When he took the reins, there were loyal patrons but many of them were older clientele, and he knew there were lots of new people moving and living in Fonthill that he wanted to become customers. He tried to spread the word about the farm, the traditional advertising route (newspaper ads and the odd online ad for example), but it wasn’t really working.

He began building the farm’s social media presence and was getting a good response from customers that way, but he wanted to find a strategic way to develop the business and needed a team with the expertise and time to help him do it, so he reached out to the Business and Commercialization Innovation Centre (BCIC).

The first step in this project was for the BCIC team to visit the farm to understand how their operation works, where their needs were and one thing that stood out around the farm was signage and specifically their logo; it was time for a rebrand.

To have a successful brand kit, the BCIC wanted to develop a responsive logo that included scalable variations. In the new logo, they made sure it had font pairings for headings and body text that worked well overall with their brand. Finally, building a defined colour palette with primary and secondary colours was also important.

For the FFFF logo, it was important to keep the essence of what they had already developed, being fun and family friendly is at the core of the business. The team’s goal was to have something that captured those feelings, was easy to read, and scalable.

“The team did a great job on our new logo – it’s incredible. They really nailed it as far as the vibe of our farm, the atmosphere and we’ve had lots of enthusiastic compliments on it, so looking forward to printing out new business cards and signage for the farm,” said Adam.

With the new logo in hand, the BCIC team took the project even farther with a few more elements to help build out FFFF’s cohesive brand. This included a focus on social media, with new photography and videography, and building out the brand story in reels and stories.

Over the two months that they supported Adam with social media, the success was clear in the data. The BCIC team focused the content creation focused on behind-the-scenes, educational, and community building.

FFFF’s social media audience is highly engaged, and their accounts continued to gain new followers. The data showed them that reels and stories performed best. They saw over 100 new followers over the two-month campaign, which is excellent growth for a local business.

Another stat that stood out was learning that FFFF’s content has been viewed over 42,000 times over the two-month period.

“We really got a crash course in social media marketing thanks to BCIC. They were phenomenal in their efforts here and provided great direction on how to connect more people with my posts,” said Adam.

He added, “I really think BCIC set a pattern up for continual growth for all the effort they put in. The success rate we’ve had from the work we did together has set the ball in motion in this new trajectory for our business and I’m very grateful for the success we’ve had already and optimistic about moving forward.”

Thanks to BCIC, Adam and his team know have a thorough understanding of the type of posts that perform best, who their audience is, where they have opportunities to grow their channel and how to move forward.

Another highlight of the project for Adam was getting to know and work with the BCIC team, specifically Research Assistants Lex van Es and Connor Gibson, who are both in the Broadcasting – Radio, Television, and Film (Film Production) program. He was so impressed with the work they did on this project, that he’s agreed to be the subject of their third-year documentary project for their program. “Those two were so nice to work with and be around. Their approach and enthusiasm to this type of work was infectious, so when they reached out to be part of their final project, I was on board,” said Adam.