From Backyard Dream to National BBQ Brand: Hawke Media’s 360° Marketing of AC Barbeque
Lighting the Fire under AC Barbeque
When Hollywood comedy kings Anthony Anderson and Cedric the Entertainer set out to turn their backyard grilling passion into a business, they envisioned more than a typical BBQ product line. The result was AC Barbeque, a BBQ lifestyle brand rooted in Black community barbeque traditions and family gatherings. But launching AC Barbeque from scratch in a saturated market required a marketing partner as multifaceted as the brand’s vision. Enter Hawke Media, the outsourced CMO and marketing force behind AC Barbeque’s rapid rise.
Hawke Media engaged with AC Barbeque on all fronts: building a custom Shopify e-commerce site, establishing a robust SEO foundation, crafting an email marketing engine with Klaviyo, driving paid media campaigns on Amazon and social platforms, and even integrating the brand’s story into a TV series. The goal was not just selling BBQ rubs and sauces, but telling a story – celebrating barbeque’s cultural heritage while delivering measurable business results. This case study unpacks how Hawke Media’s holistic approach and cross-channel teamwork turned AC Barbeque from a backyard dream into a national brand featured in 2,200 Walmart stores and a hit TV show.
In the following sections, we’ll explore Hawke’s strategy and execution across digital, email, and paid channels, the innovative integration with A&E’s “Kings of BBQ” show, and the outcomes achieved. Each step highlights the power of a comprehensive marketing engagement – and how Hawke Media’s collaborative expertise made AC Barbeque’s launch sizzle.
Laying the Digital Foundation: Custom Shopify Site & SEO
Every strong brand needs a home base. For AC Barbeque, Hawke Media built a custom Shopify website from the ground up to showcase the brand’s personality and products. In just three months, Hawke’s web design team delivered a mobile-responsive, content-rich e-commerce site featuring AC Barbeque’s line of premium BBQ rubs and sauces, branded merchandise, and even community content like recipes and city BBQ guides. The site captured the founders’ vision – “rooted in culture, fueled by community” – with engaging visuals of Cedric and Anthony and storytelling sections about Black barbeque traditions. AC Barbeque’s Shopify store launched in early August 2023, timed perfectly to coincide with the premiere of “Kings of BBQ” on A&E.
From day one, SEO best practices were woven into the site. Hawke’s SEO specialists conducted in-depth keyword research to optimize product titles, descriptions, and meta tags for search queries like “BBQ rubs for brisket” and regional barbeque terms. The team ensured the site architecture was search-friendly – creating dedicated pages for each product, recipe, and city guide – and implemented proper URL redirects and image alt-texts. This solid SEO foundation prepared AC Barbeque to rank for relevant keywords and capture organic traffic over time. In fact, Hawke’s SEO prep meant that when AC Barbeque was featured on national TV, curious viewers could easily find the website via Google. Within weeks of launch, the site began appearing for branded searches and regional BBQ terms, planting seeds for sustained organic growth. Hawke’s web and SEO teams worked hand-in-hand, exemplifying the agency’s integrated approach: designers, developers, and SEO experts coordinated each site update to balance user experience and discoverability.
To infuse content marketing into the digital presence, Hawke also helped AC Barbeque create culturally rich on-site content. For example, around the show’s premiere, the team published a “Los Angeles BBQ City Guide” and authentic recipes from local pitmasters to extend the storytelling beyond the screen. These content pieces, launched in sync with the first episode’s focus on LA barbeque, reinforced AC Barbeque’s credibility and boosted engagement on the site (watch party visitors could dive deeper into BBQ culture). This strategic coordination of web content with media events was a hallmark of the campaign – ensuring that every TV storyline had a digital touchpoint for fans to explore.
