Vermont Creamery | Brand Experience Strategy
Situation
Consciously crafted in Vermont’s green mountains, Vermont Creamery’s line of fresh and aged goat cheeses, cultured butter, and crème fraîche have won hundreds of national and international awards. After being acquired by Land O’ Lakes they went through a major rebrand but even as awards and prestige piled up, brand awareness outside its devotees lagged. With aggressive growth targets, the creamery needed to spark brand awareness among the masses and create content that gave people a reason to keep coming back.
My Role
As the brand experience strategy lead on Vermont Creamery I’ve developed a number of strategy and communication outputs to help guide the brand forward and provided ongoing consultation as they have worked to increase brand awareness, deepen connections and launch new products.
Project Highlights
Content Strategy
I formalized the role of content for the brand and identified content themes and topics that drove editorial calendars across channels. Led weekly content scrums to identify new content opportunities based on social listening, search and cultural trends.
This agile approach led to some of the brand’s top performing content during the pandemic like Stress Baking Recipes Made Easy which capitalized on the growing search traffic and interest in baking at home.
Website Redesign
I led research, strategy and user experience for the website redesign where we were tasked with bringing their new brand purpose to life for consumers.
Vermont creamery’s products are consciously crafted to love, and the website needed to play an important role to helping people understand the brand’s dedication to its craft and show how the creamery’s delicious cheese and butter products can enrich their lives.
In order for the website to be successful, we decided it must do the following:
Educate: It’s important to educate people about Vermont Creamery products and broaden their thinking about how and when they can be used.
Inspire: The website should inspire use and trial of products, and for current customers it should inspire increased frequency of consumption.
Sell: The website should make it easy for people to find out how and where to buy products.
I worked with a small team of designers and writers to craft a site that would not only embody the new look and feel of the brand but also significantly improve the user experience and help sell product.
Website Design Before
Website Design After
Results
The new website successfully embodied the new Vermont Creamery brand and made it easier for users to learn about the products, discover recipes that inspire use and find where to buy. In addition to those improvements, the new content strategy and rapid content creation process contributed to a 435% increase in organic traffic.
“Bri’s expertise helped bring the clients along on the journey, and they were able to educate while also selling in our work. It was a complicated project – a tight timeline, a small budget, two client teams, and we weren’t the ones developing the site – but our team acted with integrity and accountability to make it happen.
Bri’s team does so much more than website strategy, and they brought their broad thinking and experience to this project, making it a huge success.””
Social Strategy
I led social strategy and helped outline objectives and messaging for social ads across the user journey from awareness to advocacy.
I also worked closely with the media and production team ensure we used a social-first approach to ad campaign development and captured both evergreen and campaign specific social content on our campaign shoot.