Birchrun Hills Farm
Social Media
Community Partner
Birchrun Hills Farm is a small family-owned dairy farm located in northern Chester County, Pennsylvania. It has an on-site creamery and is run by Sue and Ken Miller, along with their two sons, Randy and Jesse. They began their cheese making process back in 2006. Beautiful Social previously partnered with Birchrun Hills in 2014 to create a promotional video and kickstarter campaign to raise money for a cheese cave. This semester, Birchrun Hills came to Beautiful Social with the task of creating promotional stock photos of their cheese to help promote their media presence and build an Ecommerce section on their new website.
At Birchrun Hills, the Millers control every aspect of their farm especially how they make their products. They practice methods that promote the growth of organic matter and build soil fertility to focus on the conservation and health of their farmland. Birchrun Hills produces local, fresh and unique cheese. They do their best to provide the highest quality cheese and use sustainable products to serve the community as well as the environment around them.
Challenge
In our collaboration with Birchrun Hills Farm, we wanted to increase their eCommerce traffic and engage customers. ECommerce is the act of electronically buying and selling of products through online services. Our goal was to engage customers through social media content and web presence to promote the selling of Birchrun Hills’ goods while maintaining relationships with their customers. ECommerce and audience engagement benefits not only Birchrun Hills’ relationship with their customers but their business as a whole. We based our project around these questions: What kind of shareable content increases engagement and eCommerce and how is the best to phrase advertising posts to engage consumers? We decided to focus on these questions by creating new media for Birchrun Hills to achieve a better online presence that promotes online sales and engagement with customers as well as providing pictures, infographics, and information that captivates and engages the audience.
In order to engage with consumers through their social media, we researched the aesthetics of similar cheese companies and recorded their best practices. We observed how they engaged with their consumers and observed how these consumers responded to different advertising tactics. In relation to the current pandemic of COVID-19, learning how to promote eCommerce is important as it becomes harder for people to shop and support local businesses. It becomes more important and pressing to have a highly functioning and engaging online presence to continue growth and profit for small businesses.
Strategic Thinking
By conducting a comparative media analysis, we were able to fully develop and create a social media analysis for Birchrun Hills Farm. To become fully immersed in Birchrun Hills beliefs of long-standing family traditions and healthy food, we used Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle theory. The Golden Circle allows a business to clearly identify their why, how and what in order to define their mission statement and guide their marketing plans. The why, or the purpose for what you do, stems from deep-rooted beliefs.
This project focused primarily on Birchrun Hills’ cheese in order to produce stock photos for their new website. We used Hugh MacLeod’s idea on social objects, which brings people together. Social objects add ease to our social interactions by giving us a reason to come together. The focus on Birchrun Hills’ cheese allows the consumers to feel a sense of family and community which are essential to the small business. Birchrun Hills cheese is made with love and acts as their social object. As a social object, it promotes love and conversation in its consumers. Using MacLeod’s social object theory we are able to market Birchrun’s cheese as a powerful social experience as well as an artisan cheese.
Results
Due to the current pandemic of COVID-19 our project has unfortunately been halted. Despite the unfortunate events, we have learned so much this semester and were still able to provide Sue and Birchrun Hills Farm with a social media analysis as well as few stock photos to use temporarily. In addition, we created a resourceful blog post on the Beautiful Social’s website “Best Practices to Photograph Stock Photos (Cheese Edition)”. In the post we covered the topic of stock photos and tips and tricks of how to photograph these specific photos, and of course our focus on the blog was all about cheese. We are sad to see the project end soon, but we are very proud of what we were able to accomplish in this short amount of time.