All Fired Up: How To Get Your Brand On Summer Shopping Lists This Grilling Season

Big box stores are readying the grill inventory while consumers count the days until they fire up their backyard barbecues. There’s pent-up enthusiasm for this year’s traditional grilling season, and you don’t have to be a data expert (like us!) to know that seasonal staples (hot dogs and burgers, anyone?) will soon top North American shoppers’ grocery lists. 

As CPG advertisers devise their summer game plan, they often face the challenge of keeping their unique products top-of-mind in a season typically dominated by traditional grilling standbys. 

To help your summer strategy, we’d like to offer insight into how AdAdapted has helped three great brands get on shoppers’ summer grilling grocery lists, and in consumers’ carts, during the hot BBQ season. 

What’s our blue ribbon winning secret sauce, you ask? We’ll give you the recipe: our first-party consumer insights from our exclusive network of popular shopping list apps. So napkins up, and let’s dig into the details!

‍

Bush’s Best: Motivate Trial

Classic bean brand Bush’s Best aimed to drive trial of their “Grillin’ Beans” product line during the summer months. With a large-scale awareness campaign in progress, their agency, Empower Media Marketing, partnered with AdAdapted to execute a lower-funnel digital strategy that would influence consumers during grocery planning and shopping. 

AdAdapted's approach for brands like Bush’s is to target grocery-buying decision-makers through the mobile apps they use to shop. Our tools get promoted products, like Bush’s Best, onto mobile shopping lists using proprietary integrations with those apps. AdAdapted uses exclusive in-app behavioral signals to identify and target specific buyers who’ve demonstrated interest in specific product categories. 

Overall, Bush’s Best found a highly targeted audience of mobile list users poised to add complementary BBQ items like Grillin’ Beans to their summer meal planning lists. AdAdapted offers brands like Bush’s Best exclusive access to promote their products to over 46MM active, verified shoppers. 

‍

Kikkoman: Drive Consideration and Purchase Intent

Speaking of top summer grilling staples, Kikkoman, a brand well-known for its soy sauces and marinades, may not initially come to mind. However, working through Active International, AdAdapted launched a comprehensive digital campaign to get more Kikkoman products onto shoppers’ grocery lists during summer and other seasonal shifts. The goal was to encourage mobile list users to add branded items to their lists while nurturing customer purchase decisions. 

AdAdapted’s Keyword Intercept tool is a popular method to get brands like Kikkoman onto shoppers’ lists, driving purchase intent. How it works: list users who’ve added an item to their list, for example, “chicken,” will see a promoted item that complements their keyword, in this case, a Kikkoman branded sauce. Allowing brands to connect with shoppers actively in market for products demonstrates the precision AdAdapted’s audience targeting delivers, unlike other advertising tactics. 

Brands like Kikkoman work with AdAdapted to drive customers through the sales funnel, from awareness to intent to purchase. Our unique ad tech products offer an omni-approach to savvy consumers buying in-store and online, growing reach and sales any time of year.

‍

McCormick Grill Mates^®: Competitor Conquest

In our final example, McCormick, known for their spices and flavoring products, partnered with AdAdapted to launch a campaign promoting their Grill Mates® spice line. The campaign targeted several major retailers using AdAdapted's Add-to-List and Keyword Intercept tools to encourage shoppers to add McCormick's products to their digital grocery list during grilling season.

Brands like McCormick have a direct sightline to incremental “list adds” from their campaigns when running product promotions with AdAdapted. We measure the number of shoppers who have added a promoted item for the first time to their mobile shopping list to serve as one metric of campaign effectiveness. 

AdAdapted also tracks conquested list-makers. For every individual who adds a newly promoted product in place of a competitor’s brand or generic product, we record that data point to drive future campaign optimizations. 

McCormick’s strong campaign results demonstrate the effectiveness of shopping list marketing for getting promoted products onto shoppers’ summer lists. In addition, seasonal promotions give brands valuable learnings to apply to future campaigns. 

Getting in front of consumers who are prepping their digital lists for weekend BBQs is just one example of how AdAdapted excels in connecting advertisers to shoppers at precisely the moment they are making purchase decisions.

No matter your product or the season, AdAdapted works with CPG brands to develop a targeted mobile advertising campaign that influences purchase intent when it matters most. 

Looking to learn more about how we can get results like these for your brand this summer? Contact us today!