, Feline Feud campaign was developed to drive audience engagement and interest in the main That’s Cat For platform.
We developed a trivia-style interactive game that allows TCF followers to test their cat knowledge while challenging their friends.
While this campaign was new and the plan was to establish a benchmark, we included the following KPIs
Our front end planning included the following:
1. Content – developed and activated social posts on key relevant platforms promoting cat genius trivia game once-a-week.
2. Landing page – created a landing page to host the Cat Genius trivial game. Users were able to take the quiz and receive their score in addition to seeing their ranking on the leaderboard allowing them to share/challenge their friends in the trivia game.
3. Paid Media – implement paid search to capture audiences that were willing to participate in the trivia. In addition we boosted social posts from the main campaign budget.
The Cat genius campaign garnered the following results:
