How we built a complete brand, content, SEO and growth programme for a South African food-innovation brand with national distribution — and turned a 200-stockist shelf-presence story into a board-ready growth case.
Our client — a South African food-innovation business with three product ranges and listings in over two hundred stockists nationally — came to us with a clear paradox. The product was on shelf almost everywhere it needed to be. The marketing engine to pull units through the till had not been built. The website carried placeholder copy. The Instagram engagement rate sat well below food-CPG benchmark. There was no recipe library, no SEO content, no email funnel and no LinkedIn presence at the moment retailer buyers were deciding which third spice brand to back next year.
We don't pitch before we diagnose. Every recommendation in the final proposal traces back to a specific finding from one of the five research deliverables — and every rand of investment is justified against modelled return.
Founder narrative, product architecture, distribution footprint, digital audit, SWOT and strategic opportunities — the full diagnostic of where the brand sits today.
Six category competitors benchmarked across distribution, brand strength, digital quality, content cadence and pricing. Weighted scoring and a positioning map that locates the lane the brand can own.
A client-lens read of Instagram and LinkedIn. Post-by-post engagement breakdown, format-gap analysis vs the category, dormancy diagnosis and the headline finding that drives the proposal's social retainer.
Four content pillars, weekly calendar, caption templates, ten ready-to-shoot Reel concepts, the four-tier SEO keyword universe and the four-stage TOFU-to-retention sales funnel.
The capstone: complimentary Month Zero, five service pillars (web, social, SEO, brand, video), three monthly tiers, ninety-day timeline and a full commercial summary in ZAR — every line tied back to an audit finding.
An eight-tab Excel model with 237 live formulas: market sizing, current-state estimate, three-scenario revenue forecast, channel P&L, CAC vs LTV cohort math, ROI & payback, and a quarterly KPI dashboard.
The client's Instagram engagement rate, calculated across the most recent twelve posts, sat at less than a quarter of the lowest competitor in the set. Not a content-quality problem — a strategic-system problem. We modelled the closeable gap and built the social retainer around it.
Every single recipe Reel the client had ever posted was a missing SEO landing page. We mapped the four-tier keyword universe, prioritised the ten highest-leverage targets, and built the four-stage funnel that converts a TikTok view into a quarterly subscription customer.
Goal: reach. Metric: views, search impressions, share of voice.
Goal: capture intent. Metric: subscribers, locator searches, return visits.
Goal: convert. Metric: AOV, conversion rate, repeat rate.
Goal: lifetime value. Metric: repeat rate, referrals, NPS.
We don't pitch a marketing programme without putting numbers around it. Our financial model showed the client what each scenario buys back: market sizing, channel-by-channel unit economics, CAC versus LTV by customer type, and a payback ratio for every rand of agency spend.
Founder, range, distribution, web, SWOT and five strategic opportunities — the document the client used internally to align the leadership team on direction.
Six category competitors scored across six weighted dimensions. The 24-point closeable equity gap quantified what "winning" looked like inside twelve months.
Post-by-post breakdown, format-gap analysis, dormancy read, LinkedIn audit and audience-overlap insight. The number that anchored the social retainer.
Four pillars, weekly calendar, four caption templates, ten Reel ideas, the SEO keyword universe and the four-stage funnel — all mapped to ninety-day targets.
Five service pillars, three tier packages, ninety-day timeline, complimentary Month Zero foundation programme, full commercial summary in ZAR. Every line traced to an audit finding.
237 live formulas. Market sizing, current state estimate, three-scenario forecast, channel P&L, CAC versus LTV math, ROI & payback, KPI dashboard. Defensible at a board table.
Every recommendation traces back to a specific finding from the audit phases. No generic decks.
Every line in the proposal is defended in the financial model. Marketing without math is just opinion.
One team across brand, site, social, SEO, email and video. No coordination tax between five vendors.
Every system, template and process documented so an in-house team can take it over inside eighteen months.
"The brand was already on the shelf. What we needed was the engine to pull units through the till. They didn't pitch us — they diagnosed us, built the math, and then proposed the work." — Founder · Specialty Food CPG, South Africa
We start every engagement with a complimentary Month Zero — a four-week foundation programme that delivers a workshop, an audit and a thirty-day content calendar at no cost. We make our case with the work.
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