“If DiGiorno pizza was a person, what would that person sound like?”
Marketers at DiGiorno asked themselves this question while planning the brand’s first paid campaign on TikTok last year. Apparently, the answer is a musician – more specifically, a rapper.
DiGiorno already had an organic presence on TikTok, but now it’s paying influencers to create original soundtracks for the brand to grow awareness among younger consumers, namely Gen Z and millennials.
Gen Z responds better to content that doesn’t feel like an overt advertisement, which makes them a difficult group to win over with conventional marketing, said Nicole Almeida, associate marketing manager at Nestlé-owned DiGiorno.
A more effective strategy is to encourage consumers to talk about a brand, rather than the brand promoting itself, and this involves creating ads that don’t look like ads (even if the end result is a rap song about cheese crust).
Take it to TikTok
DiGiorno worked with software and analytics platform CreatorIQ, which is also one of TikTok’s official marketing partners, to source influencer partners for songwriting and measure the performance of their videos on TikTok.
Based on CreatorIQ’s numbers, DiGiorno saw a 3.6% increase in brand awareness and a 6.8% uptick in brand favorability as a result of the campaign. More importantly, the brand also saw a 3.1% boost in sales.
These numbers may only be single-digit growth rates, but based on industry benchmarks, even just half a percentage point is a “significant indicator of change,” said Timothy Sovay, chief operating officer at CreatorIQ.
Sound on
This isn’t DiGiorno’s first time working with influencers, so the brand already knows that a successful TikTok campaign goes beyond simply inking a contract with a creator.
It requires careful strategizing and measurement to determine how a campaign can drive a purchase decision, said Gabe Gordon, co-founder of Reach Agency, which also worked with DiGiorno on the campaign.
Hoping to improve campaign results on TikTok, DiGiorno decided to experiment with original audio to build more engagement that would increase sales in addition to brand awareness. Even though TikTok is known for short-form video, an audio-focused campaign makes sense considering the platform’s origins. (After all, TikTok was Musical.ly once upon a time.)
The campaign started off with an original rap song earlier last year, followed by other tracks throughout 2022 across a variety of genres, including pop, country, opera and more rap. Influencers also strategically posted their content to coincide with tentpole events, such as March Madness, to compete with the frozen pizza brand’s biggest competition: delivery pizza.
On average, 22% of TikTok users who saw DiGiorno’s campaign watched the videos in full, generating a view-through rate that was 17% higher than the industry median benchmark for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands, according to Reach Agency.
Pizza, please
To reach as many people as possible, DiGiorno also pushed its videos into organic content feeds using popular hashtags such as #PizzaTalk. And the brand used TikTok’s whitelisting feature, Spark Ads, to distribute popular videos via the For You page.
Because the For You page is the first page users land on when they open the TikTok app, it’s a good way to reach and engage new customers beyond existing ones.
Roughly three-quarters of TikTok users find popular or viral content in their For You page, rather than directly from an account that they follow, said CreatorIQ’s Sovay.
Overall, DiGiorno’s engagement rate from this campaign was 55% higher than Reach Agency’s CPG benchmark.
Using CreatorIQ, DiGiorno measured engagement based on campaign video views, comments, shares, new followers on creator pages and the number of users that created split-screen duets. DiGiorno also used post-campaign surveys to measure brand awareness and brand favorability.
But while engagement and favorability are great, what brands care about most is whether these metrics result in sales, including incremental sales. An increase in incremental sales would be an indicator that DiGiorno’s campaign was resonating with a new audience that now considers its products after seeing them on TikTok.
According to CreatorIQ, DiGiorno saw a 13% increase in first-time purchases.
A result like that is a good indicator that “TikTok is the right platform to invest in heavily,” said DiGiorno’s Almeida.
