The Execution

We had worked with SGC Foodservice in the past and approached them with a recurring revenue sponsorship opportunity. Our new show, The Place, had a lot to offer to the advertiser.

SGC Foodservice was opening a brand-new culinary facility called Restaurant Marketplace. Restaurant Marketplace provides culinary products and services to the public – not just chefs and culinary professionals. The advertiser wanted to drive awareness about their new facility while also growing their email database for future marketing purposes.

To achieve all the goals of our advertiser, our team put together a robust sponsorship package including:

• Weekly cooking segment on The Place
• On-air commercials
• Display ads and pre-roll ads
• Facebook Live event at the facility

While all of this drove in a lot of branding for the advertiser, we wanted to ensure SGC Foodservice would grow their email database. We created a weekly sweepstakes campaign to couple with their segment on The Place.

Each week, one lucky winner receives a $50 gift card to the new facility. We optimized the sweepstakes registration form with an email opt-in and lead-generation questions SGC Foodservice could use for future targeted marketing campaigns.

The campaign brought in a brand new demographic of younger customers to Restaurant Marketplace. The business noticed such an influx of customers that they even had to adjust their weekday hours to stay open later to accommodate.

The immediate success of this campaign inspired us to start another. When we’d initially met with SGC Foodservice, it was very important to them and our station to support local restaurants. So we created Ozarks Big Bite – another 52-week sponsorship campaign.

Each week our show would highlight a local restaurant that is also a vendor of SGC Foodservice. This campaign allowed us to feature and promote local restaurants that need business right now and align SGC Food service with the local restaurants in their community as well. Then viewers would be able to enter to win a $50 gift card to the weekly featured restaurant.

The Results

This contest has been a tremendous success for our station and SGC Foodservice. The advertiser has seen a big uptick in customers from a previously underrepresented demographic and even had to expand their hours to accommodate for the increased foot traffic. And this campaign isn’t even over yet!

Our first campaign, All Things Culinary, has delivered over 7,500 entries so far. Email opt-ins added more than 1,800 opt-ins for our station and over 3,000 for the advertiser’s database. Plus, we identified over 1,000 people looking to update or remodel their kitchen this year.

Ozarks Big Bite has so far brought in over 6,800 entries, collected over 2,800 email opt-ins for SGC Foodservice, and added more than 1,600 new email opt-ins to our station databases.

This has been a great opportunity to utilize our lifestyle show in a way that made sense for us and for our viewers. The combination of great content and a great advertiser was a big win. Together, the two campaigns brought in $70,000 ($35,000 per campaign) of recurring revenue for our station.