86'd Me

86d’me entered the highly competitive Food & Beverage industry media landscape with a fresh concept but a critical business challenge: zero awareness and no existing audience or traffic.

For a new media property, this represented a significant and costly pain point for the business owners:

• Revenue Inefficiency: Without a demonstrable, engaged readership, the sales team had no leverage to attract premium advertisers, resulting in lost revenue opportunities from day one.

• High Acquisition Costs: Relying solely on paid advertising or pure outbound sales to find readers would be financially unsustainable and inefficient, preventing scale.

• Brand Authority Vacuum: A lack of professional branding and a foundational website meant the magazine was perceived as nascent rather than an authoritative, reliable source for the F&B community.

The core problem was invisibility, making every subsequent business goal (securing readers and advertisers) exponentially more expensive and difficult to achieve.

Our strategy was not a single-channel campaign, but a holistic, three-phased approach designed to build a sustainable and authoritative digital asset, ensuring long-term return on investment (ROI).

Phase 1: Establish the Foundation (Branding & Platform)

We began by defining the magazine’s identity and building its home.

• Brand Strategy & Branding: Developed a distinctive voice, visual identity, and core messaging that resonated with the Food & Beverage professional audience in Charleston. This ensured consistency across all future touchpoints.

• Website Design and Development: Engineered a fast, mobile-responsive, and user-friendly digital magazine platform. Crucially, the site architecture was built with SEO best practices from the ground up to ensure content could be easily discovered by search engines.

Phase 2: Build the Organic Growth Engine (SEO)

With the platform established, the focus shifted to driving cost-effective, high-intent traffic.

• Comprehensive SEO: Conducted in-depth keyword research targeting the local F&B community, implemented on-page optimization for all content, and established a technical SEO roadmap to ensure maximum indexability.

• Content Strategy: Created content that directly answered the needs of F&B operators, establishing 86d’me as an educational and relevant resource, not just a news outlet. This was key to fueling the long-term organic traffic growth.

Phase 3: Community & Amplification (Social & Merchandising)

To accelerate awareness and engagement, we leveraged existing social channels and brand extensions.

• Social Media Strategy: Developed a content calendar and engagement strategy to connect directly with the local F&B community, driving immediate traffic back to the newly optimized website.

• Merchandising: Created branded items to extend the magazine’s presence offline and build a sense of community and loyalty among readers and subscribers.

By executing a unified strategy that prioritized foundational elements like Branding and SEO, 86d’me moved from an unknown entity to an industry resource in its first year. The results demonstrate the power of a strategic digital launch.

For Directors of Marketing and Business Owners facing a challenge in a new market or struggling with stagnating traffic, this project offers a clear mandate:

Do not treat branding and SEO as separate line items; view them as the non-negotiable foundation of your business.

The 1000% increase in organic traffic did not happen by accident—it was the result of a platform and content strategy that was technically sound, strategically focused, and executed with authority. This organic growth engine:

1. Reduces your reliance on expensive paid channels.

2. Generates high-quality, high-intent traffic that is more likely to convert (into readers, leads, or customers).

3. Builds intrinsic brand authority, which is the single most valuable asset for securing high-value partners and advertisers.

Your Action Item: Ensure your next digital project starts with a unified Brand Strategy and SEO-first Website Architecture. This upfront investment is the key to unlocking exponential, sustained growth and maximizing your long-term ROI.