Services:
Web Design // Inbound Marketing // Video Production // eCommerce
Dalton Farms is a farm business located in Swedesboro, NJ. They feature agritourism in the form of Tulip Festivals in the spring and Sunflower Festivals in the fall. In addition to selling flowers at these events they also sell honey and eggs during the rest of the year. There is some local competition, including a larger agritourism company also specializing in Tulip festivals.
Throughout the lifetime of the business, owner Keith Dalton would periodically reach out to our head of marketing (Robert Storch) looking for advice about Dalton Farms. Seeing as Keith and Robert were alumni of the same college, Robert was happy to provide his insight. After consulting on a few matters, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Keith was ready to become a customer of Wunderfy, specifically with the intention of building back attendance following the pandemic.
Wunderfy started helping out during the Tulip season which is typically around late March-early April. Initially, Dalton Farms was only looking for some advertising and video editing/production. We started becoming more involved when we were asked to design a tri-fold brochure for the festival, and even got started on Facebook advertising. We successfully improved engagement on Facebook, which opened the door for SEO, branding, webpage design, etc.
That included writing a proposal for a full website rework, with the intention of improving retention/conversion rates from Facebook ads. As we moved into Sunflower season (mid-Fall), we finished our proposal for a total approach at Dalton. The proposal allowed for Dalton Farms to receive grant funding from the Board of Tourism, and we began the brunt of our work for Dalton. The proposal was approved after Dalton Farms requested a grant from the New Jersey Department of Tourism. The grant was contingent upon us fulfilling the requirements of the Department.
Our proposal budgeted for inbound marketing, a totally new website, a completely refreshed social media strategy/approach, content development, video production, and even pay-per-click ads. All of this work was to be completed in-season to promote sales and improve brand image. During the off-season we were charged with website maintenance, hosting, and developing strategy.
Services:
Web Design // Inbound Marketing // Video Production // eCommerce
Dalton Farms was able to bounce back following COVID, thanks to a completely new approach. In the first season back (following our granted proposal), Dalton experienced a bump in ticket sales from new customers (75%). Utilizing client retention strategy, we were also able to reach out to previous customers and push for repeat business, which improved overall ticket sales as well. The most impactful change that we made to Dalton’s approach was when we began pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google. We wanted to utilize Google Ads because we could track conversions, which we could not effectively do on Facebook Ads. We also knew that Google Ads could reach a much broader audience, and improve the overall sales funnel for Dalton.
The impact of Google Ads on business for Dalton was incredible. We attained a nearly unheard of 45% click-through rate (CTR) and generated 10% more in net revenue on just the “dalton farms” keyword. While remaining highly profitable on business name keywords was important, we also recognized the necessity of generating organic traffic on ad words including our client’s name. Using PPC allowed us to slowly begin generating that organic traffic. However, it wasn’t just keywords involving the company name that were successful.
Our 2023 PPC Google ads generated 170,451 impressions with 48,163 engagements(clicks). Even though we were only able to track conversions during the less-busy sunflower season, we generated 20% of gross sales and 18% in of net gain. We want to stress: sunflower season is much less busy than tulip season, we spent more than 3x our tulip season PPC budget, and still had less traffic. If we were able to track conversions, we estimate our profits would have seen a 30-40% increase during tulip season. (based on: sunflower conversion rate*tulip season total engagements) With an estimate of 10% increase in overall sales in the year 2023, we found PPC to be one of our greatest successes. Our PPC would not have been successful had we not redesigned the website in order to improve brand image, but more importantly, to improve the sales funnel for Dalton. This included creating landing pages that could push traffic to ticket sales, track conversions, and improve ease of use for customers.
