Small Biz Success Story: Pink Cake Box
I’m a big believer that learning from the successful examples of others is often the best way to grow a small business, and hopefully you’ll agree. Today, I’ll introduce you to a small business that’s baking up a storm via its web site, a blog, public relations, and social media.
Pink Cake Box is a specialty cake shop in northern New Jersey with 10 employees.
They opened for business in 2005, built their own web site, and started a blog all in that same year. They’ve been featured in People, Modern Bride, and several other publications.
They are, by any definition I can think of, a successful small business. And as Jesse Heap—whose wife, Anne, is the pastry chef and cake designer—says, they owe much of their success to solid online marketing.
“I don’t think we realized how critical the web would become to our business,” Jesse told me recently via e-mail.
How important has your web site been to growing the business?
It’s been crucial to helping build the business and driving customer growth. The majority of our customers originate through the web. Our site has also opened up doors with media contacts and helped us score a spot on CNN along with several prominent magazines and newspapers.
You guys also have a blog. What convinced you to start blogging?
When launching the business in 2005, we looked at our competitors and realized that, for the most part, they had built attractive web destinations. However, almost all our competitors had static sites that lacked the ability to connect with customers like a blog can. We realized that, in order to differentiate ourselves, we had to use our blog to promote our cakes and offer customers and cake enthusiasts a constant stream of new cake, contests, & videos. Our goal was to stay connected to our customers and help foster stronger brand recognition.
Our approach helped attract links from hobbyists that lead to increased search engine visibility and ultimately more customers.
The other positive aspect of blogging on the Wordpress platform is its native and extended SEO capabilities. Out of the box, Wordpress has some strong SEO capabilities and with the right combinations of plugins and tweaks, it is an SEO powerhouse.
Has the blog been a successful marketing tool for you?
Without a doubt, our blog is the centerpiece of our web presence and has been an extremely successful marketing tool. The blog receives upwards of 120,000 unique visitors a month and drives a large percentage of our orders.
Read more.
Photo by Pink Cake Box.
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply