At the beginning of 2015 Adviso was mandated by Arctic Gardens, leading processor of frozen vegetables in Canada, to help them through their digital transformation, develop web assets, and deploy a content strategy through the launch of a new blog. With this content marketing project, Arctic Gardens’s goal was to drive new audiences to its Owned platforms to become less dependant of media investments.
At that time, Adviso had already been managing the brand’s search campaigns for a year, as well as managing its Facebook community, and providing occasional support for the client’s social media promotions.
Adviso developed and implemented a solid content marketing initiative including a variety of owned, earned and paid digital strategies.
A year after the launch of this major content marketing project, the strategy has borne fruits (and veggies!)
The objective? Grow the brand’s online visibility, increase traffic to Arctic Gardens’ digital assets, and build an engaged community around the brand. For this partnership:
- Adviso drove the strategy with the client;
- Adviso took responsibility for the operationalization of one part of the deliverables, and supported the Arctic Gardens team throughout the other deliverables;
- Adviso had a continuous overview of the results and actions, and kept the client informed on a regular basis.
As the project evolved, we moved, often simultaneously, through multiples stages. Let’s take a look back on what we’ve done.
Create a first blog for Arctic Gardens and develop a multiplatform content strategy
When the time came to put together a strategy for the Arctic Gardens blog, Adviso came up against several challenges related both to the digital ecosystem of the brand, and to its industry: The agrifood industry.
1 – The first challenge was to strengthen brand awareness (particularly outside Quebec) and improve the visibility of Arctic Gardens in SERPs, in spite of low search volumes and few mentions on the web;
2 – Another challenge was the creation of a new digital asset – a blog – without an existing content strategy. In order to identify how the brand could best be positioned online, a major audit was undertaken and work was done to better understand its digital ecosystem;
3 – Finally, a whole other challenge was to carve out a place for Arctic Gardens among the vast quantities of content created around the food world, and take a position on subjects like nutrition, recipes and family, all very popular with users.
Adviso took complete responsibility for strategic planning for the blog. Relying on a specific methodology, the Inbound Marketing team carried out a comprehensive audit (analysis of the brand’s digital assets, search trends and user searches, social media monitoring, benchmarks, etc.) before defining a strategy for the blog (content direction and themes).
Secondly, Adviso acted as an expert consultant to optimize operations by putting in place collaborative tools and a solid content creation process in order to help Arctic Gardens gather and organize the necessary internal and external resources.
Finally, Adviso supported the Artctic Gardens team in the management and production of content, taking part in brainstorms, training writers on web writing best practices, reviewing contents, etc.. During work sessions, teams identified the content ideas with the highest potential to perform well in search and on social media, using an analysis of different SEO and social metrics.
This allowed Arctic Gardens to put forward useful and relevant content related to actual user searches, and to align content production with market and seasonal trends.
Once the blog was launched and the first content published, the priority was to deploy a multiplatform content strategy going beyond Facebook. It was important to break down the silos between the different digital assets, and to diversify content formats in order to increase traffic to these platforms. It was also necessary to develop an optimal content distribution strategy.
A content distribution and promotion plan was therefore set up by platform for each piece of content.
A year and a half after the launch of the blog in March 2015, the measured results speak for themselves:
- Increase of traffic to Arctic Gardens’ website and blog:
- Since the beginning of the year, there has been an increase of more than 78% (YoY) in the number of sessions originating from search engines;
- Over the months of May, June and July, organic traffic increased by 58.38% YoY (while total traffic increased by only 6.73%)
- Enriched content offering: More than 50 articles have been created in French and English since the blog launched in March 2015;
- Relevant and useful content related to users’ actual searches: in 90 days (June, July and August), Arctic Gardens generated 36k clicks on SERPs, 11k of which were for the blog (a proportion of 30%)
- Lasting, evergreen assets specific to the brand. Some of the articles created last year, like “Gardening 101” and “The essential guide to a successful picnic”, were among the most popular landing pages this summer.
