Connecting Food Growers & Healthy Food Consumers

Case Study

900%

Increase In Leads

80%

Decrease in CPA

3%

Increase In Ad Spend

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Overview

I Do Local Foods was looking to grow their marketplace business. Their ultimate goal was to connect local farmers and food growers with a community of healthy lifestyle enthusiasts who were looking for fresh food options.  


Challenge

Marketplace businesses are the classic example of the chicken or the egg strategy problem where buyers are only interested if they see lots of sellers (farmers, food growers) and likewise sellers are interested if they see lots of buyers.  


After reviewing their current website, Google Analytics data and other marketing efforts, we determined that sending traffic to the current site would have a very high risk of low returns and wasted ad spend.  


Strategy & Execution


Website overhaul

We started with rebuilding their website to be more visually appealing, less text heavy and with very clear communication of their value proposition and conspicuous calls to action (CTA).  Closing this gap was important to ensure the user experience on the site wasn’t the culprit for lost conversions. 

website image

Determining who to target first

We determined that the most prudent spend of their ad budget would be to target farmers/growers first.  We determined this by looking at their inquiry history and understanding that the benefit of access to more buyers of their product would be a strong enough incentive for many farmers to create an account vs. buyers who would want to see who is selling in the marketplace before likely creating an account.  


Ad testing 

We tested display ads in various urban and rural markets across Canada.  Our goal was to identify who the ads attracted - was it rural farmers or growers near more urban food markets?  What devices did they use?  When they got to the website, what actions did they take?


Optimizations

After 2-3 weeks, compared to marketing efforts done before by I Do Local Foods, we saw a slight uptick in conversions with a strong increase in the quality of those leads.  We knew there was more opportunity to grow though, and had gathered enough data at this point to make a few key revisions in the campaigns that would ultimately have a seismic positive impact on the entire account.

Device targeting: We established that mobile devices were absorbing most of the clicks and cost, but underperforming for conversions.  So cut the mobile budget.

Geo-targeted headlines: We focused each to mention the province the farmer lived in.  We identified that there was a provincial sense of community and that click through rates would improve if a farmer felt he/she was joining a community of their peers within the province. 

Ad Example:

example display ad

Landing page: We determined that users were roaming the website looking for social proof or simply to learn more about the business but were dropping off before creating an account.  We knew building a landing page that gave clear details of what they were signing up for and eliminated all of the distractions of visiting the website would prove to be a difference maker.  

Landing page example: 

Landing page example

Results

After those optimization revisions were made, we saw a study flow of new farmer/grower leads daily and an 80% lower cost per acquisition than all of their previous marketing efforts, with only a marginal (3%) increase in ad spend.

Google Ads Results:

Google Ads results


We built the foundation of I Do Local Foods marketplace business model with a reliable stream of new leads.

COMPANY NAME:

I Do Local Food

LOCATION:

British Columbia, Canada

INDUSTRY:

Healthy Food / Fresh Food

KEY GOAL:

Platform Signups

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