About Spangler Candy
Spangler Candy Company is a family-owned private international confectioner and was founded in 1906. With its headquarter in Bryan, Ohio , Spangler candy sells a range of products like lollipops, candy canes, marshmallow circus peanuts. The company started in 1906 with the name Spangler Manufacturing Company and produces baking soda, baking powder, corn starch, laundry starch, spices, and flavorings and later went on to acquire Dum dums in 1953 and saf T-pops in 1978. They manufacture and market the licensed brand names of Jelly Belly, Smarties, and Sweethearts on select lollipop and candy cane items. It has some popular brand names likes dum dums, saf-T-pops, etc. It is the second largest employer in Bryan, Ohio and the company produces almost 45% of the candy sold in United states producing more than 12 million dum dums each day.
Spangler candy’s Business Objectives
Spangler candy saw the impact of digitization and digital presence and campaigns in the industry and therefore decided to draw some more sales and higher engagement from the digital space. Spangler candy put up some objectives to be met and they employed TKG group, one of their business partners for the project as TKG group had created and executed a successful content marketing plan in the past. These goals were set keeping in mind the market growth along with an increasing and easy access of digital worlds by kids.
These goals included
- Increase candy sales online on spanglercandy.com and dumdumpops.com
- Increase engagement of kids on dumdumpops.com
- Increase traffic through new developed mobile app.
A new app is like a new user touch point for the company. It provides tremendous advantages such as
- Acting as a direct marketing channel – An app can provide new information, price changes, customized offers and a lot more. And the biggest advantage is super high rate of visibility of your offer to your target.
- Providing higher visibility to your business
- Building up brand value – A app is your customer touch point and customer sees you through that app. You can choose it to look like anything from upper class elegant to stylish/hip and thus project certain business image to the respective customer. And also it can focus on increasing your effective frequency, which essentially means higher the customer involvement more are the chances of a sale.
- Higher degree of customer engagement – A good messaging feature in app can really change the game. Instead of talking to some customer service agent they simply text you the problem and you provide solution within given amount of time. And on top of everything else it saves you a lot of manpower costs.
- Experience differentiation – A good app helps you to stand out from the other competitors and projects your company as future thinkers and closer to younger generation.
- Cultivating customer loyalty – With all the clutter and noise in the marketing out there, a personalized app helps you give exclusive experience, which can also act as your business differentiation, thus building higher customer loyalty.
Now the challenge for TKG group was to attract more and more customers towards the app and a higher focus on the kids. Keeping these goals in mind TKG went ahead and created a strategy to for spangler candy and implemented it successfully.
Strategy adopted
TKG keeping an eye on above goals decided to leverage previously created quality content which they had previously done for spangler candy. They did following:
- Added and optimized fresh content especially in the product descriptions.
- This followed by creation of some quality videos to attract children.
- Then on they went ahead to create classic paper games on PDFs which could be easily printed by children for playing.
- Special focus and greater engagement with new content on Facebook, twitter and pin-interest.
Results
And finally with leverage on content on various channels and focus on goal specific approach, the team saw an array of great results.
- The mobile app traffic for spangler candy is up by almost 30% over the last year.
- Along with that we see a tremendous 40 percent increase in the organic visits to spanglercandy.com
- There was an overall 10 percent increase in the candy sales.
Learning
The most crucial learning from this is the importance of content behind any strategy and how quality content can produce a lot better results.
Also You should remember that one of the important rule in digital world is keep publishing your content as long as its engaging and getting good reception. Instead of throwing out the old content, you should look to republish it when it could generate extra traffic.
The classic PDF game solutions was a great strategy to attract people who are still in look-out stage for some product. By providing a free incentive, you also get your product’s info to them in a creative and interactive way.