Hemp Farm
Hemp New Zealand is the largest hemp grower in New Zealand. Their well-known food and supplement brand - Hemp Farm® is vegan-certified, organic, nutritious, spray-free, and provides countless health and environmental benefits. They are passionate about sustainability and have been growing industrial hemp to supply industries with sustainable solutions since 2008.
The Client Challenge
Hemp NZ approached Author to support the relaunch of their retail brand - Hemp Farm. Their existing website was not fit for purpose and lacked a succinct and easy-to-navigate user experience that could support the direct-to-consumer growth they were after. Due to its association with the Cannabinoid plant, Hemp NZ has experienced challenges advertising on digital powerhouses META & Google and wanted help developing a digital strategy that could leverage the awareness and traffic these platforms provided.The Outcome They Wanted
- To build a first in class website and an elevated brand and user experience with which both wholesalers and retailers could easily learn and transact with Hemp NZ.
- To maintain the ‘SEO Juice’ and organic traffic the team had spent years building.
- To devise and execute a digital strategy that would leverage the audiences on META and Google.
How We Approached It
We constructed and undertook a series of interviews with 10 of their best customers, considering both volume and total spending. Obtaining these customer insights ensured as a marketing team we deeply understood their customers and why they were buying from Hemp NZ. It also facilitated some immediate and long-term customer satisfaction planning. These market insights shaped our message and a 6-month digital marketing strategy.
We designed and developed a seamless, first in-class Shopify website that leveraged the prior site’s search engine optimisation and maintained website traffic.
The website housed desperate logins, pricing structures, and checkouts for both wholesale and retail customers.
We devised a strategy and marketing funnel that utilised sub-domains and external landing pages to engage and direct traffic from Facebook and Google through to their website, where customers could explore, learn and transact. The strategy met advertising standards and turned a previous business pitfall into an opportunity to educate unaware buyers and take them through to checkout. This opened a previously untapped stream of customers.
What We Delivered
In the first four months we delivered:
- 478% increase on brand impressions.
- 544% increase in website traffic.
360% increase in sales conversions.
What They Said
We engaged Author for two reasons:
- To devise a strategy to successfully advertise on META to grow our B2C revenue, something that we hadn’t been able to do previously with META’s advertising restrictions.
- To create a best-in-class e-commerce website and frictionless user experience for both our retail and wholesale customers.
Author worked with me and the broader team to deliver a successful roadmap and outcomes for both objectives. While a significantly improved brand and sales experience was top of mind for us, our business also has many complexities; advertising compliance, inventory integration, customer service requirements and hard-earned organic search traffic which we wanted to maintain.
Author was able to work through these with us to deliver qualitative and quantitative insights, a website that is a significant step up in design and function from our previous experience, and they proved a strategy and methodology to leverage META as a traffic source for B2C revenue.
I would recommend them as a dynamic and highly competent team who were able mould their best practices to fit the requirements of our business.
Thank you, Author!
– Claude Draper, Director