Montana Legend Grows DM Business
About seven years ago, the Lazy E-L ranch in Roscoe, MT decided it wanted to try marketing directly to red meat lovers. It formed the Montana Legend Co., which markets angus beef online and through catalogs.
The Mackay family, the ranch’s owners since the early years of the 20th century, developed an aversion to middlemen who they feel care less about the quality of the beef than about high volume and lower prices, says Keith Lauver, CEO of the less-than-$10 million firm.
Montana Legend’s (http://www.montanalegend.com) business started out informally with the Mackays just selling their beef to friends who stopped by the ranch and loved its quality, says Lauver.
The company continued with this viral marketing approach until three years ago when it hired Lauver, who had previously helped develop high tech companies.
One of his first moves was to start selling Montana Legend’s beef on Amazon.com through an affiliate marketing set-up. Montana Legend has also teamed up with cooking supplies manufacturer Char-Broil in largely the same way.
He soon got the company into the search engine marketing game, starting out with simple efforts with Google AdWords, says Lauver. At present, the company ranks fifth in the paid-search category on Google under the listing of “organic steaks”
In addition, the company sends out more than 10,000 catalogs once or twice a year to existing customers, depending on how much they’ve beef they’ve bought, says Lauver.
The other side of Montana Legend’s business is selling to restaurants. At first, the company only sold to eateries within he state but Lauver hired salespeople to help extend its into major cities including New York where earlier this month its food was reviewed in several local publications like New York Magazine and the New York Post, says Lauver.
Thus far, Montana Legend’s customers are generally men and women ages 40 and above who live in cities and subscribe to magazines like Food &Wine and are likely to watch the Cooking Channel.
Going forward, Montana Legend is planning to further develop its direct marketing business, says Lauver, claiming that his love of food was one factor that lured him away from more high tech endeavors.
