The Vidalia Onion Committee (VOC) looked to reach a younger audience this year through the launch of its 'V for Vidalia' campaign, a move that yielded successful results, according to the group.
The campaign kicked off on 21 April and focused on promoting the versatility and flavour of Vidalia onions – a pioneer of sweet onions and Georgia’s official state vegetable – using increased social and digital media outreach.
“The Vidalia onion brand has strong recognition among consumers nationwide,' explained Susan Waters, executive director of the VOC. 'But our consumer research indicated that Baby Boomers have the highest percentage of usage while Millennial consumers have the lowest.
“In the past, we have spent the majority of our efforts on traditional PR and we realised that we were not reaching this important younger audience.”
As part of the campaign launch, the VOC hosted a field tour with food bloggers from around the country. Featured online with the hashtag #VisforVidalia, the weekend tour resulted in 324 social media posts from the food bloggers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest reaching 5.45m total consumer impressions. In addition, 7,000 fans followed the tour on the VOC’s Facebook page.
From May through August, the bloggers posted 31 articles on their sites reaching an audience of 1.5m consumers. “We provided each blogger with a US$500 Visa gift card to post on their blog sites as an online give-a-way,” said Waters. “This resulted in 146,000 entries which is the largest consumer audience we have reached with an online give-a-way to date.”
The VOC implemented a digital coupon, weekly trivia contest and food blogger recipe contest on their Facebook page. “We increased our Facebook fan base by 62 per cent to over 57,300 fans,” said Waters. “In addition, we had a 30 per cent increase in unique visitors to our web site during the campaign and the majority of these were consumers aged 18–34.”
