With nearly a dozen awards under their belt, premium Kona coffee producer Makahiki Farms knew they had a great product. The challenge was finding new markets on the mainland in a competitive online marketplace. Although they were gaining some traction via organic search, it wasn’t enough to grab the share of the market they were after. Enter Vuurr. Using a combination of paid search strategies and social media marketing, Makahiki Farms nearly tripled their revenue in just three months with Black Friday setting a record as the biggest online sales day in the company’s history.
In paid search, keywords are king. Premium coffee buyers are a discriminating demographic. Sales cycles can be weeks long and difficult to track after searchers abandon their initial visit. In this case, separating "buying" keywords from "browsing" keywords was the key to success.
By setting up multi-channel funnels in Google Analytics, it became clear how organic search, paid traffic and social media messaging worked in combination to keep the customer engaged throughout the sales cycle. Retargeting the user after the initial visit with tailored messaging was critical in transforming browsers into buyers.
MotorcycleGear.com had a head start on the competition with their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising efforts, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere. Their PPC campaign wasn’t profitable, and they were too busy running a successful online retail operation to learn an entire new skillset and continue running PPC themselves. Vuurr reorganized their PPC campaign and optimized their ads to improve Google Quality Scores (a formula used to determine and advertisement’s position and cost). Meanwhile, the Vuurr development team took over their Facebook page and built a powerful campaign to increase their fan base and drive newsletter signups resulting in increased repeat sales.
Results were staggering. Facebook likes increased by over 12,000 in just four months. Additionally, Vuurr reduced the average amount in dollars spent on a Facebook like by over 1,150% - saving a huge portion of advertising budget that could be reinvested to drive more interactions. Vuurr installed additional analytics throughout the Motorcyclegear.com web property to track the average amount of revenue gained per Facebook like and continued the profitable campaign through the year.
When the promotional organization of Arizona Pima cotton growers approached Vuurr, they posed an incredible short-term challenge with huge long-term plans. In less than three weeks they’d be modeling a selection of superior pima cotton products at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City, and wanted to simulcast the event live via their website. Supima needed significant site restructuring, an in-depth paid search campaign, and search engine strategy to maximize the number of viewers of the simulcast – which would only be aired live for a single hour. After restructuring the primary supima.com property, setting up several landing pages for all major SEM networks (Google, Microsoft, Facebook), and building the SEM campaign, Vuurr increased site traffic – to spike on the day of the event – by 650%.
Building a successful search engine strategy in 13 days is a feat, but launching it and running traffic to the site leading up to the event is even more spectacular. All paid search traffic was directed to specific landing pages formatted for that medium (Facebook landing pages were put into the Supima Facebook page), and specific customer data was collected to remind them on the day of the event. Emails and text messages were sent out the day before and morning of the fashion show to alert users that they could soon view premier Supima products created by top fashion students live from New York.
Epiphany Chocolates was a new branch of Kahala (owners of Cold Stone Creamery and other brands) trying to enter the chocolate market and let their competitors know they’re a force to be reckoned with. They weren’t going to have any brick and mortar stores to begin with, so their online presence had to be fierce. Epiphany wanted a killer website, but their wish list had some complex capabilities that an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution couldn’t offer.
Vuurr attacked the project with full force, creating a custom e-commerce platform while simultaneously building hype for Epiphany’s launch. The website was complete with an intricate shopping cart that allows customers to ship to multiple locations in one order to facilitate easy gift giving. While the development team hammered away on the site, an aggressive Facebook and AdWords campaign was engineered to build a fan base and drive them to the site on launch day.
After weeks of development and online advertising, Vuurr was able to help Epiphany attract over 4,000 Facebook fans and create a VIP club with over 500 highly targeted email addresses in anticipation of their grand opening. Vuurr continues to deliver results and help Epiphany Chocolates take the competition by storm.
