Beverage Marketing Case Study

How To Go About Bringing a New Drink To The Market

launching a new beverage brand

Overview

How do you launch a new Swedish beverage in the US?

A new, Swedish-based beverage company has scientifically concocted a beverage aimed at curing the afternoon slump. The company has teamed up with a US-based public relations firm to reach corporate nutritionists and everyday office heroes interested in a new beverage alternative. The PR firm and Swedish team have hit the US roadshow, going from conference to conference offering free samples to Human Resource practitioners to corporate executives.

Now, they need an online presence.

Since the beverage industry is a crowded marketplace, and since consumers are generally skeptical of any “new” brand to physically consume, how does a Swedish company go about bringing a new drink to the US market?

Challenge

Besides a handful of low-tier public relations placements, the brand is not known in Sweden or the United States.

The only people going to the website are friends, family, and a few curious people entering a giveaway at the tradeshows.

There’s no followers on the brand’s social media accounts, because the accounts don’t exist.

In other words, there’s no momentum. Envision starting from scratch.

How can SEO and digital marketing help support this beverage brand make inroads into Corporate America?

Solution

After receiving product samples and testing with our team, Markitors went to work.

We built social media assets. Keyword based SEO content strategies were created. Backlinks were rounded up from previous PR placements without links back to the corporate website.

In addition, we:

  • Managed, photographed, and created all social media content on Instagram & Facebook
  • Launched influencer campaigns to fuel brand conversations with target personas
  • Grew social media following from 0 followers to 500 within 3 months

The keys to success were going to be effectively partnering with the public relations agency, building up authority through the corporate website, and finding early fans to recommend the product.

The early fans, we found, were not the corporate nutritionists that we wanted to so desperately reach. Their reputations were far too important to recommend a new product to their corporate clients.

Instead, the every day office heroes who are influencers in their own right were the ones we found early success with. We worked with larger influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, but also the office influencer who had the power to introduce the beverage to an office of 15 people.

Other services included Digital PR to build domain authority and Technical SEO to fix website accessibility issues.

Result

Within 3 months, the beverage brand saw social media accounts go from 0 followers to 500. Referring domains increased from 0 to more than 100 urls to help boost domain authority.

Momentum was created through a joint effort with the Swedish team, the public relations firm, along with our Social Media and Digital PR efforts.

Inroads started to be established within the corporate market. Corporate nutritionists, who had once shied away from trying or recommending a new product now felt a little safer through social media validation.

The increase in domain authority helped the brand appear from their own branded keywords. This was an especially important early goal. If a tradeshow attendee Googled the brand after experiencing the drink, the brand was absent from search result pages. But, through a conscious link building effort, the brand not only started to appear for their own branded searches, but also some none branded searches as well like “how to break a sugar addiction.”

In the end, the beverage managed to break into Hyvee retail stores and is making headway in helping corporate America end a sugar addiction (and, the afternoon slump!).

“Working with Markitors on our social media accounts and Digital PR was a great idea!”

– Beverage Brand Co-Founder & CEO