The path to the successful development of Boni’s digital advertising presence: goals, processes, testing, and results

How did an established brand in the meat-processing industry manage to transform its digital presence and reach new audiences online? With a strategic marketing approach, including identifying target groups, testing different audiences, and optimizing advertising campaigns, Boni achieved significant results. In this case study, you will learn how we planned and executed the brand’s overall digital strategy, what challenges we encountered, and what the key factors for success were. Finally, you will discover valuable lessons that can be applied to your business.

Boni is the largest pig producer, with seven pig farms, a slaughterhouse, two meat-processing plants, and two own brands. Their production covers everything from A to Z, and over the last 30 years they have firmly established themselves in the FMCG market.

The client contacted us after already becoming familiar with our work through Xplora Academy. Boryana, the marketing manager of Boni, embraced our approach, and with that, our paths met not only in academia but also in practice—as the brand’s digital agency.

Boryana’s role aims to align all business lines and communicate them effectively to the audience. We combined these goals with our working principles and managed to lay the foundations for the brand’s positioning in digital environments.

What was the assignment?

The goal for the first three months of our work together was to identify the target groups. The client had had no digital activities to date, and everything about the online audience was a matter of speculation. Along with this, we needed to define the key metrics to monitor during the process so that we could identify the right audiences, formats, and messages.
Overall, we had to plan the entire digital presence, which included both strategic and operational actions, then analyze the data from the test period and apply the findings to subsequent brand communication.

How did we decide to approach this?

At the beginning of positioning the Boni brand, we relied on metrics such as reach, impressions, and content-view frequency, and as we moved into more engagement-driven campaigns, we tracked metrics such as post engagements, comments, shares, and CTR.

Because we were managing many lines of work simultaneously—media planning, photo shoots, inter-team communication, and more—we had to structure the process into eight sequential steps. Here they are::

1. Boni briefs us on an upcoming campaign.
2. We meet with the team and formulate debrief questions.
3. The client finalizes the campaign parameters.
4. Our team prepares a media plan with channel allocation.
5. The Marketing Manager reviews the proposal for media planning, formats, and channels, and approves it if there are no comments.
6. We schedule design time and prepare previews, then send them to the client for approval.
7. We receive approval of the creatives for the ads.
8. We discuss and finalize the audiences for the respective campaign. We launch the campaign. We optimize it, and prepare a report at the end.

Given the original goal for the first quarter of our work—testing and analysis—we had to consider customization of reports and the ability to provide a detailed overview of our advertising data. To that end, we created several custom metrics and were able to automate the report to the point where the client can review the results and drill down into the details of each campaign element independently.

What were the challenges in the beginning?

The challenge for our team was to find the balance between the ideas and goals we had, to choose the right messages, and to form a segment of target cores that we could reach and test primarily in a real environment to see whether it delivered the results we expected.

What did we actually do?

What formats, messages, and audiences we used—and more.

First of all, we focused on audience testing and performance-campaign optimization. Initially, the brief specified a target audience of female housewives. We now have more than eight different audiences vetted and running, along with several buffer audiences that we use depending on the style of post or the type of campaign.

Something interesting: over time, we were able to identify indirect targets to reach our main audience. For example, during the summer we targeted users interested in camping and outdoor activities, and this yielded excellent results in terms of the page’s engagement rate.

What have we achieved?

Figures, data, results.

Review of advertising results over a 12-month period:

• 186.5K post reactions
• 1.3K post saves
• 798.8K ThruPlays
• 2.2M reach

To go into even more detail, here are the key results from one of our campaign activities during this period—Boni Chef D’oeuvre:

We were able to more than double our targets because we had historical data to rely on. This means we took the most successful audiences from the Q1 tests to implement this campaign, and, on top of that, we already had a developed remarketing audience of users engaged with the brand’s content. This type of custom audience is extremely valuable for finding new users through lookalike targeting, as well as for increasing the engagement rate.

What’s next?

We’re turning our sights to bigger projects, new channels, and formats, making our collaboration even more exciting! Since we’ve found that formats like Instant Experience and campaigns optimized for Reach & Frequency are highly relevant and effective for the brand, it’s safe to say we have yet to unleash their full potential.

Working with Boni has not only given us impressive marketing results, but also a fridge full of goodies in the office and happy smiles around the table!