Wild Mike’s Ultimate Pizza is a nationally recognized frozen pizza company whose products you can find in several major grocery chains around the United States.
Challenges/Strengths
Eris faced a couple challenges when marketing Wild Mike’s. Our first challenge was creating brand recognition in a market that is saturated with established pizza brands. For the consumer to purchase Wild Mike’s pizza, it must first be available in stores. This introduces the second challenge; getting Wild Mike’s pizzas in major retailers across the U.S. Both challenges were driven by sales and would need strategic digital marketing and advertising efforts to help differentiate Wild Mike’s from its competitors in the eyes of the consumers and the corporations which supply their products.
Wild Mike’s differs from its neighbors in the frozen food isle in several key ways. Wild Mike’s focuses on quality, handmade ingredients that any consumer would feel comfortable feeding themselves and their family. Frozen pizza doesn’t always come with a bill of health, so emphasizing the use of quality ingredients makes Wild Mike’s stand out from its competitors and builds trust with the consumers.
Price is a factor for most people when making purchasing decisions. Wild Mike’s offers quality products at an affordable cost. This is another key factor that would build brand loyalty and recognition if positioned in the right way. Consumers will inevitably buy based on price and Wild Mike’s is one of the cheapest pizzas for its size that someone will find in a supermarket.
Being a new brand in an established market provided some opportunities for Wild Mike’s. Most of the larger frozen pizza brands were too big to interact on a personal level with their customers. Wild Mike’s was still small enough to be able to interact on social media with their costumers, build relationships, offer stellar customer service, and give away prizes for active participants.
These three key factors were positioned strategically to help build demand at the consumer level. This demand would be leveraged when pitching to large grocery chains and corporations to carry Wild Mike’s products across the United States.
To address the challenges that Wild Mike’s faced when growing their brand nationally, Eris implemented several different digital marketing and advertising tactics to increase brand awareness and demand. We started growing the Wild Mike’s social media following by executing like campaigns aimed towards their target demographic. Once we built the social media following to a substantial number, we could then focus on ways to produce organic and paid engagement. This engagement would help to bring attention to the brand, the products, and even give incentives for consumers to purchase the pizzas. Wild Mike’s would then use the results we obtained from the social advertisements and campaigns when they pitched large grocery chains.
Wild Mike’s has a large and loyal fan base that yearn for the opportunity to interact with the brand. Eris helped Wild Mike’s put together a handful of branded products and merchandise that customers can purchase on their website. When you buy a piece of Wild Mike’s merchandise, it is not just a new t-shirt in your dresser. Every piece of Wild Mike’s swag comes with the chance to label yourself a Pizza Rebel. Anyone can be a pizza rebel as long as they have something to show for it; a sticker, t-shirt, or even a box of pizza. Eris manages all the Wild Mike’s social activity and every Friday, we host a giveaway for the Wild Mike’s Facebook fans. We give the Facebook users and opportunity to interact with the brand to win prizes ranging from free pizzas to aprons to pizza cutters. Not only does this encourage people to post and engage, but it also increases the Wild Mike’s brand recognition. Wild Mike’s and Eris worked together to identify underperforming stores so we could come up with tactical, cost effective strategies to increase sales and brand awareness. Eris used the zip codes of underperforming stores to create social geo-targeted campaigns to offer coupons and push brand awareness in these areas to grow sales.
Strategy
With all the demand drummed up from our social media efforts, Eris and Wild Mike’s worked together to create a retail brand book that showed the Wild Mike’s history, products, and values. This brand book served as a selling tool for the Wild Mike’s sales team. We helped Wild Mike’s create stand out presentations for meetings with major retailers to pitch the Wild Mike’s products. These sales tools helped Wild Mike’s get their pizzas in some of the largest super markets in the United States. Eris was able to take sales data from Wild Mike’s to determine which stores weren’t selling as many pizzas. We used the zip codes to create social geo-targeted campaigns to offer coupons and push brand awareness in these areas to grow sales.
