When success is ... "correlate"!
With this post, the teammates Alessandro Bracciani, Claudia Caroleo, Stefania Cicoria, Licia Manfredi and Fabio Muzzupappa describe the job done for the Google Online Marketing Challenge during the Executive Master Social Media Marketing & Digital Communication and supported by the IULM Professor Andrea Testa (Google Top Contributor and Premier Google Partner).

The protagonist of our AdWords campaign: the Balsamic Vinegar DOP and IGP of Modena.
 

A precious product, full of history that lives, kept for years, in age-old barrels, in the dim light of silent acetaia (vinegar cellar), in the words of those who have been producing it for generations.
 

How to be able to decontextualize a product so deeply tied to the territory to catapult it into the digital network? How to keep all the magic of Pedroni Balsamic Vinegar in few lines of a Google AdWords campaign?
 

Would we ever be able to warm the hearts of users, stimulating clicks and conversions?
 

The antagonists
From the analysis of the benchmark, we realized the obstacle we have to front: a numbers of Vinegar Cellars competitors ready to do anything to appear in the first  page of the search engine... in response to queries "balsamic vinegar", "traditional balsamic vinegar", etc.
But the company Acetaia Pedroni was this and more.
It was tradition, quality, secular knowledge. As well as the best Vinegar Cellars.
But the rules of the market are often ruthless and take a new road, less traveled, it is often vital to be the first!
 

The attack strategy
Our marketing goal was clear: stand out of crowd and create an original strategy. It was necessary to propose a new key to interpretation of the traditional Balsamic Vinegar Pedroni. We need to move out from a highly competitive, saturated and already largely overseen market (with traditional keywords), to a more free one, in which the balsamic vinegar could take new meanings and values to meet a demand share of consumers never approached before.
From this analysis, the new positioning: the traditional Balsamic Vinegar Pedroni had to be conveyed as an exclusive product, which touched aspects related to sensoriality and emotions. It became an "instrument of seduction", the "special" ingredient to enhance dishes, surprise and add appeal. The nectar of special meetings.
 

Our great ally? "Google correlate"!
Extrapolating the pattern of the words "balsamic vinegar" on Google Correlate, we noticed the connection with  "intimate"  keywords.
Hence the intuition: the correlation between the search for seduction and the culinary art. The combination with the precious Balsamic could be a means for realize the conversions, if proposed in the Display Network in portals and websites dedicated to underwear, but also to the art of seduction.
 

To who? Where would we find the most passionate consumers of Balsamic Vinegar in a seductive key?
Our average target was young: 30/50 years, single, medium-high cultural/social extraction. A range of users made of connoisseurs (all those who pay attention to the "taste" and "class" and who would have seen in the DOP/IGP Balsamic Vinegar the added value to "beautify" their creations and surprise at the table) and the seducers (consumers highly sensitive to everything that could represent innovation in terms of seduction)
 

Where we could find them?
After identifying in our "balsamic vinegar", "recipes" and "seduction" our main clusters on which to develop the three ads groups ... an eye to geolocation:
did there exist an Italian geographical area more predisposed to receive our message?
Google Insights, looking for "balsamic vinegar", gave us a positive response: Milan, Bologna and Rome were our places! A saturated market in need for novelty... and therefore probably interested in balsamic vinegar presented in a new guise.
 

And from here, the rest was history:
Three weeks of observation and continuous adjustments to our campaign on the Google AdWords platform.

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1. Search Network with text ads, designed according to the most careful rules of persuasion: captivating headline, in-depth body and final call to action to motivate clicks and attract on a landing page in two versions:

a) download recipes for a romantic evening

b) online purchase of products

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2. Display network with text and image announcements.

 

And finally the finish line!
Not just impressions, not just clicks, but conversions and a CTR of almost 3%!
Mission accomplished!

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