HOW TO SELL COCONUT WATER
selling drinks against larger competitors
Overview
How do you use social media to create brand awareness and promote community involvement?
For the last 35 years, a multi-generation family business has brought coconut water to the US market straight from their coconut groves in Thailand. For over three generations, the Thai-roots company has built their brand on the promise to bring families the best tasting Thai beverages using the freshest and most premium ingredients.
Now, in an increasingly competitive and crowded coconut water marketplace, the beverage company wants to improve their online presence to increase beverage sales through both retailers and Amazon.
What’s the best way to sell more drinks? How can the story of this unique coconut water company be communicated?
Challenge
Plain and simple, other coconut water competitors have much larger budgets.
We’re comparing a 35-year old, multi-generational family business against a coconut water brand owned by Coca-Cola. One brand has deeper pockets than the other.
We can’t outspend the competition, either online, through influencers, or through event marketing. The challenge is how can our family owned coconut water brand outrank, outmaneuver, and outsell the competition?
Solution
After hydrating ourselves with the best tasting coconut water around, Markitors went to work.
We revamped social media assets. The Wix website received an SEO makeover with new page title tags, product descriptions, and meta information to better rank for target terms online. Keyword based SEO blogs were planned and created. Backlinks were rounded up from unlinked brand mentions that did not include a link back to the corporate website.
In addition, we:
- Managed and created all social media content on Instagram & Facebook
- Launched influencer campaigns to fuel brand conversations with target personas
- Doubled social media following of brand within 9 months
We focused on the key elements of the brand that truly differentiated it from the competition. This included frequently searched terms like:
- coconut water glass bottle
- aloe coconut water
- hpp coconut water
- how long does coconut water last
- coconut tree life cycle
These terms targeted the competitive advantages our family brand had over competitors. All coconut water came directly from the family’s coconut tree groves, so it makes sense to talk about the coconut tree life cycle and how long coconut water lasts because our brand was more “fresh.”
This all enabled us to make some headway in areas competitors could not compete.
Result
Within 9 months, the social media following of the brand on Instagram and Facebook doubled.
Referring domains also gradually increased, which helped boost the domain authority of the website – and gave more visibility to our content pillars.
Amazon sales began to increase as more brand awareness was created online. Retailers reported about the same amount of sales, but we could see that brand awareness was starting to rise in connection with the number of consumers who searched online for the brand each month.
Overall, digital marketing efforts enabled the brand to compete online against much larger competitors while still staying true to the foundation of the family-owned business.
