Hiring a Digital Marketer: More than Worth the Price

Digital Marketing, especially in a growing city like Atlanta, is essential for businesses to get their brands in front of people. The attention-economy is more competitive everyday, but you still have only 24 hours to run your business. This collaboration between Delta Star and a local Atlanta knife company is a great example of how investing in dedicated digital marketing services can yield results that exceed expectations and allow you to focus on what matters most.

Bespoke Chef Knives?

Developed by local tech firm Engineerable, KRVR Knives manufactures and sells bespoke (custom) chef knives to a global audience of professional chefs, homecooks, and foodies. From the inception of the project, social media has been the primary vehicle for promoting brand awareness and delivering on sales.

The main goal of the KRVR Knives project was to increase brand awareness and user engagement on social media to generate a monthly sales average of $10k per month.

PROJECT DURATION: March 2019 – March 2020

Roles Fulfilled:

When Digital Marketing Becomes Essential

KRVR Knives is a bespoke chef knife brand started in September 2018. Within the first few months of operation, the brand had gained significant traction on Instagram for their uniquely designed products. In January the brand peaked at ~$13k in sales and boasted a growing account of over 30K followers on Instagram.

However, maintaining this traction was difficult for the small team who was manufacturing, marketing, selling, distributing, and operating the business in-house. They had their energies split between all the responsibilities of a small manufacturing company. When they focused on production, sales dropped; when they focused on sales, production decreased. They had hit a crucial bottleneck that could only be solved through absolute commitment to the most vital internal operations.

KRVR Knives reached out to us in February 2019 to pilot their marketing and sales: manage their social media, boost sales, and grow their brand, freeing up the business to focus on other essential tasks as the brand and sales grew.

Diagnosing the Problem

The key issue that KRVR Knives wanted to solve was sustaining sales figures above $10k per month. While the firm in theory had everything they needed to solve this problem, they noticed a 42% drop in sales over two months after reaching a peak in Jan 2019.

Strategic Solutions

Strategies employed to generate sales

• Facilitated sales via auctions directly through social media (Instagram and Facebook)
• Collected and reshared product review & testimonial content
• Created sales funnel directly from Instagram to Shopify
• Created on-platform affinity groups to build community amongst clients and high-quality leads
• Facilitated positive client relations and high customer satisfaction via post comments and Direct Messaging
• Translated analytics around high-performing products sales to reflect in manufacture of new products

Strategies employed to increase brand awareness

• Employed growth tools to automate Instagram growth
• Created and curated high performing chef knife content and copy to stimulate views and engagement
• Maintained consistent schedule of social media posts
• Produced compelling high-quality photos and videos with high reshare value
• Boosted high-performing content via Facebook Ads
• Built relations and engaged influencer accounts to create content and promote the brand

Key Insights & Results

• Generated more than $140k in sales during first full year of operation, exceeding $10k monthly goal by 11%
• Grew Instagram account 27% from 33k to 42k followers
• Achieved returning customer rate of more than 20%
• Sold out inventory by January 2020
• Created over $370k value for client by end of 2020
• Solidified KRVR Knives as a reputable high-end chef knife brand

Key Takeaways

• Excellent example of the power of a robust social media presence in tandem with an e-commerce store to generate massive ongoing sales
• Highlights the crucial role that user-generated content can play in building credibility as a brand; also the versatility of that content
• Hiring a digital marketing professional to focus their energies on your marketing is often more cost-effective than trying to do it all yourself