Photo: Frits de Vries Halfmoon Bay | Architect: Patrick Warren | Photos: Ema Peter
Through the Real Cedar brand, the Western Red Cedar Lumber Association (WRCLA) runs a coordinated campaign based on proven marketing principles: building awareness, creating inspiration and interest, fostering education and understanding, and generating sales. The approach, funded in part by FII, targets both consumers and influencers through promotion, social media and direct engagement. Individual campaigns promote the many benefits of the species while responding to competitive pressures and products.
Socially popular
Real Cedar runs a dynamic digital program that uses social media to drive traffic towards the brand’s website, where videos, DIY project plans, find a local retailer search, among other features, offer extensive functionality to users.
Results in 2023 were impressive, with website visits up 8 percent and Find-A-Retailer search increasing 16 percent on a year-over-year basis. Social media apps, like Instagram, drove much of this growth, often generating an increase in hit rates of more than 20 percent. Users downloaded more than 47,000 project plans from the website, showing the strong connection established by the brand with consumers.
Shorter videos and more testimonials from influencers were credited for these positive trends. And, as awareness of climate change continued to grow and influence buyer decisions, continued positioning of western red cedar as a natural product that plays an important role in carbon sequestration helped to counter marketplace threats from composite products.
- 39,000 Find-A-Retailer visits
- 47,000 project downloads
DIY does it with cedar
With annual retail sales approaching USD $550 billion4 , the DIY market in America is a large and lucrative opportunity for value-added products, like western red cedar. Leveraging the growing use by DIYers of online videos, the Real Cedar campaign created a DIY Project Plan page at the realcedar.com website. The page offered how-to videos, downloadable plans, and links to nearby western red cedar retailers. Along with guiding the DIYer on how to build a specific project, the videos educated viewers on the many benefits and versatility of cedar products.
The Project Plan page was cross-promoted through social media advertising that reached 15 million users. Results were impressive. Visits to the retailer page topped 50,000 and the most popular design—a bike storage shed—had 155,000 visits and more than 25,000 downloads.
Western red cedar DIY table | Photos: Western Red Cedar Lumber Association
