GMO Answers

  • Lead time: 6 weeks
  • Sector: Biotechnology, GMOs, Food Security & Sustainability
  • Goal: Increase impressions, website traffic, positive sentiment, social engagement
  • Services: Social media, brand listening, content development, SEO, paid search, website development

Online visibility for biotech advocacy and food security

GMO Answers offers insights, news, and supports dissemination of updates related to food sustainability, GMO crops, food security, and bioengineering science. The target audiences include both consumers and government agencies that inform policies.

Thoroughbrand supported GMO Answers mission by combating misinformation around GMOs, biotech, and pesticides using a mixture of marketing tactics to include online listening, SEO, content creation, paid media, website development, and social media.

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Our approach

For their comprehensive marketing strategy using GMO Answers, CropLife engaged Thoroughbrand  to develop new content and landing pages, implemented onsite SEO, manage the website, deploying search and social advertising, and reporting.

Starting with market research and listening, Thoroughbrand’s strategy was informed by marketing data to ensure the content, ads, and social media content resonated with audiences and elevated the message of the organization concerning the science behind GMOs.

The tactics included a backlink outreach and partner program to help increase the number of backlinks for the domain, improving use of high search volume terms with clear user intentions answered by GMOA content. Leveraging the website data, listening, and reporting to inform social media marketing and improving the content development process with the right topics and categories.

02

The results

From 2018 to 2022, GMO Answers partnered with Thoroughbrand to ensure visibility of the answers, messaging, and research offered by the biotechnology advocacy website.  Thoroughbrand was successful in elevating GMO Answers’ visibility while working with +55% less spend on advertising.

The market research and analytic insights helped inform onsite and social content strategies which produced 170% increase in social media traffic from 2020 to 2021, in a noisy social media space due to COVID lockdowns, higher competition, and social platform changes. Audience engagement with social content drove relevant website traffic, delivering a 7.4% decrease in the bounce rate from social media channels.

SEO of the website, along with the backlinking outreach program, helped elevate visibility of the website content over the course of the engagement, with the top terms targeted for GMO Answers growing from an average position of 13 to 5.5. The improved website and it’s content received more impressions from 2020 to 2021.

Paid media was in place as Thoroughbrand began. At the start of the engagement, the campaigns were rebuilt to align with best practices and implement opportunities discovered during the initial marketing audit. With this foundation and ongoing campaign refinements, the average click through rate improved by 166%.

Garnering more awareness online from these efforts along with physical events and key content placements helped overall search impressions increase by 11.79%.

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Thoroughbrand's SEO and content marketing strategy worked in combination with our online advertising drove more impressions on more valuable non-brand terms, comparing 2020 to 2021.

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Using a combination of videos, infographics, images, and scientific papers as the foundation for social posts with resource on their associated landing pages contributed to session durations increasing by 170%.

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Optimizing the website for Google's core web vitals, effective backlink strategies, initializing new content, and onsite SEO supported further growth of search engine result page position from an average of 16 to 5.5 and generated 11.79% more impressions.

From backend website SEO optimisations to managing the vagaries of an ever-changing social media landscape, Thoroughbrand has been there to guide us, help us, and fix things we didn’t even think needed fixing. 

I don’t know what we would have done without their knowledge, expertise, research, and their honest, plain-spoken common sense recommendations.

Michael Stebbins, Senior Manager, Communications
CropLife

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