Resources

Consumer brands in any industry know what a crazed and chaotic time Q4 is. Some thrive in the chaos, but more often than we care to see, many fall short—fall short of goals, deadlines for holiday creative needs, and even in building a strategic plan for sales growth during such an important time of year.

This time of year is when consumer brands are the most jazzed and shoppers are willing to spend the most money. Even despite the inconsistencies and uncertainties we’ve seen in the economy over the past two years and are seeing currently, it’s not in the forecast that sales are going to falter. The biggest difference is that consumers are shopping smarter – looking and waiting for sales, more comparative research – versus just buying what they can find, when they find it, regardless of the price.

For one consumer brand in the Food & Wellness industry, a seasonal holiday catalog featuring meal and gifting options is a large revenue driver for Q4 sales goals in-store and online. Each year, the Kelly Marketing division helps them with this catalog and its coinciding omnichannel marketing strategy, including all preparation and staging  of photo and video content, shooting and post-production, copywriting, layout and graphic design, pre–press and printing and direct mail and digital delivery.

2021 Catalog Stats

Farmview Market, is a Brick & Mortar specialty retailer, so driving traffic to its store is always a key initiative. A major holiday initiative is its printed catalog, featuring products from across all store venues – Butcher Shop, Ready-To-Eat meal options, Grocery and Bake Shop, and Café – along with a 2-page spread dedicated to holiday meal ordering. The catalog also features some of the store’s online exclusive eCommerce gift sets as well as a coupon for Farmview’s Corporate Gifts.

Last year, the 26-page catalog was designed and edited, and all photography was completed in-house by Kelly’s marketing team. More than 30,000 catalogs were printed and mailed to local community residents.

Overall catalog SKUs performed at a 30% volume increase over same period previous year. Quite a number of SKUs saw 100%+ increases with some performing at increases up to 300%.

Holiday Corporate Gifting Catalog

FarmviewMarket.com addresses local Brick & Mortar inquiries through its Visit the Market page, and its eCommerce offerings focus on unique gifting options for all occasions. With a 2021 goal to launch a corporate gifting initiative, the plan for successful execution hinged on a large promotion of this 6-page gifting catalog. Part of this promotion, outside of the design and printing process, fell to the web design members of the marketing team to design and create a space on the website for this catalog to live where we could drive consumers and track conversions. (This landing page has been updated to feature this year’s offerings, but functionality and layout have remained the same.) Early promotions and flyers have already gone out ahead of the larger mailing and the program has seen 168% growth YOY and gifting season still has nearly two months until close.

In-store Marketing Collateral

As with any business that operates both in a physical, retail location and online, it’s crucial that all marketing materials are succinct and help foster a seamless experience for consumers regardless where your shoppers are finding you. For Farmview, this meant reworking digital marketing collateral to better engage local consumers.

The design theme from the holiday catalog was recreated across all print materials for in-store—bag inserts, coupons, signage, menu boards, shelf-talkers, etc. In certain categories, season displays were merchandised around catalog special features, like our holiday cheese board and holiday gift sets.

Digital Marketing Collateral

Just as in-store collateral must remain seamless when it comes to design and branding, the same holds true for the social media and email. For this piece, the same photography used for the catalogs was repurposed for organic and paid social and email. The creative team also stepped back in to fill videography requests from the brand as needed throughout the remainder of the holiday selling season.

From social advertising, email campaigns, holiday-rich content like recipe blogs and how-to videos for surviving the holidays, to seasonally-inspired eCommerce product collections, the original creative design and direction was apparent across the board in the digital space. The key to success for larger initiatives lies in driving a greater need, in eliciting a stronger emotional pull from the consumer to complete the action you want them to complete.

Luckily, you don’t have to go it alone. Our full-service sales and marketing team is here to make the road to success smoother. If you’re wondering how you can streamline your efforts and drive seasonal revenue, we welcome a conversation! You can reach us at info@kellybrandmanagement.com.