- Rise of community engagement around the brand.
Structuring and developing digital assets for Arctic Gardens
While developing the content strategy, Adviso stressed the importance of working on the optimization of the brand’s website and existing social media presence, which are critical platforms for the acquisition of traffic across multiple channels.
1 – Optimizing the brand’s social presence
Arctic Gardens brought each social platform up to date, planned ongoing improvements with the client using optimization guides, and provided support for community management. This work enriched and standardized Arctic Gardens’ content and contributed significantly to an increase in engagement across all platforms.
2 – Website optimization
Adviso worked on various levels to help give the website more weight with search engines, and improve the user experience.
The Inbound Marketing team first optimized the site’s recipe pages (added structured data, visuals, share buttons, etc.) which gave the brand increased visibility both on SEPRs and on Pinterest. At the same time, the optimizations facilitated and encouraged sharing and engagement on the site.
The SEO and UX recommendations improved the performance of the landing pages used in media campaigns, and improved conversion rates:
- Organic traffic on the recipes almost doubles YoY;
- Conversions increased of 128%;
- Among the 10 key words that generated the most organic traffic on aParmi les 10 mots-clés qui ont généré le plus de trafic organique vers arcticgardens.ca during June, July and August 2016, 7 are associated with recipes.
Optimized recipes pages
In the aim of growing the online popularity of Arctic Gardens, Adviso also took responsibility for correcting broken external links and seeking out other opportunities to gain mentions and grow an external network by developing relationships with partners.
Finally, Adviso lead, in collaboration with Reptiletech, the complete redesign of the onsite recipe search engine. To do this, Adviso created a common workspace to facilitate collaboration among stakeholders. This project significantly improved the visibility of the website’s top level recipes in SERPs.
Increase brand awareness
In the aim of increasing awareness of the Arctic Gardens brand, particularly outside Quebec, Adviso deployed a variety of strategies: Promoting blog content to specific audiences, media exposure, and highlighting the partnerships developed with the brand.
The Digital Media and Inbound Marketing teams also worked together to create a trend calendar. Campaign managers were then able to deploy sponsored link campaigns featuring relevant recipes, chosen based on search trends and seasonal trends.
These efforts paid off:
- ince 2014, Adviso has generated more than 27 million impressions, 39% of which were outside Quebec, both through AdWords and Facebook;
- Since 2016, the Paid channel represents 44% of sessions on the site, and 48% of total conversions (time spent on the site surpasses 5 minutes, 3 page views per session, recipe shared), which represents a conversion rate increase of 221% and a bounce rate decrease of 31%, as compared to last year.
Generate new audiences
On the owned-earned side, the Inbound Marketing team helped Arctic Gardens acquire new audiences beyond its owned platforms.
To do this, Adviso worked in an influence marketing approach to developed relationships with bloggers. This opened the door for the first time for collaboration on the co-creation of content and recipes with influencers like Bernard Lavallée (Le Nutritionniste Urbain), Emilie Murmure, Max L’Affamé and nutritionist Karine Gravel.
By developing relationships with influencers, Arctic Gardens also benefited from an increase in natural mentions and shares of its content by the influencers quoted in the various blog articles.
This strategy brought more visibility to the content created by Arctic Gardens, which was largely dependent on paid efforts, and allowed the brand to reach new audiences.
All in all, over the past two years, the relationship between Arctic Gardens and Adviso has evolved into a true strategic partnership based on close collaboration between the teams, which is the root of the current success of the blog. The efforts put into this content marketing mandate at each stage created a true synergy between Arctic Gardens’ earned, owned and paid platforms resulting in a significant growth of the key performance indicators identified at the very outset of the project: The brand is more visible online, the triffic on the site increased and the engagement around the community is stronger than ever!
Thanks to Matthieu Casanova, Inbound-SEO Team Lead, and Sébastien Mailloux, Digital Media Campaign Manager, for their collaboration in the writing of this article.
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