Background

McKay Nursery Company is a 100% employee-owned nursery and landscape company rooted in Waterloo, Wisconsin since 1897. For more than a century, McKay has built a reputation for growing and shipping northern-hardy plants across the country while helping homeowners create beautiful outdoor spaces through its garden centers, landscape design services, and expert guidance.

While the company had a strong reputation offline, its digital presence did not fully reflect the quality, expertise, and trust the brand had established over generations. Social media activity lacked consistency, audience engagement remained limited, and the brand voice online was not creating meaningful connection with the audiences McKay wanted to reach.

In May 2025, McKay partnered with BConnected to help modernize and strengthen its digital presence while building a marketing system capable of supporting long-term ecommerce growth, customer engagement, and brand visibility.

Opportunity

The challenge was not simply creating more content. The opportunity was to transform McKay’s online presence into a cohesive, scalable digital ecosystem that could strengthen brand trust while directly contributing to measurable business growth.

At the time the partnership began, McKay’s content lacked strategic consistency and audience alignment. The company had strong products, knowledgeable employees, and an established reputation, but the social presence was not effectively translating those strengths into digital momentum.

The broader opportunity extended beyond social media visibility alone. McKay needed a strategy capable of:

• Increasing brand awareness across multiple platforms
• Building stronger audience trust and engagement
• Creating a recognizable and authentic online voice
• Supporting ecommerce and revenue growth
• Improving performance across paid advertising and email marketing channels
• Positioning McKay as a trusted educational resource within the gardening and landscaping industry

Rather than treating content, paid advertising, and ecommerce as separate initiatives, BConnected approached the engagement as a fully connected growth system.

Solution

BConnected developed a multi-layered digital marketing strategy designed to elevate McKay’s brand presence while driving measurable business performance across social media, ecommerce, email marketing, and paid advertising.

The strategy centered around five primary focus areas.

Consistent Content Creation

Consistency became the foundation of McKay’s digital growth. BConnected implemented a structured publishing schedule across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to ensure the brand remained visible, active, and relevant throughout the year.

This consistency helped build familiarity with audiences while creating ongoing opportunities for engagement and customer interaction.

Audience-First Messaging

Rather than producing generalized promotional content, BConnected focused heavily on understanding McKay’s audience and what types of content resonated most effectively.

Content was developed around relatable gardening experiences, educational insights, seasonal relevance, and homeowner-focused storytelling. This allowed the brand to feel approachable and authentic instead of overly corporate or sales-driven.

Elevated Brand Storytelling

BConnected created polished, professional content designed to elevate the perception of the brand while still maintaining authenticity.

Every post, video, and campaign was intentionally developed to reinforce trust, expertise, and credibility while helping audiences better understand the people, products, and values behind McKay Nursery.

Employee Spotlights and Behind-the-Scenes Content

To humanize the brand and deepen audience connection, BConnected introduced employee spotlights and “day in the life” style content.

These pieces helped showcase the expertise and personality behind the company while strengthening audience trust through authentic storytelling.

Integrated Growth Layer Strategy

Beyond organic social media efforts, BConnected implemented a connected growth strategy through paid advertising, ecommerce optimization, and email marketing.

Campaigns were structured to support both brand awareness and revenue generation while creating stronger alignment between content, customer engagement, and conversion-focused marketing efforts.

This integrated approach allowed McKay to move beyond simply building visibility and instead create a scalable digital ecosystem capable of driving long-term business growth.

Results

The partnership transformed McKay’s online presence from an inconsistent social media footprint into a recognizable, engaging, and growth-oriented digital brand.

From May 1, 2025 through May 1, 2026, compared to the previous year, combined performance across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube showed significant growth in reach, engagement, and visibility.

Key performance results included:

• 1,071,623 total impressions
• 32,947 total engagements
• 212,306 video views
• 105% increase in net audience growth
• 126.6% increase in published content output
• 60.4% increase in engagements
• 3.5 Google Ads ROAS
• 6.6 Meta Ads ROAS
• 63% year over year increase in email revenue
• 47% year over year increase in ecommerce revenue

Beyond the raw numbers, the most meaningful outcome was the creation of a connected marketing system capable of sustaining long-term growth.

McKay evolved from having a limited and inconsistent digital presence into a trusted and recognizable online brand supported by strategic storytelling, educational content, employee-driven authenticity, and integrated performance marketing.

The combined impact of organic social media, paid advertising, ecommerce optimization, and email marketing created stronger audience trust while directly contributing to measurable business growth.

At BConnected, the goal is never simply to post content or launch ads. It is to build connected digital systems that help brands grow visibility, trust, engagement, and revenue in a sustainable way.

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