CASE STUDY: Melt Bar and Grilled Meltidential Election

In an oversaturated digital world, sometimes we can forget that social media is supposed to be fun. One of the best ways to leverage social media to promote your brand is to create and post content that is lighthearted and engaging. Our client Melt Bar and Grilled was looking for a way to better leverage their social media presence while increasing customer interaction with their brand. DRM took the opportunity to capitalize on the energy of the 2016 presidential election by creating the inaugural Melt Bar and Grilled Meltidential Election.

For the uninitiated, Melt Bar and Grilled is a restaurant chain located in the Cleveland, Columbus and Akron, Ohio areas that specializes in gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, craft beer and unique cocktails. They are well known for their eclectic atmosphere and regular appearances on national television. To elevate brand awareness state-wide, the 2016 Melt Bar and Grilled Meltidential Election was created. This campaign began with the ten most popular Melt sandwiches and eliminated them one-by-one through several rounds of online customer voting. This campaign was given an intentionally “cheesy” tone by using several different types of sandwich puns along with using the silly concept of personifying each “sandidate” by giving them a bio, “political” party and a side dish as a “running mate”. The Meltidential Election was given unique branding with a logo and the slogan “Politicians Bite. Bite ‘Em Back!”

DRM launched a mini-site to be the home of the Meltidential Election. This mobile-friendly site was home to all of the information about the campaign. The first section gave information about each sandwich and offered a fun “Press Quote” that helped to personify each candidate. Melt fans could vote for their favorite sandwich through embedded technology from polling provider Opinion Stage. To keep voters consistently engaged with the campaign and keep them coming back to the site, DRM created the MNN (Melt News Network) blog updated by fictional reporter Sanderson Cooper. This blog was updated bi-weekly and offered a parody of regular election updates using Melt’s sandwiches as characters.

To promote the campaign, DRM devised a comprehensive digital advertising campaign utilizing Facebook’s advertising platform. We used a combination of regular ads and boosted posts to promote the campaign and its related content. The campaign’s ad budget was spread out over four months. Approximately half of this budget was allocated towards weekly ads that were targeted at both those who follow Melt’s Facebook page and those who do not. The ads targeting Melt’s followers were designed to bring Melt’s followers over to the Meltidential Elections site to cast their votes. The ads targeted to non-followers were general ads promoting Melt to people who may or may not be familiar with the brand. The demographic was set to only target those within 15km of any of Melt’s ten locations. The remaining budget was used for boosting one of three weekly Facebook posts promoting the election. This included articles from the MNN blog as well as graphics we had created.

The Melt Bar and Grilled Meltidential Election received over 5.5k votes over the course of the campaign. The ads targeting Melt’s followers received over 5,000 clicks and 35,000 impressions. This is a CTR of about 15% and a conversion rate of about 106%! Ads targeting those who do not currently follow Melt’s page received over 70,000 impressions and had a CTR of about 1%. Collectively, all boosted posts for the Meltidential Election received over 7,000 engagements and 322,000 impressions. After the winner of the election was chosen, Melt hosted a special live video broadcast from their Facebook page using the new “live” feature. This broadcast received over 13,800 views. We saw amazing results with this campaign and are very happy with the passion that Melt’s customers showed. Overall, we believe that the 2016 Melt Bar and Grilled Meltidential Election was a smashing success.