Case Study
Kellogg Garden Products Builds a Strategy for Search That No Longer Sends Clicks
Kellogg Garden Products
Kellogg Garden Products has made organic soils, potting mixes, and garden care products since 1925. The company is based in Carson, California.
Industry: Consumer Packaged Goods, Organic Garden and Soil Products
Location: Carson, California
Project Scope: Annual marketing strategy, SEO and content, paid search and social, organic social management, email marketing, influencer program management Solution
Solutions Provided: Deksia built Kellogg Garden Products' 2026 marketing strategy around three shifts, an AI-ready digital presence, a more structured influencer program, and a community-first approach to customer engagement, then executed that plan across the year.
The Challenge
Kellogg Garden Products had momentum heading into 2026. The prior year's program had grown newsletter subscribers, social reach, and site traffic, and a first-year influencer push had already generated more than two million organic views across seventeen influencers. The question wasn't whether the existing approach worked; it was whether it would keep working as the ground underneath it shifted.
Search was the clearest example. More gardeners were getting their answers directly inside AI-generated search results instead of clicking through to a website, and Kellogg's own site was still configured to block the AI crawlers reading that content in the first place. An early-2026 audit put the brand's website AI visibility score at 28 out of 100, against an industry benchmark north of 64.
At the same time, the organic gardening category was drawing more competition and more scrutiny on authenticity and environmental responsibility, exactly the qualities a scaled, efficient marketing operation can flatten out by accident if it isn't built with intention.
The Solution
Digital evolution for an AI-first future. To dive headfirst into the tech-forward future of the brand’s marketing, a full site rebuild was called into question. Incorporating features dedicated to AI search system friendliness, Deksia performed the rebuild, finishing with a full re-launch on their primary domain. Content got reformatted around the direct, citable answers, definitions, comparisons, and plain FAQs that AI search pulls from, replacing older, dense PDF guides.
Scaling what already worked with influencers, on purpose this time. The 2025 influencer program had proven itself, so 2026 moved it onto a dedicated management platform to run it at scale rather than by hand, timed the heaviest push to the actual planting season each spring, and built room for a larger creator partnership alongside its base of smaller ones.
Turning community and customer support into part of the content itself. Deksia built a plan for real-time interaction with gardeners, starting with a live presence on platforms like Reddit, positioned internally as "chat with our humans," designed to work as both a service function and a differentiator rather than routing every question into the same kind of static help page most brands use.
The Results
By October, the metric the strategy was built to move had done its job. The site's AI visibility score reached 84 out of 100, past an industry-benchmark target of 61, up from a starting point of 32. Organic traffic and top-100 keyword rankings kept declining over the same stretch, consistent with the shift the strategy was built around in the first place, more gardeners getting their answer directly inside AI results instead of clicking through to a site. Whether that decline is simply the cost of winning the metric that matters more now, or a separate problem still unsolved, isn't something the data alone settles.
The influencer program had the strongest season of any pillar. An April giveaway with a partner creator drove more than 2,000 new Instagram followers at an 8.5% engagement rate, well above the 0.8 to 2% industry standard for macro-influencer content, and creator content went on to generate 7.6 million impressions across the season against a target of 1 million, with 97% of that engagement coming from the creators' own posts rather than paid promotion. A single creator-led video also held attention far longer than the brand's own paid ads, though not for less money once the creator's fee was counted alongside media spend, a real trade-off rather than a clean win, and one that makes next year's repeat a budget question as much as a creative one.
Community work showed up early and stayed concrete. A Community Gardening initiative launched in February brought in more than 400 applications and more than 350 new Instagram followers in a single month, proof the community-first pillar was more than a line in a strategy deck.
Email beat its headline target while a broader trend underneath it points the other way. The newsletter open rate, 49.2% on a trailing-twelve-month basis, cleared its 30% target comfortably. But open and click rates across all email sends combined both declined over the same year, even as total email volume nearly doubled, more sends working less hard overall. List growth landed just under its 5% goal at 4.1%, with real new-signup growth underneath a number also inflated by reactivating a batch of previously inactive contacts. YouTube beat its own target too, drawing 856,000 views against a 550,000 goal. Paid social on Meta was the one clear miss, 19% fewer engagements than targeted on flat spend.
[DRAFT QUOTE, PENDING CLIENT APPROVAL, name and title to be confirmed]
"We didn't need a new strategy every year. We needed the one we had to keep working as search itself changed, and that's exactly what this did."
[Name, Title], Kellogg Garden Products
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