August 29, 2023

Jelly Belly Successfully Drives Consumer Website Traffic To Stores With Purchase Intent By Managing 10,000 Distributor Locations With Ease

Worldwide, Jelly Belly is the recognizable face of the jelly bean. The company has been in the candy-manufacturing business since 1869, but Jelly Belly faced significant business changes in the candy industry during the pandemic. As a result, the company experienced a surge in direct-to-consumer sales through jellybelly.com and e-commerce marketplaces. While online sales have stayed high, Jelly Belly remains a manufacturing company, offering several types of candy and a number of branded lines of packaging, with a majority of its sales through retail partners. Because Jelly Belly is managing more than 10,000 partner locations that partner with the company to distribute its candy, driving consumers to the right store to find what they’re looking for is essential. Adapting through the pandemic, Jelly Belly has refocused on strengthening its loyalty program, renewing its presence on e-commerce marketplaces, and driving consumers to its website to find what they need, whether online or in-store.

“Our digital marketing strategy is specifically designed to drive consumers to the website with purchase intent. Marketing drives consumers to the website and the store locator powered by SOCi, and that helps us get people in-store to purchase our products.”

Brandon Finch, Vice President of Global eBusiness for Jelly Belly

Jelly Belly has partnered with SOCi for over a decade, utilizing SOCi’s Locator as their store locator product to address the needs of people looking for a specific candy type or line. Jelly Belly’s store locator is a crucial part of its digital marketing strategy, helping drive into stores the consumer website traffic with brick-and-mortar purchase intent. The product finder, built by SOCi, further enhances the user experience by showing local stores that carry a specific product. The finder is linked on product category and detail pages with a “find locally” button that prompts a zip code entry, making it easy for consumers to locate what they want.

“I’ve been with Jelly Belly for eleven years now and the store locator was available when I started, so we’ve been a partner for well over a decade. One of the ways it helps me achieve success is that it just works and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s a stable, turnkey solution that is rock solid. We would have been hard-pressed to create the additional product finder on our own and SOCi helped us build it to great success. We’ve also worked successfully with the SOCi team to update the look and feel of the store locator to match new designs and make it ADA compliant.”

Brandon Finch, Vice President of Global eBusiness for Jelly Belly

SOCi Results

Jelly Belly’s two main localized digital marketing goals are: 1. Serve the consumer better by creating a straight line from the product to the store where it can be purchased, online or in person; and 2. Empower retailers to sell more products by funneling high-intent consumers to stores. Since implementing SOCi's store locator and product finder, Jelly Belly has observed several measurable benefits. It considers the number of visits to the store locator page, the number of searches conducted, and the number of "get direction" clicks as key indicators of success that consumers are actively seeking and finding Jelly Belly products through the store locator. For example, Q1 of 2023 saw a 30% increase in the number of locator searches compared to Q1 of 2022. The product finder also provides the company data it could not previously access, showing which regional areas purchase which products. Looking ahead, Jelly Belly aims to further leverage its partnership with SOCi to build out its local pages. By continuing to optimize its localized marketing efforts, Jelly Belly strives to improve consumer satisfaction by making it easier to find and purchase its products while increasing exposure and foot traffic for its retail partners. SOCi's tool set has been instrumental in achieving these goals, providing a reliable and effective solution that has positively impacted Jelly Belly's digital marketing strategies and overall success as a manufacturing and distributor company.