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Get your free copyI’ve been with Paxton & Whitfield for over 10 years now, and during that time the artisan cheesemaking industry has grown in terms of size and the number of really exciting/interesting cheeses that consumers can enjoy.
Our ‘Cheese of the Month’ grew from wanting to ring the changes in-store by promoting new and different cheeses on our counter and also to engage with our team to learn more interesting facts about some of our cheeses. It also gave us an opportunity to ensure we had matched the cheese with some of our other fine food products and promote them too.
We produced an annual calendar and championed one cheese a month. In terms of the criteria for picking the cheese we looked at areas that included seasonality, newness, was it an award-winning cheese, was there a calendar date we could tie it into – e.g. Bastille Day for a French cheese – and did it have an interesting story.
It’s a simple premise but one that has helped us engage with our customers, highlighted the great assortment we stock and also enabled us to promote some overlooked cheesemakers.
Fast forward to 2016 and with the development of our website, the growth of our business and the changing promotional/marketing landscape in terms of the expansion of social media, we’ve adapted the activity and today use it across the whole business. We realized that we’d invested the time in creating the calendar and the content, so wanted to make it work harder.
Today we use the selected cheese in our PR activity, we highlight it on our website, we talk about it in our newsletters to customers, we share it on our social media channels (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook), we promote the cheese in our shops and we use it in our monthly Cheese Society subscription club.
What does the activity achieve for us in terms of results? From this simple idea we’ve found the following:
Engagement: It’s a great engagement tool for the teams in our shops. We have the relevant cheese promoted on our counters for a period of time during that month. The teams taste it and learn about its provenance and flavour to then engage customers.
Sales: We’ve achieved sales off this activity – with the cheeses and also specially chosen complementary products, e.g. biscuits, chutneys etc.
Awareness: Through promoting it via press releases it gives us consistent contact with the media on interesting products and the stories behind them.
Cross-platform content: A buzz phrase in today’s marketing industry is ‘creating interesting content shared across multiple platforms’. This activity achieves this and also helps us in terms of our time when shared across social media, the website and our newsletter.