SMC X The Garden Strathcona
Overview
The Smith Marketing Consulting (SMC) team recently worked on The Garden Strathcona project, which was led by Aidan Alderson, project director. His team was made of 4 consultants: Cat O’Brien, Jack Morse, Aarti Patel. The Co-chair of SMC, Ashley Greenwald, also assisted on this exciting project.
The Garden Strathcona is located in Vancouver’s historic Strathcona neighbourhood, offering a coffee shop, bakery, retail store and rental spaces. They hope to offer a location where everyone feels inspired, relaxed, ready to learn or meet up in the community, while offering delicious food and drink to bring people together. Recently, The Gardens top selling product, Saviour cookies, expanded into its own business with a website and social media accounts.
On June 1st, 2020, Aidan and Ashely met with Anna MCmillin, Kirsten Kennedy and Max Huggan, the owner, partner, and consultant at The Garden Strathcona to discuss their needs. Prior to official acquiring this client our team created a well detailed sales proposal to communicate our solution. On September 10th, the owner, Anna, officially agreed to work with us, which transitioned into our team entering Phase 1 of our business plan for our new client.
The Problem
Our team conducted an extensive market research of The Garden Strathcona, which made us recognize their areas of improvement such as: increasing brand awareness and improving traffic & user experience on the website, which would hopefully raise their online sales. Although The Garden had done an impressive job with their website and social media, SMC noticed some issues such as: low SEO rankings, poor website layout, and lack of follower engagement on social media.
Moreover, the new Saviour foods brand lacked a strong website and needed to increase brand awareness and customer engagement. Although since it’s launch, the product had already sold out in multiple stores, their overall goal is to penetrate new wholesale markets and increase sales. In order to promote sustainable growth for The Garden Strathcona, we broke our plan into multiple phases to carefully analyze each issue and understand how it led to marketing implications.
Solution
As aforementioned, we split our solution into 4 phases of research and a final implementation phase. Phase 1 consisted of a small SWOT analysis for Saviour foods. As they currently used Squarespace for their store, SMC made the recommendation to switch to Shopify, as it was a better fit to their needs. Phase 2, was tailored towards increasing The Garden Strathcona website SEO. After diving deep into the website and utilizing SEO optimizer tools, SMC created a list of recommendations including, implementation of meta description tags, ALT image tags, thin content elimination, leveraging existing backlinks, keyword implementation, etc. Phase 3 consisted of UI and UX recommendations. After the implementation of a consumer traffic tracking tool we provided recommendations on how to optimize the landing page and design around hot zones. While Aidan and Jack worked on Phase 2 and 3, Aarti and Cat worked hard on phase 4. This phase was designed to help Saviour Foods create a detailed Social Media Strategy, to increase engagement and ultimately grow sales. Cat and Aarti conducted a competitor analysis and later helped Anna develop a strong brand voice and provided her with tips and tricks on how to increase engagement. Finally, phase 5 consisted of the implementation of phases 2&3 through Shopify.
Highlights
Industry: Due to the high levels of competition and younger demographic, online presence is everything! Although increasing store traffic is the ultimate goal, without a well developed Social media strategy or website, it is very difficult to stand out in this market.
Nature of the Company: With in store sales being the largest contributor to revenue, covid-19 created a large barrier. However, due to their high adaptability they were able to create a new e-commerce and wholesale business out of their best selling product.
Competition: Due to the continuous shift towards sustainable options, the market for healthy alternatives continues to grow. However, out of all competitors in the Vancouver area The Garden places the highest emphasis on digital marketing which will lead to future growth opportunities.
Did we develop any new skills?: Given The Garden’s requirements for website development the team was required to learn a multitude of skills for this project. Some of these skills included website optimization, understanding shopify backend, coding and more.
How will this experience allow your team to grow?: As this project required a lot of new skill development we were able to learn about each other's strengths and weaknesses. Each team member had the opportunity to take leadership roles and help others to grow.
What surprised us?: The thing that surprised us was The Garden’s ability to adjust their business model during the covid-19 pandemic. Their biggest source of revenue was in-store purchases; however, they brought in new revenue through their new Saviour Foods brand and online store.
Keys to success
Open communication between SMC team members and Client
Creating a schedule ahead of time with small goals to meet along the way
Sticking to an overall framework but not being afraid to make changes to your original plan
Learn from each other