Green Gatherings
A new line of biodegradable picnic wares designed with sustainability and community in mind. The challenge for a new brand involved increasing awareness, generating leads, and producing sales leads. My role was to conduct market research in order to develop a target persona and create enticing and optimized content to encourage engagement.
*Green Gatherings is a fictional company created for CareerFoundry’s Digital Marketing Course
market research
Purpose
- Conduct research in to the industry, target market, and competitors
- Understand state of the industry and gaps in competitor offerings
- Provide full picture on target market’s demographics, psychographics, needs/wants, pain points, and preferred digital channels
- Use research to create buyer persona
outcome
Market research is very important to a content marketing campaign- it provides the foundation and direction for everything. Sound research ensures you’re creating engaging content that the target audience wants and will resonate with. If assumptions are made, chances are the content won’t reach the target audience and the campaign will fail before it gets a chance. For this project, taking an in-depth look at competitors and target market resulted in creating a solid buyer persona.
research Findings
Competitor Analysis
Main Competitor Strengths
- Environmentally Responsible
- High Quality
- Authentic Communication
Main Competitor Weaknesses
- Limited Product Offerings
- High Price
- Geared Toward Formal Events
Target Market
- Age: 28-43
- Gender: primarily female
- Income: middle/upper middle class
- Education: college educated
- Family Status: married with young children
- Digital Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Email
- Values: sustainability, convenience, responsible consumption
- Needs/Wants: eco-friendly options that are responsibly made, affordable, and easy to purchase and use
Buyer Persona: Faye
- 37 year old female
- Married with 4 kids
- College educated
- Works part time
- Values the environment, sustainability, family, and inclusivity
- Hopes for a better future for her kids, wants to demonstrate a sustainable lifestyle to her kids, needs a way to do this that is efficient and cost-effective
- Pain Points: tough to trust if a green product is actually eco-friendly, sustainable choices often take more energy and money than she wants to spend
brand guidelines
Purpose
- Create clear instructions to be used as a guide for branding
- Keep brand’s mission and purpose as focus
- Ensure tone, voice, and other brand elements reflect the company’s values to best communicate to target market
Key Insight
Where market research serves as the backbone for making sure the content serves and reaches the right audience, brand guidelines ensure the message and content remains consistent and recognizable. By breaking down Green Gathering’s brand in to these categories, I achieved a thorough understanding of their values and how to communicate them to the target persona.
blog article
Purpose
A long-form blog article aimed at created persona with the aim to gain leads via email sign-up form. Language aligns with brand guidelines while being accessible and inclusive. Engaging content to entice readers to engage further with the brand.
landing page
Purpose
Publish an engaging product landing page that highlights the UVP (unique value proposition). Use effective language and images to demonstrate how this product can address the buyer persona’s needs and provide solutions to their pain points.
Keyword & seo analysis
Purpose
- Conduct thorough research to determine the best keywords to use and target
- strengthen the SEO in order to drive more traffic to the blog article and landing page
Process
Used SemRush to research a variety of long and short tail keywords. I identified “biodegradable plates” and “eco-friendly picnic” to have a high search volume and low ranking difficulty making them ideal to use for the blog article and landing page in order to improve SEO of both pages.
outcome
Knowing what is important to the buyer persona was helpful in selecting which keywords to research and ultimately choose to target. Conducting the research provided me with a fuller picture of this brand’s competition for search results, and allowed me to identify and target specific keywords that would resonate with the target persona and allow for higher organic search results ranking.
Crafting an Email Campaign
Purpose
- Further engage subscribers and continue to build trust
- Increasing sales leads (move target audience further along the funnel to interest and desire and ultimately to action)
- Increase sales by driving subscribers to click through emails to product landing page and purchase
outcome
This email campaign not only met, but exceeded every KPI set by Green Gatherings. This tells me the content – both text and visuals – resonates with our target audience, and the schedule on when to send out the emails is also effective. I greatly enjoyed creating the emails and seeing the planning and research pay off- the research conducted earlier that lead to making buyer personas and brand guidelines, led to being able to craft engaging content that our target market felt added value and successfully enticed them to click through and ultimately purchase.
email campaign: A closer look
Interview with Founder
CTA: Learn more about Green Gatherings!
Journey of a Plastic Cup
CTA: Find your alternative here!
Community Reviews
CTA: Take me to Green Gatherings!
Discount for First Purchase
CTA: Claim your 15% off!
results
50
Blog Views (target = 20)
74.9%
Ave. Email Open Rate (target = 35%)
32
Email Click Through Total (target = 10)
28
Conversions (target = 4)
final reflections
In addition to the marketing content created, I also gained new skills in WordPress, Mailchimp, and Google Analytics to better monitor and analyze the success of these marketing efforts. I learned that a successful campaign is one that has a strong foundation of research (to best create relevant and valuable content) and a clear plan/schedule on when to release the content. As all KPIs set forth by the company were met, this campaign feels successful and provides good feedback that my created content resonated with the target market and is moving in a good direction to continue for future endeavors.
megan kalan 