Theory is good but seeing how it’s implemented in practice is even better.

Today’s article is about an award-winning campaign for Bellamy’s First. You’ll find many interesting concepts in this case study.

Bellamy’s Organic was founded in 2004 by a Tasmanian family who wanted to provide nutritious organic food for their children. They are now one of the largest producers of organic baby food in Australia as well as having a significant presence in China and across South East Asia.

The challenge

Bellamy’s faced three significant challenges heading into this campaign.

• Challenge #1: Drive awareness of Bellamy’s Organic within regulations
• Challenge #2: Win new customers in a highly competitive industry
• Challenge #3: Find cost-effective ways to engage consumers.

The approach

They began by taking an in-depth look into the brand and the customer in order to ensure success in the campaign execution.

From research and their own stats, they had a clearly defined target audience.

After that, through a combination of social listening and analyzing customer reviews on ProductReview, they pinpointed that Bellamy’s customers were ready and willing to share their experiences with the product.

This sparked an Aha! moment.

With Bellamy’s customers willing to share their experiences they decided to turn mothers into brand advocates. They wanted these brand advocates to share their experiences with the product in a way that would boost Bellamy’s credibility amongst their friends and followers, and effectively say the things that the brand couldn’t say.

To get cut-through with their target market they decided to create a social & content marketing strategy that would:

• Emotively tap into the mentality of a new mother
• Encourage her to engage with the brand
• Address her concerns with content that provided the answers she was looking for
• Educate her on Bellamy’s mission and purpose

Through creative thinking, they elaborated on their “Firsts” mantra and arrived at the concept of focusing on parent and baby ‘firsts’.

By conducting further, more specific, research on keyword volume and content virality they were able to select topical milestones that celebrated an infant’s firsts.

They called the campaign ‘Bellamy’s Firsts’, shifting the focus from a transactional message to a transformational one.

Each campaign month had a select theme, enabling them to create:

• Facebook competitions, introducing the theme and encouraging followers to participate by sharing relevant experiences or tips.
• Blog articles, collating user comments which were then shared on social media and via email towards the end of the month.
• Instagram photo competitions, where followers were incentivized to share pictures as well as their stories and experiences for a chance to win prizes from adjacent industries – like department store gift cards, skin care products, or Bellamy’s own products.

The execution

This user-generated-content became collateral that could be used for many months after across multiple channels including; blog content, Facebook galleries, Instagram posts, and email sequences.

In addition to creating content that spoke to real-life examples to help current and potential mothers, the viral nature of this approach enabled Bellamy’s to amplify their reach while keeping ad spend relatively low. This meant that their social media posts gained an additional 1 million impressions on top of those they paid to reach.

Bellamy’s were able to show that they were with mothers through all of their ‘firsts’, whether happy or challenging. This helped them to build trust with their target audience.

The results

They measured three campaign objectives: brand awareness, user engagement, and relevant community growth.

They smashed all of the objectives.

Conclusion

Even with products that are hard to market (regulations) and have competitors with extremely deep pockets (e.g. in Bellamy’s case Nestle was one of their main competitors), you can still achieve great results with great research before starting, and then great campaign and great execution.

A fantastic product which almost literally sold itself also helped, but each good product needs that extra help to make it big.

An award-winning case study: Bellamy’s Firsts

PS. If you need to market something that has lots of constraints (in terms of regulations or what you can or cannot do) check also this article about how to advertise stuff that’s hard to advertise.