Kekoa Foods
Kekoa Foods is an all-natural, wholesome organic baby food brand that sells mainly direct-to-consumer via its website and Amazon.
282,000
Potential Audience
27,000
Campaign Impressions
5.83%
Engagement Rate
22
CGC
About the Product
Kekoa Foods is an all-natural, wholesome organic baby food brand that sells mainly direct-to-consumer via its website and Amazon. The brand launched when the founder’s first child was born premature and needed the most nutritious foods possible to grow and thrive. David Fullner and Danny Auld concocted home recipes for baby Kekoa, who did just that – grow and thrive.
Knowing parents had limited choices for all-organic, non-GMO and no preservative baby foods, the couple launched Kekoa Foods.
The Challenge
Growing a startup direct-to-consumer baby food brand is a challenge. Not only are the retail aisles competitive and often controlled by big-box retail stores and suppliers, but breaking through on more accessible channels like Amazon is like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
Kekoa Foods needed to get the word out to nutrition-focused new parents that there was a healthier option than traditional baby foods offered. They turned to Community Influence Marketing and CIPIO.ai’s CIM application.
The Strategy
Kekoa Foods launched its CIM strategy with two goals in mind: Create awareness for the new, emerging brand, and drive online sales of the product on both Amazon and their newly launched Shopify site. It would target content creators who were new or expecting parents, were focused on healthy living, wellness and nutrition, and whose content was authentic, trustworthy and engaging for new parents.
The brand started with CIPIO.ai in their first full year of operations and with a social media following of just a few hundred people.
The Execution
In Q4 of 2022 CIPIO.ai mapped Kekoa Foods’s Brand Community and discovered 1.96 million creators at least lightly connected through the brand. Mining those audiences, that included followers of affinity brands and competitors, plus Kekoa Foods’s small-but-growing social media following, CIPIO.ai and the brand began engaging the community.
The initial launch of a product trial campaign in the fall of 2022 engaged 14 creators with a prospective audience of over 282,000 people. The program yielded 22 posts which drove over 27,000 impressions and 1,500 engagements.
Overall, the 5.83% engagement rate showed that not only were the creator’s audiences seeing the content, but responding to it as well.
The content our community creators delivered was far more engaging than our previous social content,” Daniel Auld reported. “And the fact we can, in turn, use that engaging content on our social channels really delivers on added value for our investment in Community Influence Marketing.
Auld also declared conversions a success as well, affirming that Amazon sales for the product jump the days the community content is posted.
Status Report
After success in 2022, Kekoa Foods is forging ahead in 2023 with plans to expand its Community Influence Marketing efforts and shift calls-to-action to its website versus Amazon to zero in on a more specific ROI calculation for the efforts.
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