As many of you know, my brothers set out on a journey 5+ years ago: to create a niche farming brand. Acorn Bluff Farms, following in the footsteps of Thistledown Farms,  our cattle business with less branding but an avid local following in Southeast Iowa.

Acorn Bluff Farms sells Mangalitsa Pork, often called the Kobe Beef of Pork. Mangalitsa is probably the best tasting pork in the world. We needed to create a lasting brand identity and logo. Through multiple iterations as well as our designer extraordinaire co-owner, Seth Todd, we have created a lasting brand identity that is really latching on.

Visual Identity

The brand speaks to our positioning as an

A) Heritage Brand

B) High End Brand

We've also built out a variety of secondary identities, hats, etc.

We've been able to generate sustainable organic traction to our website and order page . We recently shifted to Shopify. Unfortunately our 301 redirects somehow got messed up in the transition from Squarespace to Shopify. As a result, our organic traffic has gone from extremely healthy to almost nil. We used to have the #1 ranking for "best tasting pork" which generated several sales a week. As we patch up 301 redirects and build a link profile, we hope that we are able to return.

Social

Our Twitter is actually a big driver of sales. Whenever we had personal tweets go viral, we would affix a tweet steering people to Acorn Bluff. Our ability to consistently sell out of available pork is largely due to a well placed tweet. We are tweeting maybe once a week right now. Our guess is that if we moved to 3x a day, we could consistently get several hundred dollars of revenue a week out of our Twitter. Along those lines, if our social following got to 10k instead of 500 people, the economic implications would be enormous.

Instagram has been pretty spotty for us in generating revenue, and will remain a part, but not a key part of our strategy.

TikTok could certainly work but we lack the time or frankly, energy, to carry it out!

SEO

Mangalitsa is a competitive keyword. 301s somehow getting messed up were a really negative blow for us. We are working on building a backlink profile. In that, we also had some sites literally copy and paste our copy talking about how great natural farming of Mangalitsa hogs is, our methodology, and the taste of Acorn Bluff Farms.

We only get about 70 visitors a month to learn more about our Mangalitsa feeder pigs for sale, but that's proven to have a very high hit rate in conversion.

Local Sales

Friends and family have continued to be huge supporters, often discovering a deeper love for culinary delicacies than they are able to buy at their local grocery store.

Where do we go from here?

Our next step at Acorn Bluff Farms is to launch a new brand. We've learned that the Mangalitsa niche is extraordinarily rewarding, but also a limited market that we create. We are going to anchor around our Mangalitsa pork while launching new items from the home, with our same ethos.

In the meantime, to stay tuned, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

Oh, and buy a hat!