Digital Marketing Manager at Gazebo Room Salad Dressings
In six years with this company, I can honestly say that I’ve gained more experience and insight into the full spectrum of advertising and marketing skills than I could have anywhere else. I’ve had the pleasure of building an entire marketing strategy for an iconic Central Pennsylvania brand with a loyal following. From building 2 entirely new websites as Webmaster/SEO Admin (https://gazeboroom.com and http://gazeboroom.biz), to creating and maintaining a comprehensive social media presence across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube and Pinterest, to maintaining traditional advertising campaigns with local partners like the Harrisburg Senators and ABC27, I have had the opportunity and been given the autonomy to take on a variety of roles that fall outside the realm of just Digital Communications/Social Media Marketing.
Social Media Initiatives
Finding a way to build a social media presence from
scratch with essentially no advertising budget was difficult at a time when
Facebook’s organic (free) reach had dipped into the low single digits, but I
was allowed to give away a certain
number of bottles to increase fan/follower engagement. I decided that the best
way to do this was through a twice yearly “Win a Year’s Supply of Gazebo Room”
contest, wherein a reasonable years supply is defined as 3 cases (36 bottles).
Social media actions during a 2 week contest periods in June and December earn
followers contest entry points, which are used in a random drawing to determine
a winner. Another benefit of this system is that these contest entry points can
be used to encourage a variety of actions, such as signing up for our email
newsletter, or writing a review of our products. We have even begun using them
as a free and unlimited customer service resource to appease the occasional difficult customer.
One of the initiatives that I’m
most proud of is our collaboration with several cooking/lifestyle bloggers who
periodically create recipes using our products. Our “Gazebo Room Bloggers” not
only promote our products to their own readers at no cost to us, they also
create valuable content for our website visitors and social media followers.
After some research into the other affinity categories that our website
visitors fall into, I decided to expand this initiative to a new social media
segment that I called “Gazebo Room Blogger Lifestyle” posts, which share
articles from our network of Gazebo Room Blogger that feature useful
information on topics like style, home décor, parenting, health and beauty
tips. Our followers have been happy with the diversified content, and our bloggers
have enjoyed the increased website traffic and pageviews that have come with
the added exposure.
I think that we’ve been able to
use the social media hashtag system in some unique ways, such as highlighting
how our products are shelf stable (no refrigeration needed) by encouraging fans
to post selfies with our products in the places that they keep them with the
hashtag #GazeboRoomShelfie in exchange for bonus contest points. We also
encourage customers to use the hashtag #WheresMyGazeboRoom, along with their
city and state, and we will respond with a list of retailer options or a link
to buy online at our website. We use #GazeboRoomRecipe for the recipes that we
create in house, but it’s also how our customers and bloggers let us know that
they’ve posted a recipe that uses our products, and that it’s ok for us to use
on our website.
Amazon Alexa Skill: Gazebo Room Recipes
One of the major perks of this job is that they give me a lot of autonomy when it comes to launching new and innovative Digital Marketing Strategies and campaigns, which has recently included the creation of an Amazon Alexa "Skill" which allows users to access recipes that feature Gazebo Room Salad Dressings by interacting with their Amazon Alexa voice assistant device. Users can say "Alexa, ask Gazebo Room Recipes for (Appetizer, Entree, Pasta, Seafood, etc...) recipes.", then choose from a list of 5 different recipes, read aloud by Alexa. The recipe is then read aloud to them in full, and a digital recipe card is sent to their mobile device for reference. This skill has been extremely popular with our customers, generally producing several hundred unique user interactions per week. The image below is from our recent social media campaign highlighting the 30th anniversary of the company, and prompts users to ask Alexa for recipes that were used in the old Gazebo Room Restaurant before it closed in 1999.
Gazebo Room Kitchen Virtual Reality Application Concept (In Progress)
Another innovative project that I've been working on lately is still in a proof-of-concept stage at the moment, but it will allow us to create interactive experiences, such as cooking demonstrations, within a virtual kitchen environment, accessible through VR Head Mounted Displays such as Facebook's Oculus line of products, or HTC's Vive headsets. The link below will open in any browser to give you an idea of the concept, but must be viewed on a VR headset to get the full Virtual Reality effect.
https://us-east-1.sumerian.aws/bfea8f7071c14344bae57e497a571aa9.scene
Other Initiatives
In the Fall of 2013, I was approached by an account executive from ABC27 about participating in a cooking segment on their new Good Day PA morning show. Neither of the owners necessarily wanted to be the “face” of Gazebo Room Salad Dressings on a live cooking segment, so I reached out to David Albright, owner and head chef at one of York’s finest restaurants, The Left Bank. David has used our products at The Left Bank for years, and was very happy to participate in the segment in return for some free publicity for his restaurant. The segment was such a success that David also agreed to shoot a commercial (our first ever) for Gazebo Room which ran for several months on local cable channels throughout the summer of 2015. The co-branding initiative was so successful that David is asked often about our products, which have become strongly associated with fine dining in the minds of many local customers.
Gazebo Room has had a long standing advertising partnership with the Harrisburg Senators minor league baseball team, participating annually in an in-game back to back homerun contest and securing naming rights to a food stand (The Gazebo Room Grill). Early in 2015, the owners asked me to brainstorm some new sponsorship ideas to replace the in-game homerun contest. The idea that they liked best was one that became our “Walks for Warriors” campaign, in which every time that a batter was walked during a home game, Gazebo Room would add money to a pot to be donated to a veteran’s support group at the end of the season. After researching several charities and navigating a minefield of corporate charity laws, we decided to work with the DAV (Disabled American Veterans), who allowed the full donation to go directly to their local Harrisburg chapter. This was probably the most rewarding work experience of my career, because the Harrisburg DAV chapter had been struggling with dwindling membership (and therefore reduced fundraising capability) for several years, but the donation made 2015 one of their best fundraising years to date, and the publicity from the on field interview/check presentation brought in several new members to their organization.
