Recipes are our love of making food into something greater than the sum of its parts, and recipes have long been fuelling great swathes of internet content.
They are one of the great staples of the thousands of hours of video content that gets uploaded every day.
Video recipes rock according to those food and homeware brands investing in the format.
A recent campaign by Sarson’s vinegar created a series of pickling videos (and pickling is the latest craze in kitchens across the UK), which showcased how vinegar could be used with different ingredients like cabbage and root veggies to make sauerkraut and pickled beetroot.
The campaign was based on research by the Sarson’s team which discovered the under-30s suck up platform-targeted recipe videos.
Although pickling may be thought of as a ‘mend-and-make-do’ method from the 1940s, and our neighbours in Europe, to whom preserving fresh food in salt or vinegar is a way of life, must secretly shake their heads at British gastronomic ignorance, this form of food preparation is being viewed as a new discovery by a whole generation.
So when Sarson’s created recipe videos specifically for You Tube, they not only demonstrated pickling procedure but very much sold the Sarson’s brand. The campaign generated 4m views in 2016, and a growth of 541% on inbound website traffic compared to 2015.
The two lessons to pick out from this case study are that a strategic approach to any video campaign is vital (do the research, commission the video and analyse the results) and that the right video created for a specific platform rather than a generic one-size fits all approach will help engage the target audience.
A recent article by Econsultancy underscores the importance of creating bespoke video for existing channels, whether online or broadcast. Simply re-versioning or tweaking existing videos may diminish the engagement value of the content; “the best results occur when videos or ads are first created with the medium in mind.”
At Mendip Media we’ve just finished a video series for Lakeland which also feature pickling accoutrements, so we’re on-track to be (hashtag) on-message with this year’s vinegary mainstream of products and produce.
Importantly the Lakeland videos are tailored to their online platform which means they are contextualised for the target audience and more likely to be watched to the end.
That recipe videos are undoubtedly a magnet for a younger demographic means the genre is a potentially valuable marketing vehicle for food brands, but without a fully-fledged commissioning strategy to create the right video formats for specific platforms don’t expect to achieve the same results as Sarson’s.
By Nicky Robertson, Managing Director