Situation

For several years, Sans Bakery has enjoyed success through their wholesale production bakery and retail storefront. With the goal of growing their revenue channels, they built a D2C ecommerce website and expanded their reach with nationwide shipping. The website also includes information and lead capture for new wholesale opportunities.

The team reached out to ITAC for marketing support in order to grow ecommerce sales through D2C and wholesale accounts.

Solution

ITAC and our marketing experts developed a marketing strategy and implementation plan to increase exposure, grow brand awareness, and improve the sales funnels for website conversions, with a dual ecommerce and wholesale focus. The action plan included improvements to the organic social media channels and the creation of paid ads.

For the organic social media plan, ITAC began by defining and organizing the content categories, while optimizing each platform to bring results in a new era of trends and consumption. By managing the posting schedule, we were able to review for timing and content trends, while offering consistent posting for the audience. Additionally, the marketing team advised and collaborated on trending video assets to gain maximum exposure.

As for paid social media, the marketing team advised on a budget, created ads and testing opportunities, and defined reporting metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Facebook and Instagram ads were implemented for outreach to new audiences and for retargeting to website visitors. Both image ads and video reels were used. Once the assets were created, the team looked to historic data and industry trends to build targeted audiences based on interest, demographics, behaviors, location, and more.

Results

As a result of these efforts, Sans Bakery enjoyed a growing reach and awareness, a strong number of social media impressions, an increase in email list and customer data, and increased traffic and activity on the website. Additionally, a refresh to the visual strategy pushed Sans Bakery in a direction of more entertaining and engaging videos to match their visual brand and maximize organic traffic.

Paid ads saw as much as a 10.83% click through rate to the website, when averages for the food and beverage industry range from 0.9 – 1.2%. This traffic was directed to the website, where visitors were prompted with a new popup to subscribe to the email newsletter. Website traffic also generated an increase in ecommerce sales and wholesale opportunities.

In 3 months, Sans Bakery saw a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) of 200%, meaning that every $1 spent on ads generated $2 in sales. Online sales increased by 285%, with a nearly 200% increase in total units sold.