CPG Strategies create B2B success at Lactalis Canada

Lactalis Canada Foodservice is Canada’s premier dairy solutions provider for the foodservice industry in Canada. Offering a broad range of high-quality products and services, Lactalis Canada Foodservice’s mission is to help the Canadian hospitality, institutional, and healthcare industries solve their culinary and foodservice requirements.  

As part of its ongoing commitment to leadership in the foodservice sector, Lactalis Canada was launching Galbani Professionale 2.27kg Lactose-Free Shredded Pizza Mozzarella for the foodservice industry. Given that a significant portion of the Canadian population is lactose intolerant, and most Canadians now claim that they eat out at least once a week, the incremental sales opportunity this represented for restaurant operators was significant, and it was especially timely for an industry looking for solutions in a post-COVID financial recovery.  

Furthermore, speed was of the essence because it was only a matter of time before the competition would launch a similar product. Strategy, planning and execution of an effective launch program had to be completed within an unprecedented timeframe if Lactalis Canada were to achieve first-to-market success.

The Challenge

Our first challenge was to identify the size of the audiences we were looking to connect with so that we could develop an effective strategy as well as implement the necessary key performance indicators to determine what success looked like. BrandBourg reached out to Glassroom, one of our partners inside the Humanise Collective we are a member of, to enlist their expertise and capabilities in the media space. 

In collaboration with LinkedIn Canada’s insights team, Glassroom’s data and analytics experts were able to estimate, based on professional designation, that there were just over 9,000 professionals operating within the foodservice sales vertical, presenting us with the primary challenge of having to connect and communicate with a very niche audience in a very narrow time window to ensure our first-to-market strategy was achieved.   

Strategy, planning and execution of an effective launch program had to be completed within an unprecedented timeframe if Lactalis Canada were to achieve first-to-market success.

To solve this problem, we activated our pure-play digital partners Bleublancrouge/U92, also members of the Humanise Collective, to lead the development of custom digital assets that effectively connected with the targeted B2B trade audiences, while BrandBourg conceived the user experience and designed the overall aesthetic. 

Our Approach

To effectively connect with foodservice professionals in Canada, Glassroom created a customized digital marketing approach that was based on reverse-engineering the traditional consumer funnel by focusing on: 

• Connecting with restaurant owners/operators and the Canadian foodservice industry through vertical trade publishers and professional social media; 
• Collecting interested, inbound audiences off the website to continue to nurture with content, and social media SEO opportunities; 
• Re-targeting and scaling reach and awareness using ads and content to increase qualified web visits and sampling opportunities sent to restauranteurs. 

Results

Using this approach, the team of BrandBourg, Glassroom and BBR/U92 were able to successfully increase Galbani Professionale Lactose-Free Shredded Pizza Mozzarella awareness amongst a highly relevant trade audience through a very collaborative digital marketing strategy.    

Thanks to the use of relevant industry publishers, as well as publishing on various social media handles and e-newsletters, the plan effectively maximized the impact of Lactalis Canada Foodservice’s initiative on the foodservice industry. The plan also created news and excitement within the trade through sponsored posts on LinkedIn, customized SEM/SEO strategies and retargeting audiences across Google’s DV360 platform, all driving to a Lactalis Canada custom microsite and landing page. 

In the first eight weeks, not only were we able to unify our prospecting and conversion strategies across digital platforms, we also created a new and customized communication approach that integrated creative, content and digital leadership within the precision marketing space to allow Lactalis Canada to target Canadian foodservice professionals.  

This unified approach allowed Lactalis Canada Foodservice to acquire many new followers on LinkedIn and subsequently increase their Earned and Owned Media opportunities within the foodservice industry. Furthermore, it facilitated the collection of invaluable CRM data through a customized product sampling program which interacted with over 12% of restaurant owners and operators in Canada within the first two months of launch.