Nutritional powdered food brand Huel has grown to sell over 50 million meals a year, in over 80 countries, since its launch four years ago. To continue to acquire new customers, the brand turned to mobile ad campaigns across social platforms, with the help of tech engine Vidsy. Here, we speak to Josh Caine Goldsmith, head of performance marketing, Huel, and Gerard Keeley, CEO & co-founder, Vidsy, to understand more about the partnership and the challenges in keeping customer acquisition fresh. 

DTC Daily: How has your customer acquisition strategy changed since you launched four years ago?

Josh Caine Goldsmith (Huel): Our customer acquisition strategy focuses mainly on online performance marketing, predominantly Facebook, Instagram and Google channels as these platforms offer the biggest prizes in terms of audience reach, optimisation to downstream events and leveraging 1st party data. Recently, some of the other social/API partners such as Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit have upped their game too and we've had some success albeit on a smaller scale. 

We also have a fantastic customer base of loyal Hueligans who love our product and actively promote our brand with our refer-a-friend program. It adds an extra element of trust to our brand it's great to hear such positive feedback from our customers.

Looking to the future, we've got a roadmap to test and broaden our acquisition efforts both online and offline, experimenting with everything from influencers and brand partnerships to out-of-home and TV. It's much harder to measure the true value of these channels so we're trying to work with partners who can offer a robust measurement system and who focus on direct response.

Why did you decide you needed to change your approach to customer acquisition?

Josh Caine Goldsmith (Huel): We've come a long way on performance marketing alone - we're now at a stage where we need to be testing a broader range of awareness and acquisition driving tools (but with a measurable, performance-driven methodology) in order to scale our efforts and reach people through other mediums than just their mobile phone and laptops.

What challenges have you faced when trying to bring new customers to the Huel Powder brand? 

Josh Caine Goldsmith (Huel): One of the biggest challenges is changing the perception of Huel to potential customers who could benefit from our products. Most busy people these days will resort to having few meals a week which are selected for their convenience factor - ie a quick meal on the go. More often than not, these will not be very nutritious, not taste particularly great and cost much more than a serving of Huel. We aim to address these factors by providing affordable nutrition which is quick and easy, with the added benefit of being plant-based and sustainable. It's a win-win situation!

However, I think that sometimes we as marketers forget how new we are. Not just Huel as a brand but the category of 'Complete Nutrition' or 'Complete Food' itself. We're not promoting a traditional meal replacement or a diet shake - it's just nutritious food, packaged in a way that's super convenient for the consumer. The hardest part is challenging the mindset about what 'food' is, and understanding that Huel can be really beneficial to a wide range of people. Being a direct-to-consumer brand we have the luxury of being able to talk to our customers and they post about us on social media - it's amazing how many different types of people have Huel to make their lives easier - doctors, nurses, pilots, programmers just to name a few but also people suffering from medical conditions such as IBS, diabetes and obesity. The testimonials page on our website has so many inspirational stories about how Huel has changed their lives

How did you measure the success of your social campaigns with Huel? 

Gerard Keeley (Vidsy): Our creative exploration with Huel allowed us to create 10+ videos, and enabled us to build out a clear test and learn strategy ahead of launch. This allowed us to begin to identify which elements of the video creative were driving performance for Huel via the social platform’s ad interfaces. From this insight, we then iterated the videos and were able to drive additional performance using the same test and learn methodology.

With so many ads on social, it can be hard to stand out. What must brands do to achieve this? 

Gerard Keeley (Vidsy): First things first, brands must be creating bespoke content fit for purpose and the platform/channel - Vidsy helps global brands achieve ad success by constantly developing mobile optimised content for specific channels and KPIs. 

Ad fatigue is a real reason why brands need to look beyond platform best practises and this is why Vidsy will always work closely with every client to understand what it is that drives their audiences to take action. In order to do this, we believe that you have to create at scale and adopt a test and learn mentality for creative rather than overspending on media to make up the gap. With Huel we tested different reasons why people buy Huel i.e. price point per meal, natural ingredients and how fast it is to make.

Do you think social is purely an acquisition channel or can it be used for brand building too? 

Gerard Keeley (Vidsy): Social is definitely a medium that can be leveraged to execute at all stages of the marketing funnel. From awareness, through to acquisition video on social platforms has a key part to play.  

DTC brands such as Huel are a prime example of how this can be achieved successfully with the right creative strategy and ability to execute. Brands are normally good at planning but lack creative execution skills.