Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin

Marketing communications: Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin (dfw) exists to be a tireless advocate for our state's Dairy Farmers and is focused on increasing demand for the Milk produced in our state. Because 90% of the Milk produced in Wisconsin goes into making cheese and 90% of that cheese is sold outside of our state, we spend the largest portionof our resources on activities to drive demand for Wisconsin cheese at the national level. We continue to elevate perceptions of Wisconsin cheese with an integrated Marketing strategy that includes public relations, digital advertising, events, search engine optimization (seo), social media, partnerships, and our national brand ambassador community for cheese lovers. We continue to focus our digital communications to concentrate heavily on reaching our target audience, food fanatics, and people who believe food is core to who they are. This year we executed an aggressive plan to develop over 380 new assets including cheese illustrations, perfect bites, monger reviews and even a series of cheesemaker videos featuring food network star justin warner. We developed a new strategy and content grid to sustain an evergreen content stream that will be implemented in 2024 to be used across multiple social media platforms - primarily instagram, facebook, tiktok and youtube. Simultaneously, we created new assets in-house to deliver educational, inspirational, and on-trend posts to complement these efforts. Our fy2023 plan resulted in an increase in followers on all platforms including a 162% increase in followers on facebook year-over-year compared to fy2022. We also increased our long-term seo tactics to continue to help us increase visibility of Wisconsin cheese for search engines and lift our organic traffic to wisconsincheese.com. This contributed to 1.5 million website visitors in fy2023 as well as a media equivalent value of $5.2 million and a 4.7:1 return on investment since the inception of our program in fy2019.dfw's brand advocate program called cheeselandia grew another 25% adding 591 new members in 2023. Word-of-mouth Marketing has become an important part of our strategy as we continue to leverage cheeselandians throughout the u.s. to advocate for Wisconsin cheese. We were able to expand and deepen their knowledge of Wisconsin cheeses through virtual and in-person events, educational seminars, social media and the members-only app. We also increased daily and weekly active users in the app by 10%. These combined efforts generated an additional 20,000 conversations about Wisconsin cheese in the last year.in fy2023, dfw earned $80 million in earned publicity indicating our return on our investments was at least 80:1. We secured placements in some widely viewed shows and publications including today show, all recipes, forbes, mashed, reader's digest, food & wine and more! Public relations supported major campaigns and drove 1.5 million dollars in advertising value equivalency for the "wedgewater spa" campaign alone. Local broadcast coverage continued to grow and achieved placements reaching more than 24.6 million consumers in 96% of tier 1 and tier 2 retail markets, helping drive purchases at local retailers.across key partnerships we reached over 5 million targeted consumers - identified through our research as food fanatics - through storytelling advertising and content, building brand loyalty. Our saveur podcast partnership reached more than 1 million consumers with Wisconsin cheese stories. Through a food52 digital partnership, our "meet the maker" teaser video led to over 2.3 million impressions and individual maker videos totaling 4.5 million impressions and 5 million+ video views. We continued to tell the Wisconsin cheese brand story through partnerships with Wisconsin foodie (television) reaching 1 million midwest viewers per episode (14 episodes season) and heritage radio network reaching a niche audience through food focused content achieving over 1 million impressions monthly. Through these channels we featured original content and targeted ads to hundreds of thousands of consumers.dfw's mission of growing demand and our relentless actions to promote Dairy products has led to Wisconsin outpacing other origins (such as france or California) on awareness, consideration and purchase. Consumers are taking notice as awareness of Wisconsin cheese varieties is up to nearly 60% and growth of Wisconsin specialty cheese retail sales outpaced growth of the entire cheese category. All of this means that consumers recognize Wisconsin for its award-winning cheese and specifically look for it when buying cheese.

Dairy company communications:through the application of the "proudly Wisconsin" badge, Dairy company communications helps Dairy companies build distribution, visibility, trial, and sales of their products, thus increasing the demand for Wisconsin cow's milk.our three largest impact items in fy2023 were badge/label support, demo support, and trade show support. Our support can only happen if an item qualifies to have the badge.badge/label support:the Dairy company communications team worked with 44 Wisconsin Dairy companies to have the badge added to approximately 700 new items or label redesigns. There are now over 5,000 items in distribution with the "proudly Wisconsin" badge.food tradeshow support:tradeshows help Wisconsin Dairy companies connect with retailer decision makers building visibility and leading to in store shelf distribution of Wisconsin Dairy products. A tradeshow can be industry events, or specific to a distributor and their customer base. For fy2023, we helped support 28 different companies at 118 different trade shows.product demonstration/in-store sampling support:product demonstrations and sampling are crucial to help drive consumer trial and sales of Wisconsin Dairy products. As post-covid demos continued to come back, we helped support 45 Wisconsin Dairy companies for approximately 6,200 demos across the country.

Channel promotions:dairy Farmers of Wisconsin's channel promotions area provides support to supermarket retailers, foodservice operators, wholesalers and distributors through a variety of promotional support programs to drive distribution, sales and awareness of Wisconsin artisan and specialty cheese both domestically and internationally. In fy2023 channel promotions continued to adapt our tactics to the marketplace with additional focus on private label (store brands) and deepening our relationship with boar's head, a best-in-class deli purveyor.buyer missions, both live in-state and virtual, continue to be one of our best tactics for connecting Wisconsin cheese companies and cheese makers with key trade decision makers leading to new authorizations and stronger relationships. We completed a total of 49 buyer missions supporting retail, foodservice and international partners. We currently have 41 combined buyer missions on the books for calendar 2024. The buyer missions helped support over 565 new item authorizations. In addition, we were able to bring the whole foods team back for two separate weeks of training at the center for Dairy research to prepare their cheese mongers for the certified cheese professional test administered by the american cheese society. We also supported 15 key trade decision makers at the center for Dairy research "world of cheese from pasture to plate" short course.january through june saw dfw participation with key trade shows including winter fancy foods, international dairy-deli-bakery association and summer fancy foods. Additionally, the team participated in the national restaurant association show in may 2023 and prepared for the private label manufacturers association show in november 2023. Plans are in place to repeat these major industry events for calendar 2024 where we will support bringing industry buyers to our participating cheese companies.the regional Marketing managers combined for over 801 campaigns utilizing multiple tactics with 110 targeted retail and foodservice accounts. While retailer print ads continue to drive the category with over 200+ campaigns, the team also executed 168 digital, e-commerce and social campaigns. The channel promotions team supported over 44 display contests with average sales increases from 30% to 50%. The regional Marketing managers combined for 164 separate campaigns supporting our three major events including "for the love of cheese", "wonders of Wisconsin and "the more the merrier". The channel programs team helped execute over 81 demo-sampling events driving additional retail sales. We continue to partner with our retail trade accounts for special events and store traffic building opportunities fueling category growth and excitement.