Wendy’s entire premium beverages effort was driven by audience data. It helped us identify audience segments with the most potential for purchase and then guided us in how best to connect with those consumers creatively.

Working with the newly available Facebook Topic Data and Crimson Hexagon, we analyzed more than 4.6 million social conversations about beverages. Our analysis found that our potential customers associated their desire for and purchase of beverages with a positive pick-me-up in their day – this data-driven insight was essential to our idea.

The creative idea then became to refresh her with a positive, personalized interaction. We served our audience highly targeted and customized short, “sip-able” content, aiming to leave her with a refreshing feeling representative of the pick-me-up she commonly associated with her beverage craving and purchase. We called these vignettes “Sip Me Ups.”

For example, our audience with interests in health and wellness was served individual “Sip Me Ups” that connected the beverage to her interests in yoga, jogging and hiking. Our audience interested in the environment, sustainability and conservation was served “Sip Me Ups”  that demonstrated how to recycle our cups into crafty lamps and planters.

Our marketing strategy, as is the case in our restaurants, was to follow the axiom “the customer is always right.” Our entire effort was driven by our chosen audience segments – we didn’t want her to feel like we were pushing messages; we wanted her to feel like she was pulling them. This marriage of data and creative was critical to the success of our campaign.

We leveraged data from MRI and Acxiom to strategically quantify our audiences’ lifestyles and behaviors. Then, using this information, we tailored our creative “Sip Me Ups” accordingly.

We used MRI data to further fine-tune our channel strategy. We found that social was her media of choice. Given our limited budget, we were confident that social would be an effective and efficient platform for the basis of the campaign and would drive the highest ROI.

We created content inspired by her interests, and found ways to connect those interests to Wendy’s premium beverages. This created an efficient, one-to-one moment with her and the Wendy’s premium beverages best suited to her lifestyle. It helped turn what could be a functional message into a more emotional and fun one.

Our data-driven strategy worked. Wendy’s saw an +8% increase in overall beverage sales and a 29% increase in the premium beverage category year over year. Additionally, 50 to 60% of all beverage sales during the campaign were attributed to new customers – which is fantastic in an industry that has historically lost traffic. What’s more –  beverage incidence actually increased 1.8% – a large increase for a high-margin product.

As for our campaign content, these refreshing, personalized moments led to statistically significant growth across all of our metrics in social according to our Nielsen studies. Compared to our control group, audiences exposed to our “Sip Me Up” content saw a +14 point increase in ad recall; +11 point increase in message association with Wendy’s; +4 point increase in intent to purchase; and +4 point increase in intent to recommend to a friend.

Wendy’s met its audience in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. In turn, we were able to successfully increase sales of our new premium beverages on a tight budget.