• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, November 12, 2014

With nearly 50 national food brands, recipes are like spun gold for giant ConAgra Foods.

The company employs recipes featuring its brands in numerous direct-to-consumer channels, including individual brand sites and ConAgra's heavily trafficked umbrella site ReadySetEat.com. 

ReadySetEat — a user-friendly recipe finder designed to enable busy consumers to solve the perennial "what to make for dinner" dilemma — includes several thousand recipes that can be made in 30 minutes or less, with seven or fewer common ingredients (including one or more ConAgra products, of course). 

The site is also the hub for a broader customer relationship management program, explains ConAgra CRM and recipe strategy manager Megan West. Consumers who sign up as members receive a free, twice-monthly newsletter that includes recipes, special offers, sale price notices for the local store of the recipient's choice, a digital recipe box to keep favorites handy, and access to a quick-click digital shopping list tool, she tells Marketing Daily. There is a Hispanic version of the recipe-finder/CRM program as well at listoyservido.com.  

ConAgra's global marketing team also offers recipes via social media channels, including those of individual brands and ConAgra's umbrella sites (ReadySetEat has a large Pinterest following, for example).

In addition, recipes are central to the seasonal and other promotional strategies that ConAgra's sales team and shopper marketing team help create and implement for retailers in-store and on their sites. 

West and her team manage the recipe database, which has been made accessible online to an expanding internal user base in the past year, and assist the other internal teams in selecting the best recipes for consumers and retailers based on season and other factors. 

Three years ago, West created a ConAgra Recipe Planner: a paper booklet (also available in PDF format) that helps internal users and retailer partners prioritize recipes by consumer demand within six shopper seasons. 

The Recipe Planner is a user-friendly summary of consumer food search trends, based on an analysis of data from Google's Consumer Food Index for the previous year. "Basically, the Recipe Planner shows what types of recipes consumers are searching for at specific times of the year, to inform teams' searches of our recipe database and help them plan everything from promotions to social media content," says West. 

By helping ConAgra ensure that teams are "pushing out the right recipes at the right times," the Recipe Planner has contributed to significant increases in recipe site traffic and recipe downloads in the past few years, she confirms.

West also acts as a liaison or bridge between marketing and ConAgra's in-house culinary team, which creates about 100 to 200 new recipes per year in response to specific team and retailer needs and new flavor and ingredients trends. For instance, when a brand needs a particular type of recipe for a specific purpose, she provides the culinary team with an analysis of the relevant consumer recipe search trends and briefs them on what recipes along those lines already exist in the database. "All recipe development is grounded in data," she reports. 

Every recipe that's developed and added to the database, ReadySetEat and other sites is new content that drives organic traffic and helps improve and expand ConAgra's keyword-driven paid search marketing — both of which ultimately mean more recipe use and more product sales, points out West. 

Individual brand sites, as well as the recipe content coordinated by the shopper marketing team for retailer and other sites, have recipe-driven traffic and download performance goals to meet.

Working with search marketing experts to ensure that recipe names reflect the search terms actually being used by consumers further increases engagement performance, notes West. For instance, changing one recipe's name from "Chicken Bruscetta Skillet" to "Bruscetta Chicken Skillet" considerably boosted its results, she reports.