American Pecans: Website Campaign Page
Description
Pecan pie is the most-searched pecan recipe during the holiday season. The American Pecan Council wanted to capitalize on this opportunity by providing a digital destination through the Americanpecan.com website featuring the most popularly searched for pies and non-pie pecan holiday recipes that would spark awareness among their target audiences.
Objective
To drive consideration of pecans in pie and other holiday recipes and make AmericanPecan.com the pecan pie authority and online destination for pecan inspiration during the holiday season.
What I did
• Research
• Wireframes
• Visual Design
Approach
Trend research has shown consumers searching for “pecan pie” begins to significantly increase in late October, with the highest volume in mid-November. American Pecan wanted to intersect the search behavior for pies on Google, a major channel for holiday meal planning. They developed a toolkit called The Pecan Pie Plus Optimization Engine comprised of a Google paid search component and a dedicated Pecan Pie Plus landing page on Americanpecan.com.
The landing page would help build their authority around the term “pecan pie'“ and feature pies and holiday recipes to help optimize AmericanPecan.com with visitors arriving to the website organically or with paid support.
Phase 2
Pecan-Plus Wireframes
I wanted to develop a page structure that complements the existing site design and makes it easy for visitors to browse content and find specific holiday recipes. In addition to the original wireframe I also designed a version using images and color to help communicate a realistic view of what the final product could look and feel like.
Mobile & Desktop Wireframes
High Fidelity Wireframe
Wireframe Iterations
One of the features in my original wireframe was an on-page drop-down menu to help visitors find additional pecan recipes by category. The below mockups were iterations of that feature developed for the client’s consideration.
Due to the limited number of recipes per category it was decided that the default view would show nine recipe cards and visitors could use the site’s existing ‘view more’ button to reveal additional recipe cards as needed (reference below : Phase 4 - final design)
Phase 3
American Pecan-a-Thon
Epicurious—a top recipe site for consumers interested in food and cooking-related topics hosted The Super American Pecan-A-Thon campaign during the 2018 holiday season. They encouraged their audience to go beyond standard pie recipes to make one more pecan dish that would “blow their holiday guests away”.
They teamed up with Wendi McLendon-Covey, six American pecan growers, and a few food influencers to create a selection of recipes and ideas. The pledging process was simple: click on a recipe on the Epicurious.com website and make it—that’s it. The Epicurious.com website also provided a link to the Americanpecan.com website for more recipes and visitors were encouraged to share their creations on social media using the hashtag #pledgepecans.
Epicurious.com online video campaign - view here
Conde’ Nast Entertainment online video campaign hosted by Vimeo - view here
Social media card formatted for all social channels used to help drive traffic to the American Pecans promotional website page.
Phase 4
Pecan-a-Thon Wireframes
The Super American Pecan-A-Thon campaign page was an evolution of the existing Pecan Pie Plus landing page. In addition to copy updates, the most noticeable update was the section on ‘how to pledge’ where I decided to outline the pledge process using three easily recognizable icons with supporting copy.
Our development team created the final page design and it was featured on the American Pecan website from mid-November 2018 to end-December 2018—it appeared to be well received by both the pecan industry and pecan enthusiasts.
Mobile & Desktop Wireframes
Final Page Design
Post-Launch Performance Highlights
With the help of various promotions and paid media both the Pecan Plus page and Pecan-a-Thon campaign page performed well.
High Site Traffic
The American Pecans website saw the highest website traffic in 2018 and more than half of the visits were for recipes.
More Page Views
Paid social media and paid search advertising helped to generate interest in American Pecans holiday ideas, leading to 29% more page views in December than in November.
Increased Popularity
The Pecan-a-Thon campaign page was the most popular section of the digital toolkit for the pecan industry.
Phase 5
Homepage banners
It was important that visitors could easily access the Pecan Plus and Pecan-a-Thon landing pages if they arrived on the site through the homepage. I designed banners for each program that would be featured in clear view across the top portion of the site’s homepage using brand colors, images and calls-to-action that would drive to each landing page. They were presented to the client as high-fidelity designs to look & feel like a final designed product.
Pecan Plus Banner
Pecan-a-Thon Banner
Future Development
AmericanPecan.com will continue to implement my approach and framework for future promotional content to help serve up additional pecan usage recipes and ideas that will educate visitors to think of pecans in a fresh new way.