HOW GRACE KENNEDY IS WASTING MONEY ON ONLINE ADS

Grace Kennedy, the Jamaican Conglomerate with the Caribbean famous and loved homegrown Grace brand is wasting money with their current online advertising campaign. Here’s how. 

The company’s Food & Beverage division one of the company’s top performing divisions launched an innovative line of frozen meals called Caribbean Traditions, targeted primarily at the Caribbean Diaspora in USA, specifically the large Jamaican population in New York. So they have the products – curried chicken, curried mutton, jerk chicken, jerk shrimp.

They placed a leder board type ad on radiojamaica.com known to have a strong and quantifiable Jamaican Diaspora audience seeking to stay in touch via the live radio stream and news headlines. Great site choice for placement. They positioned the ad on the home page and other secondary pages. Excellent! That’s where the good decisions end.

When you click on the ad it takes you to the gracefoods.com site, where what you get is to make a decision- do I wait and watch the 45 second long version of the first ad I saw on radiojamaica.com or do I try and find more about Caribbean Traditions Frozen meals somewhere obviously hidden from me on this site. That’s the mistake. Gracefoods.com is not a landing page, also known as a specifically designed and desired page on your website where you get to convert browsers to customers.

When you dump potential customers onto your home page, they tend to get lost. They have trouble finding your offer, your info and might give up or they might see something else of interest on your site and click away to that. You don’t want them randomly browsing your site. You want them to respond to your specific offer, a specific ad, specific info! The bottom line? When you send the reader to a landing page, you’re in control.

As a member of their target market, having seen the ad on radiojamaica.com, clicked through to see another ad and no further details or information that will prompt me to take action, I leave teased but not satisfied. I leave not knowing how much the meals cost, where to buy them online or in stores. I leave without giving Grace Kennedy any crucial data about myself, which they can use to follow up with other promotions that could lead to more sales for them.

Now I have no doubt that GK Foods had other elements to this Caribbean Traditions frozen meals marketing campaign, but this was one element- online advertising that they used and spent money on, has failed. If all Grace Kennedy Foods division wanted me to know is know that yep, they have a new line of frozen meals out, they succeeded. If they wanted to me go buy it, sign up for an offer or to be further contact, pass on the info to my friends and family as landing pages are designed to do, then it failed. But don’t take my word for it, go to radiojamaica.com and tell me about your own experience with the Grace Kennedy online ad campaign.

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