A Masterclass in Opening a New Grocery Store Location

The Strategy

Organic Social Media & Influencers

We began with Influencer identification and our objective was clear: identify and reach out to local New Jersey creators whose content focused on food, lifestyle, and travel. We identified creators whose audiences were local to a Livoti’s location. By focusing on creators with specific audience demographics, we were able to maximize the overall effectiveness of each post while ensuring we kept the overall cost in check.

For our organic social media strategy, we utilized different types of posts, from showcasing Livoti’s relationship with the local community to addressing circulating rumors:

• Local Support Story
  • During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Livoti’s Aberdeen location remained open thanks to a generator installed after Hurricane Irene, allowing them to provide hot meals and coffee during the power outage. This effort greatly strengthened customer loyalty. To build on this, we planned to share an audio recording of a store manager detailing the experience and highlighting Livoti’s positive community impact, reminding everyone of its lasting importance to the area.
• Local Influencer Outreach
  • Not only did we use collaboration posts for extended reach, but we reached out to local chambers and major, local influencers as well.
• Local Stir in FB Groups
  • A rumor was spreading that Tommy Devito, New York Giants Quarterback at the time, would be showing up for the Brick Grand Opening. Although Tommy Devito did not show up to the event we played into the rumor and posted a Reel to promote our Grand Opening even more. 

Through our organic social media strategy, we effectively leveraged various types of posts, from showcasing Livoti’s strong community ties to creatively addressing circulating rumors, to enhance engagement and promote our events.

SEO

In addition to working on social platforms and bringing brand awareness to Livoti’s new location, we knew investing in SEO would help organic users naturally discover the new Brick location no matter if they went to the website or searched locally. Local SEO plays a significant role in connecting customers to the most appropriate location nearest them, or helping them discover their options for highly-specific queries. 

Sure enough, keywords like ‘livoti’s brick’ and ‘livoti’s brick nj’ had thousands of searchers clicking to go to the website since March along with hundreds of thousands of impressions. The average position of words like ‘Italian market brick’ and ‘italian market near me’ always show up in the top 10 search results. 

The strategy would have to include understand which keywords we wanted to compete for, having a strong landing page and sub-landing page for just pizza, a compelling business profile, and building off of any success won by the social media team.

The Execution

Organic Social Media & Influencers

Immediately following our onboarding we utilized Sprout Social to develop a content calendar for the company as a whole with specific posts and activations tailored around the grand opening.

Our team contacted the top 10 local influencers and secured 3 of the ones we felt would be most impactful to create content covering the new store opening. The influencers were scheduled to post just days before the grand opening to excite their local audience about the new location. We then had influencers regularly visit the store and post about it after the opening.

Of course, acquiring all this new traffic is only useful if you know what to do with it, so we made sure to update the Livoti’s website in preparation for Brick. We added menu items, focused on service pages, and made plans to add a liquor store page just for the Brick store. This will ultimately help users that come to the site find what they are looking for, be able to see information quickly and make informed choices, and place any orders or catering requests effortlessly.

SEO

We began by setting up the Google Business Profile fully, along with populating directories like Bing Places fairly quickly. We used local tools to help monitor and manage these listings and see how our keywords stacked up against competitors. We added appetizing images of the great food and dessert selections from Livtoi’s Brick and hooked up the social media profiles to the listing as well.

For the location pages on the main website, we took advantage of the keywords we’d found, optimized the page for search and usability, and made sure it was easy to navigate and understand what customers could expect from the Brick location just by organically landing on Brick’s pages. We used more advanced location schema and made sure to dominate the real estate in the SERPs for our chosen keywords. Additionally, we made it easy to order from Instacart, order catering, navigate to the right part of the website, and even compare Brick to the other Livoti’s locations in the area.

From March 1st (when our optimizations began), until the end of June 2024

• The Brick Landing pages exploded in impressions, garnering over 50k in the 4-month timeframe. V iews on search grew by more than 500%. There were 728 clicks to the two pages we newly built. We also held top (10) positions for non-branded keywords like italian market+location, butcher (nearest user), italian supermarket new jersey, and more. 
• This led to 24,166 website visits
• In comparison, other locations had between 5,000-9,000 website visits.
• There were also 180 new reviews and over 40,000 total GBP actions – more than double any other location. Not bad for a new listing!