CHALLENGE: Become the Industry Expert
Through traditional PR and digital marketing efforts, Kiterocket has made great strides in gaining consumer brand awareness for Stemilt Growers, one of the world’s leading fresh produce brands. In 2016 specifically, the time was ripe to combine web, digital marketing, public relations and social media for a unified communications front to make an even stronger impact. But first, the brand needed a fresh website overhaul for both aesthetic and technical reasons, with the primary goal to improve SEO, increase site traffic and improve the user experience and engagement.
Client
SERVICES
Strategic Planning and Brand Development
Public Relations
Website Development
Content Creation
website traffic increase
blog post views
brand impressions
STRATEGY: Reach Consumers Across All Channels
Kiterocket developed four websites in 2016, including a new corporate site Stemilt.com; an e-commerce site, SincerelyFresh.com; the branded product site LilSnappers.com; and AppleforThat.com. In order to increase brand awareness for Stemilt in the apple category, the “There’s An Apple for That” site was specifically created to capture long-tail keyword traffic, using niche topical landing pages optimized for SEO. Our research showed that each month more than 500k consumers were searching “what is the best apple for…,” and we wanted a piece of that action.
In addition to the new websites, we also launched a comprehensive in-bound marketing strategy, conducted national consumer media outreach and fueled social media. To assist with authentic content development across multiple channels, we also launched a blog program – “The Kitchen Council” – in which we partner with top tier bloggers to provide monthly content, based on trending search terms, as well as gain cross-marketing exposure to their audience.
RESULTS: Increased Traffic, Consumer Connections
Our efforts were a success in 2016 as Kiterocket worked with Stemilt to raise brand awareness, educate consumers and engage with target audiences on a deeper level to foster long-term brand loyalty and drive produce-aisle decisions and sales. By revamping the corporate home page, we increased website visits by 25% and improved the user experience, including a 12% bounce rate decrease. Separately, our There’s an Apple for That campaign site fulfilled the strategy to position Stemilt as the de facto apple expert and capture long-tail keyword traffic. The site now receives 7,000 visits per month on average.
For content, by mapping blog posts to trending topics, we garnered more than 200k blog visits for the year. Social media accounts and impressions were also way up, due to curated content and efforts to reach influencers with seasonal fruit mailers.
Among traditional media, the PR team drove 52 placements equating to 17.2 million impressions with key placements in Martha Stewart Online, Shape magazine, USA Today’s 10Best.com, OnTrak magazine, Sally’s Baking Addiction, Chicago Parent and many foodie blogs.
Social media channels also performed well with increases across all key performance indicators, including total fans/followers, average monthly impressions, average monthly engagement and average monthly fans/followers. Social media was a key traffic driver to Stemilt.com, with an average of nearly 2,000 visits per month, via paid and organic reach, marking an 84% year-over-year increase.