Manzanita Cooperative
Fractional CMO
Leading marketing department for agro-forestry and native foods startup. Building brand, go-to-market and funding strategy, partnerships, sales enablement, performance marketing, communications, social media and content marketing initiatives. Built EatAcorn.com site, as a partnership with the California Indian Cultural Center.
Socializing the idea of native foods
The challenge: building an audience without a saleable product for a pre-revenue company doing something different, in an environment that has politicized food costs and climage change solutions
The solution: talk about food and land use with people who want to hear it
Manzanita is a pre-revenue company with very little budget, operating in an environment where our National Science Foundation grant funds were frozen and may or may not be fully issued. Paid online marketing efforts are hampered by filters that don’t allow basic phrases like “grocery bills, because they’re “political.” What we’ve found is that thoughtful long-form (like the piece on why the L.A. fires were as bad as they were) is doing extremely well, with long engagement times and emails from people who want to help.
Long-form writing and paid social ads drive the vast majority of traffic, for very little spend.
Example: a small paid social spend increased website traffic by 10X over 2 months. The “L.A. Story” I wrote in February had a 5-6% CTR and 4+ min read time, for a cost of $.03 per engaged minute. This trend continues with new long-form pieces.
Other social ads have a 2-3% CTR and $.12-$.20 CPC, with 2% conversion to newsletter.
Content and paid social ads are operating at 500% of platform standards, and engagement rates on site are similar.
Current targeting is venn diagram of people who care about both food security and the impact that their food has: chefs, conscious consumers & capitalists, and the organic/regenerative farm community. I built a crowdfunding push to pre-sell acorn flour in order to finance the acorn factory set up. As a marketing department of one, I built and wrote the EatAcorn.com site as part of a parternship with the California Indian Cultural Center, to socialize recipes and start to spread the word about this novel incredient as one that’s not just delicious, but much healthier for people and planet.
By using vintage poster and comic book styles for blog imagery and social ads (I’m also a design department of one), our CTR’s are well above platform averages and we’re steadily gaining social followers.
My time in bullets:
Fundraising: Active in company fundraising, partnered with CEO on vision & narrative, and signed LOI with lead investors for $2M.
Branding: Full rebrand, produced brand identity deck and new site
Site builds: ManzanitaCooperative.com, EatAcorn.com website
Performance marketing: Defined ICP, ran SEM & paid social
Content & Social Media Marketing: Social engagement: building online audiences; streamlined channels by giving them each a distinct purpose. Social following up 400% and growing.
Writing: websites, ads, articles, brand identity deck