At Laurel & Grey, we believe that when building an agile CPG marketing strategy, the most impactful results happen where paid performance media meets authentic brand soul: especially when operating with a focused, highly disciplined budget.

At a Glance: 

• Client: Sweety (Emerging CPG Mochi Ice Cream Brand)

• Agency: Laurel & Grey (Digital Marketing Agency)

• Challenge: Scaling brand awareness and retail trial on a limited budget against massive, established competitors.

• Objective: Drive in-store retail velocity across Costco and regional grocers, increasing local share of voice in key growth markets.

• Tactics: Hyper-local influencer partnerships, regional product education, on-site content capture, geotargeted paid media, and holiday giveaways.

• Results: +369% MoM Instagram video views (1.76M+ total), 7.5K engagements, +5% follower growth, and 125% regional retail sales growth.

As a boutique, family-owned mochi ice cream brand competing in a freezer aisle dominated by heavily funded legacy players, Sweety needed to make every dollar work harder. In July, we partnered with Sweety to deploy an agile, multi-faceted digital marketing campaign. The goal: maximize efficiency, grow brand awareness in priority markets, and drive measurable retail velocity against category leaders.

By combining hyper-local creator partnerships, on-the-ground content capture, and precision geotargeted paid media, we built a lean, full-funnel strategy designed for maximum ROI.

Executing a Hyper-Local CPG Marketing Strategy at Costco

As part of their summer push, Sweety deployed a featured Costco Road Show across five high-performing Southern California locations: Garden Grove, Tustin, Marina Del Rey, Irvine, and Monterey Park.

To support these limited-time warehouse appearances, maximize foot traffic, and convert shoppers into long-term brand loyalists, we executed a localized, three-step activation:

• High-Indexing Local Influencers: We partnered with trusted local creators whose audiences heavily overlap with Costco shoppers. By amplifying their authentic store-visit content via geotargeted paid media, we reached verified Costco fans near each participating warehouse.

• On-Site Content Creation: The Laurel & Grey team was on location at the Road Shows to capture native, high-energy video content for TikTok and Instagram Reels. Building this fresh asset library gave us a continuous stream of authentic creative to actively feature and promote the Road Show throughout the entire month of July.

• Geotargeted Paid Media Amplification: We also put paid advertising spend behind custom assets, targeting active shoppers living within a tight geographic radius of the specific store locations to drive immediate foot traffic.

Driving Retail Expansion & Category Education

In tandem with the Costco Road Show, Sweety launched across new grocery retailers in key expansion markets: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oregon, and California.

To convert this distribution push into actual sales velocity, our CPG marketing strategy relied on regional foodie influencers to document “the store hunt,” capturing real-time video of themselves finding Sweety in local freezer aisles. Crucially, in markets where mochi ice cream is less prevalent (such as Michigan), we leveraged creators to play an educational role. Influencers introduced prospective buyers not only to Sweety as a premier brand, but to the concept of mochi ice cream as a category. We then used paid social ads to boost these educational and store-visit posts directly to consumers in target zip codes, turning online engagement into offline store visits.

Sustaining Engagement with Seasonal Activations

To maintain audience momentum between retail pushes, we leveraged seasonal social triggers like National Ice Cream Day. Combining evergreen static and video ad creative with a high-converting giveaway strategy allowed us to expand organic reach, spark community conversation, and continuously capture new audience demand.

Campaign Results & Impact

By pairing high-converting creative with precise paid social targeting, the campaign delivered clear retail and social performance metrics:

• More than 2MM Total Views Across Instagram and TikTok (+369% month-over-month growth)

• 7,600 Total Engagements

• 4,100 Profile Visits

• +5% Organic Follower Growth

• 125% Retail Sales Growth in key focus expansion markets

Key CPG Marketing Strategy Takeaways for Modern Brands

Sustained CPG growth requires aligning digital marketing with physical retail distribution. By connecting localized creator authority to geotargeted ad delivery, digital campaigns can directly lift in-store purchase velocity.

Interested in scaling your brand with a data-driven CPG marketing strategy? Request a Media Audit with Laurel & Grey to optimize your performance media strategy.