Review Syndication helps Primal Kitchen see 64x more reviews on retailer sites

Primal Kitchen is a brand that’s been taking over grocery store shelves for the last few years thanks to its tasty pantry staples and meal solutions made from beneficial fats and clean ingredients.

The brand also sells its products direct-to-consumer online through its primalkitchen.com site and primalblueprint.com.

Primal Kitchen initially started working with Bazaarvoice because the team understood the importance of featuring user-generated content (UGC). The brand was accumulating continuous reviews on its website, and sites like Amazon, but it needed a way to syndicate them to retail partners, like Target.com and Walmart.com, to build customer confidence.

“We are constantly looking for more content to be helpful to our consumer base. What brought Primal Kitchen to Bazaarvoice was its unique ability to seamlessly plug into our site’s technology and pump out reviews to our retail network. That was a selling point for us,” said Anna Simon, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Primal Kitchen.

The UGC Primal Kitchen was missing

Primal Kitchen needed a way to get first-time customers who may not be familiar with its unique products to convert. The company knew that written reviews would help with this, but it also wanted to use Bazaarvoice’s unique solutions to increase visual UGC and in turn create more authenticity.

“Most consumers are looking for authenticity from brands. Reviews are the absolute best way to provide that,” said Simon.

The brand also needed an easier way to connect with social media followers. Primal Kitchen has over 700,000 followers on Instagram alone, so it’s no small feat to connect with every single one of them in a meaningful way.

Social proof makes a big difference

Today, Bazaarvoice enables Primal Kitchen to manage and engage in social media at scale. The brand uses Bazaarvoice’s social suite for day-to-day posting on its channels and for engaging with customers.

“We respond to literally every single person, which is pretty incredible and we do get a lot of feedback from our consumers that our personalized approach is meaningful. It’s just a wonderful customer experience that they don’t necessarily get from other brands,” said Simon

Primal Kitchen also uses Like2Buy as a social commerce solution to drive traffic to its own website.

“We see constant growth, and it’s consistently one of our top five referral sources to our site,” said Simon.

Primal Kitchen leverages visual UGC to provide social proof on retailer sites, like Target.com. When acquiring social and visual content, the Primal Kitchen team knows exactly what to look for.

“We do have a standard that we look for in images for amplification. It typically mimics what you see on our Instagram page. We want the food to look appetizing, but we don’t want it to look too perfect because it needs to have authenticity,” said Simon.

Syndication brings a 130x increase in review volume

After implementing the Bazaarvoice platform, Primal Kitchen saw an immediate increase in reviews on retail partner sites and a massive boost in search volume for its products. Primal Kitchen’s product pages on Target.com and Walmart.com are also more visually appealing to potential customers.

Primal Kitchen went from a few thousand reviews to over 100,000 reviews across multiple retailers, which was a 130x increase in review volume.

Looking specifically at Target.com, the brand is syndicating hundreds of visuals that are approved by Target for its product pages, and the company is seeing significant business growth from this effort.

Bazaarvoice’s Visual Syndication Network increased reviews on Target.com 64-fold, taking them from a few hundred reviews on the retailer site to over 20,000 reviews. Unsurprisingly, it’s the top brand within the food and beverage category for volume of visual content syndicated to Target, with over 1,000 images shared to date. And on top of that, Primal Kitchen saw a 131% increase in conversion at Target.com for Q4 year-on-year.

“Our product pages look so beautiful now across all of ecommerce, not just our own site. It’s so nice having the ability to tag particular photos with particular products and then send that off via the Bazaarvoice Visual Syndication Network to Target.com,” said Simon.

The brand has also seen click-through-rates improve when using UGC in email, Instagram, and Facebook campaigns.

“UGC is incredibly important in all our channels. In our testing, we find that UGC content outperforms any other content that we put out there. On Instagram, Facebook, and e-mail channels, we see engagement, click-through rates, and open rates are higher,” said Simon.

Insights from reviews are also crucial for the business to understand how the consumer views its products.

“Reviews are always very telling as to whether people are enjoying the experience that they’re getting, and we always take that back to our QA team to further improve our products,” said Simon.

Use review syndication to increase conversions, improve SEO, and see better performance on retailer sites. Get started here.