Collin Street Bakery
About Collin Street Bakery
Collin Street Bakery, world-famous for deluxe fruitcakes and baked goods that have been a cherished holiday tradition for millions of families for more than 100 years, has always been a pioneer when it comes to creating all-natural, hand-picked fruit and hand-shelled pecan nut-baked products for customers.
The bakery has also been a trailblazer for adopting new ways of marketing and selling their popular baked goods and desserts. The business was among the earliest entrants into the lucrative mail order business in the early nineteenth century, which resulted in Collin Street Deluxe® Fruitcakes reaching homes across the entire world. Around the middle of the century, the bakery embraced direct mail and phone marketing, and it was one of the first companies to accept orders by mail, phone, fax, and online.
So, it was an honor when Collin Street Bakery turned to Marketing.com for marketing strategies to help them grow traffic with digital marketing to their website in order to increase sales during the holiday season.
The Situation
Collin Street Bakery wanted to increase traffic to its newly launched Shopify storefront and sought to ramp up marketing efforts over the holiday season for its wide variety of classic, apricot pecan, cherry fudge, and other fruitcakes, pecan pies, cheesecakes, and cookies in time for the holiday season. Collin Street, although well known as a leader in fruitcake, wanted to grow market share within the fruitcake segment and capitalize on the emerging artisanal food movement that is interested in naturally crafted foods. Collin Street Bakery also wanted a way to grow awareness of Collin Street Bakery products with younger audiences unfamiliar with the history and legacy of the Collin Street brand.
The Solution
First, we focused on first improving the performance of Collin Street Bakery’s e-commerce site, through a comprehensive audit and plan to tackle onsite issues impacting site performance. Considering the site was launched in the summer, and the holiday season was right around the corner, we moved fast realizing that incremental traffic gains may not even be possible given the re-structuring of the site and temporary position declines typically experienced with new website launches.
Next, we completed extensive keyword research identifying opportunities to extend content strategy across products, blogs, FAQ’s, video and more. Knowing that growth in traffic from SEO would not materialize right away, to accomplish the last step of our strategy we went to work on improving organic social media strategy and launching ads on streaming TV as part of comprehensive test of OTT.
The OTT campaign leveraged data to create custom affinity audiences defined by keywords and visits to competitor URLs and third-party audiences that closely aligned with target and identified buyer personas. Buyer personas that were used to mirror the way Collin Street Bakery customers were more likely to engage with OTT during the holidays and help us align the right third-party audiences to reach them.
The Result
Despite these challenges:
- Traffic to the website over the holiday season increased over 97% YOY, 49% from organic search, and Collin Street had the highest brand association with key SEO terms compared to competitors.
- The Collin Street Bakery domain received 18.32% more impressions in Google Search results pages from expanded content and revealed opportunities to grow in search rankings for other Collin Street baked goods and gift packages.
- Traffic from set top boxes increased 77% YOY and average order value for organic search increased over paid search order value.
- To increase awareness and attract younger audiences, we:
- Developed social media platform-specific strategies to capitalize on the visually appealing product categories with aesthetically pleasing food photography, shared recipes and family stories highlighting the traditional and seasonal themes and encouraged user-generated content.
- Created engaging storytelling and heritage posts that highlighted the bakery’s 125-year history and provided behind the scenes looks at how the Collin Street Bakery magic occurs.
- A social media strategy for paid social ads boosted posts to increase impressions of trending posts with specific commercial intent and drive more traffic to the site from social media engagements.
The evolution of our marketing efforts from traditional into more digital channels, OTT aligned with our core customer by delivering tailored video content showcasing the story behind our World-Famous Fruitcake and other bakery items. The emotional connection with potential customers using behavioral and demographic data ultimately increased brand awareness and drove sales through our ecommerce channel.
— Jenny Super, CMO, Collin Street Bakery
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