Media buying best practices recommend distinct assets to fill the funnel: awareness, consideration, and then conversion.

With our innovative media-tailored approach, we were able to condense the funnel into one asset to drastically shorten the path-to-purchase, and effectively create a new media opportunity for the online grocery delivery category.

We were the first-mover to tap into the trending #TikTokMadeMeTryIt recipes phenomenon, and the first Canadian brand to use the new Pop-out Showcase feature on Spark Ads to drive sales.

In Canada, the online grocery and food delivery space is growing dramatically.

Voilà is a relatively new grocery delivery service. Despite having fresher offerings and more efficient delivery, it was hard to stand out against established competitors and other new market entrants amongst our millennial target.

Other online delivery services, such as Walmart, have a head start and larger geographical distribution. In addition to major grocery retailers that deliver, like Metro and Loblaws, we’re also competing against third-party services like Instacart or UberEats and meal kit delivery services.

Voilà is only available in select urban areas. With a ‘fresh or it’s free’ guarantee and strong Net Promoter Scores, we found that people who tried the service tended to love it -- so we just needed more people to try it.

We needed a game-changing way to get noticed and drive leads as a challenger brand.

When a recipe goes viral on TikTok, ingredients sell out quickly. Whether it’s #WhippedCoffee, #CloudBread, or #FetaPasta, this phenomenon has caused grocery retailers to sell out of key ingredients and has more than doubled Instacart orders.

This was a perfect opportunity for our grocery delivery service Voilà. If we could predict recipe trends before they took off, we would be able to intercept cultural moments in a way no competitors in Canada had.

A tool to measure food trends didn’t exist, so we built one. Our proprietary, custom-built Trend Index ingests data from TikTok trends, Google insights, Pinterest trends, social listening, culture and content trends, and Voilà’s first-party search and sales data. Each data source is assigned a value based on its level of influence. These data points are filtered through our index to generate “trend energy” predictions.

Our target market was tech-savvy Millennials (and older Gen Z) in metro areas who were likely to use an existing delivery service but may not have heard of Voilà. This demographic is particularly active and engaged on social media, readily “consuming” viral recipe content.

This interesting new phenomenon of viral food trends causing ingredients to sell out in grocery stores during recipe frenzies hadn't been tapped into by any of our competitors yet. This could be a first-to-market opportunity to creatively use data and shoppable social media in a novel way to drive both new acquisitions and orders.

Using our “trend energy” predictions, we partnered with TikTok creators to drive sales right as the trends were hitting critical mass.

Using TikTok Spark Ads and Pop-out Showcase add-ons, we targeted the creators’ content at high affinity audiences who were likely to convert on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

With our custom-built Trend Index as a silver bullet, we were ready to bring trending recipes to consumers’ tables.

We partnered with #FoodTok creators, and applied a Spark Ads media buy accompanied by a Pop-out Showcase add-on (a first in Canada) to trending TikTok recipes, to make them shoppable. With just one click, customers were taken directly to pre-populated ingredients pages on the Voilà website, where shoppers could purchase all required ingredients for delivery, drastically shortening the path-to-purchase.

Once the ingredients arrived, our CRM system triggered a follow-up email with the recipe and video, to make the entire experience as seamless as possible.

We boosted these recipe videos as TikTok Spark Ads and Facebook and Instagram dark ads to make them shoppable in one click.

Our campaign ran for 10 weeks, with less than $50,000 in media support.

A social-first campaign from inception to execution, Trending 2 Table successfully turned social media trends into trials and drastically shortened the path-to-purchase.

By taking a thoughtful, insights-driven approach using social data, we were able to drive both new orders and acquisitions with our paid social content and smartly compete with more established competitors.

8x increase in Voilà orders

11x increase in new Voilà customers

Drove 60-80 new users per week (benchmark average of other Voilà ads was 5-7 new users per week)

200%+ higher clickthrough rate

Over 3.5 million views

More than 40K engagements

Trending 2 Table has been a great conversion-driver for Voilà. It eliminated the friction between first exposure to a trending recipe and getting it onto your plate and allowed us to turn complex data into dinners, “Just Like That.”

TikTok Canada refers to Trending 2 Table as “The Ultimate #FoodTok experience.”

From start to finish, we leveraged the FOMO nature of the mob #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt mentality.

The insight that viral TikTok recipes cause ingredients to sell out drove the creative concept. Data from a variety of sources, including social media platforms like TikTok, drove the direction we took in shaping the campaign and the content created.

TikTok is all about community and creators, and we tapped into both of these with food creators and the #FoodTok community in a novel way to drive business objectives.