A couple of months ago I featured our first sweet case study for Pure Canadian Maple Syrup. We now have another sweet client on our hands that needed some help in the digital frontier. We just wrapped up our campaign for the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange and here is what we did for them. [Update] this campaign won the following awards:
- Winner: PR News Digital PR Award
- Winner: PR Daily Digital PR Award
- Silver: Bulldog Reporter Digital/Social PR Award
- Runner up: Holmes Report – In2 Sabre Award
About the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange
- The Florida Sweet Corn Exchange is a collective of family farmers growing super sweet varieties of fresh corn in Palm Beach County Florida
- Bred naturally and entirely without GMO’s
- Florida Sweet Corn produces fresh sweet corn November – May but has a peak season between April 1 – June 1
Unique Challenges
- We are marketing fresh sweet corn in the spring, rather than summer – when it is typically thought of as “in season”
- Because our campaign is only active during the peak season of April – June, traditional social media such as Facebook and Twitter are inactive 9 months of the year, rendering them largely ineffective.
Objective & Goals
- To drive traffic to the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange website (sunshinesweetcorn.com) so that visitors can learn how to cook sweet corn and find delicious corn recipes.
- To raise awareness of spring sweet corn
- Generate impressions in April and May for the Florida Sweet Corn brand
- Increase sales of sweet corn East of the Mississippi River
Strategy & Execution
- Pinterest Contest – Pinterest has become very popular for recipes and food images are some of the most pinned and repinned images. We designed developed and implemented a Pinterest contest to help leverage select sweet corn recipes. We wanted pinners to pin from the sunshinesweetcorn.com website so we created a contest landing page with customized pins. (A more in-depth Pinterest strategy post will be coming soon!)
- Organic Search– We wanted to make sure our site was ranking in Google for sweet corn related content so that searchers could experience our brand and content
- Conducted keyword research
- Developed keyword rich content
- On-site optimization
- Deployed a link building strategy in order to increase our popularity signal to Google
- Paid Search – Having our website optimized for “sweet corn” corn content didn’t really give us the opportunity to rank for more general “corn” searches. We wanted to get traffic to our site for searches that didn’t include “sweet corn” in the query as a searcher could easily use sweet corn in place of regular corn.
- Only targeted searches that originated in geographic locations East of the Mississippi River
- Campaigns created around recipes, tips, cooking techniques, meal types and growing corn
- Keyword match types were set to target searches that used “corn” or “sweet corn” in the search query
- Top 5 traffic driving keywords: Corn chowder, Microwave corn, Corn salad, Freeze corn, Vegetarian recipes
- Ran a Cicno de Mayo campaign that drove traffic to our Mexican inspired recipes landing page
- Display Advertising – Promotion for our Pinterest contest and grilling recipes
- Blogger Outreach – Networking and promoting our Pinterest contest through select bloggers
Results by Tactic
- Pinterest Results
- Site received 4,700 visits from Pinterest
- Contest page received 1,513 visits
- Recipes were repined over 7,300 times on Pinterest
- Top recipe visits from Pinterest
- Fresh Corn Salsa (1,342 visits)
- Mexican Style Corn (1,213 visits)
- Kimchi Grilled Corn on the Cob (1,045)
- Organic Search Results
- Visits to the site via organic search grew by 129% compared to last year
- Built 16 high quality, relevant, organic links around 10 pages on site
- Outreached to 46 different sites 106 times
- Published 11 articles
- “Fresh Sweet corn” ranks #1 in Google
- “Sweet corn” ranking went from 17 and now averages about 3rd in Google
- “How to cook sweet corn” ranking went from 15 and now averages about 4th in Google
- 10 pages rank on page one of Google – 6 of which refer to cooking techniques
- 500 different search terms drove traffic to the site
- sunshinesweetcorn.com received over 35,000 impressions in Google
- Paid Search Results
- Google Adwords generated 6,400 visits to the site and 215,000 impressions in Google
- 70% of our Adwords traffic to the site came from searches that didn’t include “sweet corn” in the query
- Avg. Ad position was 1.3
- Avg. Click through rate was 3%
- Avg. Cost per click was $.78
- Cinco de Mayo ad campaign received 195 clicks/4500 impressions/4.3% CTR
- Advertising & Outreach Results
- Blogger outreach drove approx. 200 visits
- Kitchn HTML e-mail banner ad drove 400 visits
- Website banner ads drove 5,524 visits to the site
Campaign Results
In two short months:
- Visits to the site grew by 1,000% (April-May of 2013 compared to April-May of 2012)
- Pageviews grew by 496% (April-May of 2013 compared to April-May of 2012)
- Traffic from a search engine grew by 675%
- 250,000 Search impressions from Google
- Our client, the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange reported record-breaking sales figures for May 2013