Clarifruit

An A to Z marketing package that’s helping drive growth for Clarifruit, the world’s first AI-powered Quality Control software for the Fresh Produce industry

Background

Clarifruit built the world’s first automatic, end-to-end quality control and data analytics platform for the fresh fruit and vegetable industry. Leveraging big data and artificial intelligence, Clarifruit aims to add consistency, accuracy, and objectivity to fresh produce quality control processes for the entire supply chain—from growers and marketing companies to wholesalers and retailers. The platform empowers stakeholders with the data they need to make business decisions that reduce waste, maximize productivity, and level the playing field for fruit and vegetable quality control.

Challenges

The agricultural sector is only beginning to enter the world of automation and digitization, so any company working in the field has to invest in extensive market education, a task that requires significant time and energy. As an early-stage lean startup in a traditional market, Clarifruit didn’t have the resources to recruit and manage an in-house marketing team with diverse skills and expertise ranging from that unique market education to “bread and butter” marketing capabilities like branding, positioning, digital marketing, and lead generation. They needed a way to hit the ground running and deliver results quickly and efficiently.

Goals

Given the challenges noted above, one of the company’s key goals was to educate the market about the advantages of automated quality control over the existing manual processes. As part of this process, Clarifruit identified the opportunity to become a thought leader in the industry and was seeking to establish social proof and market authority through strategic partnerships with industry groups, media and influencers. But first, the company needed to dig deep and define its unique brand values, value proposition, corporate voice, messaging, and positioning.

Once this was accurately defined, the company aimed to focus on driving sales, first by increasing engagement with prospects and generating high-quality leads, then by nurturing these leads through the sales funnel, and finally by converting these leads into customers and brand enthusiasts and optimizing these conversion rates.

The Process

At the beginning of 2020, Clarifruit approached Inspired Marketing about marketing management services. In a short time, Inspired Marketing became an inherent part of the Clarifruit team and took the lead in planning and implementing all marketing activities.

Building an Infrastructure

Initially, we focused on understanding fresh produce marketing through extensive industry research, analyzing competitors, media channels, and relevant industry groups, and identifying and developing target audiences and personas based on the most relevant stakeholders in the fresh produce supply chain.

Next, we created a comprehensive strategy for the company’s initial branding and positioning including defining the company’s value proposition, strategic messaging, and brand voice, and worked closely with a graphic designer to create a new visual concept and logo that supported the brand values. We also conducted extensive strategic keyword research and built a sitemap for the company’s new website based on our findings. Once that was done, we sat down to plan, write, and develop the company’s website, and managed the website project from A to Z, including coordination with designers and developers. In addition, in order to reach Spanish-speaking audiences, we helped coordinate the translation of all website content for a new Spanish website.

Lead Generation and Outreach

Once the marketing infrastructure was in place, we started to focus on inbound marketing, social media marketing, LinkedIn outreach and lead generation on several platforms. For the LinkedIn outreach activities, we chose a specific team member from Clarifruit to serve as the face of all campaigns and optimized his profile to include strategic information about Clarifruit and relevant industry keywords, and highlighted his achievements in the industry.

Understanding that these outreach efforts are an ongoing process, we continuously research and identify new target audiences, create new campaigns with personalized messages for these audiences and monitor all campaigns to optimize the results. In addition to generating high-quality leads, this also increases brand awareness and helps increase the number of followers on the company’s LI page.

In parallel, we also invest a large proportion of our efforts in reaching out to leading industry media portals. This involves ongoing research into which media portals are most relevant to the agricultural industry and Clarifruit’s mission, identifying who to reach out to on a monthly basis, and encouraging them to feature Clarifruit in their publications to build brand awareness and thought leadership in the field.

Last but not least, we supported Clarifruit in implementing marketing automation through HubSpot, including onboarding, reporting, form integrations, email marketing flows, and ongoing support, and we also continue to optimize SEO on the Clarifruit website.

The Results

Clarifruit now has a clear brand and value proposition, and the industry is aware of Clarifruit and its unique offering. Traffic to the company website, available in English and Spanish, has increased, both through organic content and paid campaigns. This increased traffic has led to more marketing-qualified leads from multiple channels and in different geographies, which are then nurtured through the automatic funnels.

Clarifruit’s social media channels are active and growing—the company now has over 1000 followers on LinkedIn—and there is a content and media plan in place for the future. Most importantly, the marketing-driven inbound sales channel has proved to be the superior sales channel with a 50% shorter sales cycle relative to other channels.

The detailed keyword research and the website content we created based on strategic keywords also delivered impressive results. Clarifruit was ranked amongst the top three results in Google for target keywords shortly after the new website was launched, and has maintained or improved those rankings since that time due to ongoing SEO efforts and the development of new content such as blog posts. The ongoing optimization has also led to increased website traffic and a rise in the number of monthly lead conversions.

Ongoing media outreach has led to multiple features in leading media portals like Fresh Plaza and The Produce Industry Podcast, which has also brought in a substantial number of high-quality leads.

We needed to move, and move fast, and while we had some idea of what was required, we didn’t have the resources to get it done properly and quickly. And Inspired Marketing delivered on both accounts. We got the full spectrum of expertise right away, but also the close connection and constant communication you’d expect from an in-house team. The IM staff seamlessly became an integral part of our team and continue to deliver what we need, when we need it.