Today’s consumers don’t have to look far for answers. They’re everywhere in cyberspace, peppered throughout several of the apps installed on their phones and tablets. But the right answers may not be at the top of the feed.
“Consumers aren't coming to look for you anymore,” says Kaci Creel, consumer marketing director, Dairy MAX. “They're doing a quick Google search and if you're not there, then they're not going to keep looking.”
That’s why Dairy MAX is committed to reaching the dairy lovers and the dairy curious where they already are—making it easy for them to get the information they want about the products they crave.
“We’ve always had great ways to promote dairy in-person,” Creel says. “We’ve reached hundreds of thousands of consumers through our Dairy Discovery Zone exhibit. But over the last three years, we’ve really tried to ramp up our digital marketing so we can go home with them. We really wanted to expand that reach and create a virtual community.”
With a goal to become the source for all things dairy for consumers and stakeholders alike, Dairy MAX created an e-newsletter that is distributed to consumers they have connected with at one of the Dairy Discovery Zone events.
In addition, they revamped their web presence, updating DairyMAX.org and creating the consumer-specific DairyDiscoveryZone.com. Both sites are chock full of information and mobile-friendly.
To help consumers find the sites, Creel says Dairy MAX uses Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Pinterest advertising. It works. Just between January and May of this year, 56 percent of all web traffic has originated from one of those advertisements.
“That's telling me that consumers are finding our content,” Creel says. “Not only that, but they're finding it relevant to them and they're clicking through those ads and coming to our website when we probably wouldn't have found them before.”
Not only are the marketing tactics working, but they’re cost-efficient as well. Creel says each click costs less than a quarter. Not bad considering page visitors are staying on the site more than twice as long as the industry average. That’s a statistic Dairy MAX is particularly proud of, and no doubt stems from thorough research into consumer trends and the resulting content they’ve created.
“It just really shows there is a void for this kind of content,” she says, “especially in this day and age where dairy alternatives are such a trend and people are seeking out information based on misconceptions.”
Creel says her department is dedicated to busting consumers’ myths and becoming their most trusted source for dairy information.
“It's really important to us that consumers not only understand the nutritional value that milk and milk products have for their families, but also the importance of agriculture and the farm to fridge story,” she says.
“The further removed you are from something, the more skeptical you can become of it. If we can break through and find a way to connect with these consumers, show them the families and the cows and the passion that the dairy farm families have for the food that they produce, we can really break through some of the myths that continue to grow and build in consumers' minds.”
