AI-powered strategy doubles dairy’s engagement and reach

As the marketing function for dairy farmers and importers, Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) is tasked with ensuring Americans purchase, consume and feel good about dairy products. Today’s dairy marketing goes beyond the famous milk mustaches of the ’90s (which are still having a moment) to include gooey, cheesy pizza close-ups, talking cows and protein-packed cottage cheese recipes.

While the positive sentiment around dairy ebbs and flows, DMI must continue to cultivate consumer trust in dairy with its healthy nutrients and affordability messaging to ultimately boost sales across the industry.

As the voice of dairy, DMI connects with consumers on its primary platforms, its website and media channels. In recent years, DMI relied on non-branded keywords to drive traffic, yet saw a drop in site visitors as the effects of organic search tactics lost efficiency.

Like many of today’s modern marketers, DMI was trying to maintain audience engagement in a fragmented user journey while competing on noisy, disjointed channels.

DMI tapped Rise, a Quad agency, to diversify its media mix and create more seamless, cross-channel experiences throughout Google’s ecosystem that would not only increase visitors but also get them to hang out on the page longer.

Well-developed, relevant organic content would anchor the strategy while inspiring, delighting and engaging the audience in meaningful ways. Innovative paid tactics would amplify DMI’s content and messaging even further.

With DMI’s well-worn keyword list in hand, the Rise team homed in on the best intent-based keywords and those that could offset negative sentiment. Because organic search traction was sliding, Rise would devise a full-funnel approach powered by Google’s AI solutions and centered on a specific traffic metric — the one-minute page view — as the true measure of visitor interest.

The team uncovered an abundance of high-performing recipe content — from quiches and cakes to milkshakes and cheese plates. The deep-dive onsite recipes needed a regular publishing schedule, while 6- and 15-second recipe videos could augment DMI’s “Do Dairy Daily” campaign, paired with the quirky “Have a Diary Fling” short-form video series.

Rise took a four-pronged approach to re-engage DMI’s audience across the Google ecosystem:

• Performance Max to extend DMI’s reach beyond standard Search, using audience signals and keyword learnings to tailor creative across Google. Performance Max’s AI also identified recipe content as a high-performing complement to existing search ads, adding newly proven content in more placements at every stage of the funnel.

• Broad match keywords with CPA to replace phrase match strategies in order to identify high-intent recipe queries that capture emerging trends and reach a wider audience with more cost efficiency.

• YouTube video content to test creator-style content, Shorts and recipe videos — reaching 5 million unique users and cementing YouTube as an effective evergreen tactic. Utilizing Performance Max for remarketing to YouTube viewers ensured a consistent cross-channel message.

• SEO to optimize high-volume keywords, offset negative search queries and quickly and effectively navigate the ongoing changes to the search landscape as AI tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT were introduced and evolved.