Tony‘s Meats & Market Case Study
Client Overview
Tony’s Meats and Market is a well-known, family-owned and operated butcher shop and market in the Denver Metro area, with three locations. Tony’s is known for its high-quality meat selections, premium groceries, prepared food, and meals, but more than anything, for the knowledge and advice its friendly staff provides on how to achieve the best results from the grill.
When people come to Tony’s, they are seeking only the best quality foods and insights into the best preparation tips for that special meal, whether it’s a big Holiday meal, a celebratory gathering, or a simple weeknight dinner.
Client Goals
- Bring Tony’s renowned quality, experience, and reputation to life online
- Yearly increases in customer count at store locations
- Annual increases in Tony’s Rewards membership
- Overall, a yearly increase in sales across all departments
Challenges
- Outdated website presence that did not adequately represent Tony’s brand and reputation.
- Increasing competition from newer entries into the market, such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
- Market downturn forcing consumers to decide between quality and cost.
Our Approach
To help Tony’s stand out in a competitive market, we implemented our proprietary Marketing Positioning Action Plan™. This strategic process included:
- Developing target personas and defining their Unique Selling Propositions (USPs)
- Conducting in-depth keyword research to uncover search engine ranking opportunities
- Performing competitive research and analysis to assess market dynamics and identify key differentiators
The insights gained through this process led to the creation of Tony’s distinctive core branding themes:
- Offering: Sharing Our Passion for Great Food
- Experience: Celebrating Life Daily
Brand Platform
Utilizing and building off of elements from the Market Positioning Action Plan™, we created the Brand Platform. The Brand Platform included the creation of:
- Purpose
- Core Values
- Unique Vocabulary
- Messaging Hierarchy
- Unique Imagery
- Overall Brand Story
The Brand Platform culminated in the establishment of Tony’s unique story and their passion for great food. A place with a knowledgeable and friendly team who live to bring customers only the finest, hand-picked meats and groceries, while making everyone feel right at home and a part of the family.
Website Design – UX and UI
Using our proprietary Websites Right Methodology™, we crafted Tony’s website UX and UI based on detailed personas and strategic insights uncovered through keyword research and competitive analysis. This process involved:
- Integrating key findings from the Marketing Positioning Action Plan™ to strategically reverse engineer the site’s navigation and URL structure, optimizing it for search visibility across critical services.
- As you do "eat with your eyes" before anything else, we designed a visual experience that highlights custom photography to emphasize the unmatched quality of Tony’s food offerings and meat selection.
- Enhancing the user experience with features such as "Ask a Butcher," online ordering, recipes, weekly specials, and Tony’s Rewards enrollment.
- Incorporating a visual identity inspired by classic corner butcher shops, featuring signature elements like Tony’s butcher paper and traditional script fonts.
Website Development – Scope and Programming
The website was built on our custom Enhanced WordPress Platform and guided by our proven Websites Right Methodology™. Key components of this approach included:
- Clearly defined website goals to track and measure success.
- Collaborative homepage planning to shape the brand story from the outset.
- Development of detailed design mockups to ensure team alignment and enthusiasm for the new look.
- Thorough documentation of functional requirements to clarify how each feature would work and be managed.
- A comprehensive project plan with a visual Gantt chart to keep timelines transparent and on track.
- Weekly status updates and touch-base emails to maintain consistent communication
- Integration of third-party tools to extend website capabilities.
- Custom development of advanced functionality tailored to the business.
- Rigorous cross-browser and cross-device testing, including mobile and tablet optimization.
- Strategic content leadership to ensure the brand story is clearly and effectively communicated.
- Implementation of SEO best practices to improve visibility and search engine rankings.
- Post-launch testing and ongoing performance analysis to ensure long-term success.
Ongoing Marketing Program
Performance Intelligence Dashboard and Reporting
We collaborated with Tony’s to determine key performance metrics and plans for ongoing program enhancements. By integrating several tracking systems into the website, we established visual and real-time dashboards that provide convenient and actionable insights. Additionally, they help drive accountability back to specific growth measure goals.
Among the dashboard reports are year-over-year sales by department, by location, and customer count. Using the dashboard, we were able to visually identify trends that helped with campaign planning, such as adding extra support for specific locations or products.
We also implemented other reporting, including:
- Heat maps to improve website user engagement and event conversions.
- Attribution tracking to measure marketing tactics and performance, including cost per visitor reporting based on their Paid Search ad spend.
- Tony’s Reward sign-up visual trends
- Social media audience growth visual reporting
We tested and continuously improved results through Performance Intelligence across all touchpoints. We effectively measured the website, ad copy, landing pages, calls to action, and more to create positive ROI.
Paid Search and Social Media
As you can imagine, Tony’s has a significant number of seasonal promotions, as well as a need to ensure that evergreen ads are in place. We work with Tony’s to ensure our paid strategy supports both. We activate several seasonal promotions for prepaid meals around:
- Thanksgiving
- Holidays
- Valentine’s Day
- St. Patrick’s Day
- Easter
In addition, we support ongoing paid ads for such things:
- Department-specific and location-based search
- Tony’s Rewards sign up via Meta
- Weekly special or limited-time promotions
Furthermore, we have successfully utilized paid advertising to promote new offerings, such as wine and beer sales at their Bowles locations, mountain community sign-ups for local delivery, and programs targeting people who have recently moved into an area near their location, to name a few.
Search Engine Optimization, Local Search Optimization, and Backlink Building
We identified targeted keywords and groupings during the website’s initial development. While the website was built and optimized for those terms, ongoing SEO was required to remain competitive in search.
Utilizing a vast toolset, our team audits the website monthly, tracking rankings, traffic, engagement, identifying content gaps, and more. Our team would perform necessary on-page optimizations and work to ensure all new content was correctly optimized for search.
Local search was also vitally important to ensure Map Pack visibility for all three locations. Our team optimized Tony’s local listings around our target keywords and updated a vast area of local directories to ensure consistency and alignment.
Our team also created vital backlinks from other relevant websites to enhance the overall domain authority and search rankings of the website. Each month, we would identify ten or more high-authority domains and work with those site owners to have content that included a keyword-rich backlink pointing to Tony’s website.
Results
We achieved excellent results with Tony Meats and Market. Some highlights include:
- Current calendar year increase in sales of 25.7% over the previous year
- Current calendar year customer count increase of 6.2% from a year earlier
- Tony Reward’s subscribers increased by over 5,500 over the most recent year
- Monthly organic traffic values have consistently increased year-over-year, with an 18.1% increase over the previous year.
- Local search rankings consistently hold the top positions across all map packs.
