Small Business Strategy with a ‘Cherry’ on Top
Small Business Strategy with a ‘Cherry’ on Top https://northstrategic.com/wp-content/uploads/CherryLane_0B5A3223-1024x683.jpg 1024 683 Jonathan Forani https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0224c5ae9357da0ca0dcbe96be87c430?s=96&d=mm&r=gBy Jamie Love, Sr. Manager, Digital Media Strategy
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As a small business ourselves, North Strategic knows the value of strong digital strategies to give the little guy a leg up.
So, when we partnered with Cherry Lane, a family-run business and farm operating since 1907, we knew how to help. The business had little to no digital footprint: no measurable ads running online and modest social engagement.
To raise awareness and drive relevant traffic to their website and online store, North assisted with an audit of existing digital and social assets and helped Cherry Lane set up analytics for their online infrastructure critical to tracking customer journey and marking key events on-site.
Leveraging existing social channels, we developed a plan to compliment communications efforts and extend the brands digital footprint through social amplification and advertising to generate key awareness and engagement. We leveraged these same social platforms to test new creative and surface relevant audiences.
Digital marketing for Canadian small business owners
The results were the most significant digital lift in Cherry Lane’s recent history: over 39 per cent of new traffic visited the site from Facebook and Instagram paid support during the primary campaign period with an average time on site of one minute as users viewed over three pages per session upon visiting the landing page. Further leveraging these learnings, North developed a search campaign around key terms to reach more users. These efforts attracted an audience that spent an average of more than one minute on the site, a strong result for any sized business looking to raise awareness.
With such a strong outcome, North secured an opportunity for an always-on campaign to support Cherry Lane’s goals and leverage learnings from incoming audience habits and emerging search trends in market. Since the start of the campaign, Cherry Lane saw sales double over the same period last year and major grocers increase the frequency of their orders.
Social media for Canadian small business owners
On top of our social and digital amplification efforts, we partnered with four Ontario-based influencers to help build brand awareness and affinity and bring Cherry Lane into the conversation around a relevant trending moment: National Cherry Day. Influencers developed content highlighting the benefits of Cherry Lane’s 100-per-cent pure concentrated tart cherry juice and how they integrate it into some of their favourite recipes.
With National Cherry Day as the news hook, we pitched Cherry Lane as the premium Canadian source for tart cherry juice and generated coverage in major Canadian news outlets, including CHCH Morning Live, Foodism TO, Toronto Star and Yahoo! News Canada.
From one small business to another, it has been a rewarding journey to see Cherry Lane come out on top just in time to celebrate Small Business Month. The success story can serve as a reminder to small and medium-sized businesses who are too often under the impression that they can’t afford PR support from agencies, even those like North who operate within a large global network. Though we have a lengthy client roster of big businesses at North, we offer a range of services that smaller clients can take advantage of to usher their business into an exciting new chapter.