In the first 8 months of 2023, 38,000 people visited CALRICE.org, equaling 100 people per day. In the first 8 months of 2024, 379,000 people visited CALRICE.org, totaling more than 1,000 people per day.
How’d we do it? We built a sophisticated, modern, digital-first marketing strategy and followed a simple 5 step plan to ensure every dollar spent on advertising has the biggest possible impact.
Step 1- Only spend money advertising to certain types of people
When you buy a radio spot or billboard, you pay a flat price based on estimated impressions, and you pay regardless of who those impressions come from. With Google Ads, we’ve defined key segments of the CA population: legislators and decision makers, rice lovers, and environmental enthusiasts. Through a process called “Affinity Targeting,” we restrict our ad serving to exclusively those California residents who meet our specific qualifications, only paying for those impressions.
Step 2- Only show those people the right ads for them
One size doesn’t fit all. If we had one singular message about CA Rice, it may resonate with certain audiences, but not others. Since we know that some people in California care about wildlife, while others care about the economy, and others just care about sushi, we developed 48 unique ads and carefully matched these messages to the most relevant audience possible.
Step 3- Only pay when our ads actually work
Programmatic display advertising platforms, like Google Ads, allow you to set up your campaigns on the principle of “cost-per-click” advertising. In these 8 months, our ads showed up on the sides of websites 63,233,742 times, but when a user ignores our ad and doesn’t click, we don’t pay a penny. We only pay for clicks, and so far, we’ve only had to pay around $0.17 per click.
Step 4- Only send those people to web content curated to them
CALRICE.org has a ton of valuable content, but just like ads, one size doesn’t fit all. Reading about the CA Ricelands Salmon Project may increase some consumers’ affinity for our industry, others will need to see sushi recipes. We send specific users to the most relevant content based on their interests. We’ve sent more than 140,000 people to our economic report, our environmental benefits page, and our home page. Not to mention more than 60,000 users sent to recipe information. This has increased interest in learning and lengthened the amount of time a user stays on our website, more than 3minutes and 13seconds on average.
Step 5- Measure everything
Unlike many traditional forms of advertising, most digital platforms can provide real time feedback on your campaigns in the form of mountains of data. We use Google Ads, Google Analytics, Looker Studio, and Google Tag Manager to constantly monitor our campaigns, and make real time updates to our creative and targeting strategies to improve performance.
We will continue to utilize these same tools in our 2024-24 Fiscal Year.
For more information on our targeted digital ads, contact the CRC’s Communications Manager Katie Cahill at kcahill@calrice.org or (916) 612-8899 and she can connect you with Steve Lerch.
