Canyon Bakehouse, a dedicated gluten free bakery located along the Front Range in Loveland, Colo., has provided delicious, wholesome gluten free bakery products to an underserved community since 2009. The Canyon Bakehouse customer is dedicated to living a gluten-free lifestyle and regularly searches for products and recipes that meet their dietary needs without sacrificing on taste and quality, Our challenge was to increase overall engagement of the current Facebook fan base and attract new fans and potential customers. We also worked with a small budget, had one month to pull the program together, and a team of only two to execute and monitor the program.

Since our community is looking for a variety of gluten free options, we partnered with well-established and non-competing brands in the gluten free market. This allowed Canyon to position itself as a leader in the industry, create lasting relationships with these brands, and generate awareness for Canyon Bakehouse within each brand’s existing fan base.

We created and launched the Month of Love Gluten Free Giveaways to promote both the theme of February love as well as the brand’s tagline: “love bread again.” We developed this tagline based on the consumer insight that gluten-free consumers still want to eat and enjoy delicious bread.

Canyon posted 20 days of gluten free giveaways. Each day featured a product from Canyon, and at least one other gluten free brand. To enter, fans had to “like” or “share” the image, and comment on the post often answering a question. The primary social media outlet for this contest was Facebook and we promoted the contest on Twitter by driving potential fans to the Facebook page.

A few of the brands we partnered with: LARABAR, Food Should Taste Good, Justin’s Nut Butter, Enjoy Life Foods, Earthbound Farm and Organic Valley.

• The number of unique users per day who engaged with the Canyon Bakehouse Facebook Page was up 234% during the month of the promotion (February) versus the prior month (January).
• The improved engagement carried over into March, which still had a 78% increase in daily engagement versus January (also in lieu of Facebook’s algorithm changes).
• The number of unique users that saw content related to the page (reach) was up 197% during the promotion.
• Qualitatively, we found that other gluten-free brands were thrilled to partner with like-minded companies and indicated there were not enough opportunities to reach the gluten-free community as a group.
  

• Each post averaged an organic reach of 11,000+, with 300 comments and 250 likes
• The month-long promotion reached a total of 451,480 Facebook users, consisting of completely organic, unpaid positioning
• 8,000+ new Facebook followers from beginning of promotion “teasers” to the final promotion day