Lifecycle Marketing: Klaviyo Email Automation & Community Building
With the website up and traffic flowing in, Hawke Media turned attention to lifecycle marketing, keeping AC Barbeque’s new audience engaged and converting. Hawke’s Lifecycle Marketing team implemented Klaviyo as the email marketing platform, building a full suite of email automations and newsletters to nurture AC Barbeque’s growing community. The team set up email capture forms across the site (“Join the Fam” prompts on the homepage acbarbeque.com) and quickly began growing the subscriber list as the brand gained exposure.
In July 2023, before the site launch, Hawke strategized an Email Execution Plan to roll out in phases. Phase 1, launched in early August, introduced a welcome email series that greeted new subscribers with AC Barbeque’s story and a discount code for their first purchase. The welcome emails dripped out over several days, sharing Cedric and Anthony’s personal BBQ memories and highlighting best-selling products like the Midnight Smoke seasoning rub. Thanks to the excitement from the TV show, these emails saw extraordinary engagement – open rates around 90% and click-through rates near 20% in the initial weeks. This far exceeds typical industry benchmarks and shows how eager fans were to connect with the brand. Those automated welcome emails weren’t just opened – they drove revenue, generating 58 orders (over $1.8K in sales) from new subscribers in the first month.
As the campaign progressed, Hawke expanded the email automations with additional flows: cart abandonment reminders to recover potential lost sales, post-purchase thank-you emails encouraging social sharing (#ACBarbeque), and a “Tailgate Ambassadors” series to recruit superfans for grassroots promotions. By September, a dedicated Tailgate Ambassador program email had launched, contributing to a segment of highly engaged brand advocates (over two dozen subscribers joined the ambassador flow in the first month).
Meanwhile, Hawke’s team designed a branded newsletter template and kicked off regular campaign sends. The AC Barbeque newsletter, starting in September, featured grilling tips, upcoming event news (like local cookouts), and product spotlights. These campaigns kept AC’s audience in the loop and drove repeat traffic to the site. The results quickly proved the value of lifecycle marketing: in September, email campaigns achieved a 38% average open rate and 4.37% click rate, outperforming food & beverage industry benchmarks (≈20% opens, 2% clicks). More importantly, email marketing directly drove 22% of AC Barbeque’s total online revenue in September. As the subscriber list grew, this contribution only increased – by October, email generated 38% of all D2C revenue for the brand. That month’s newsletter campaigns saw open rates soaring above 48% and click-throughs above 8%, engaging the fanbase at levels double or triple typical averages. The October emails drove 28 orders and $1.3K in sales, helping convert first-time TV viewers into loyal customers.
Hawke’s lifecycle marketing success with AC Barbeque came from both creative storytelling and data-driven optimization. The team closely monitored Klaviyo analytics – tweaking subject lines, send times, and segmentation to keep performance trending upward. For instance, they A/B tested subject lines referencing the latest “Kings of BBQ” episode, finding that integrating show buzz increased open rates. They also leveraged customer data (like purchase history and site browsing behavior) to personalize content – recommending a sauce to a customer who bought a rub, for example. Through this combination of automation and personalization, Hawke nurtured AC Barbeque’s audience from interested onlookers into an engaged community who not only watched the show, but subscribed, purchased, and advocated for the brand. It’s a textbook demonstration of how strategic email marketing can turn brand awareness into revenue, even in the early stages of a brand launch.
Amplifying the Brand: Amazon Marketplace & Paid Media
While the owned channels were being built, Hawke Media simultaneously pushed AC Barbeque into wider paid media and marketplace channels to capture demand. A key pillar of this strategy was establishing AC Barbeque on Amazon – the world’s largest product search platform. Hawke’s Amazon services team sprang into action in parallel with the D2C site build. They set up AC Barbeque’s Amazon Seller Central account and enrolled the brand in Amazon Brand Registry to unlock enhanced listing features. By launch time, AC Barbeque’s signature products (like the Trio Seasoning Rub Set) were listed on Amazon with full A+ Content: rich product descriptions, high-quality images, and comparison charts that told the brand story. This ensured that curious customers who searched Amazon after seeing the TV show found a compelling, conversion-optimized product page rather than a generic listing. Hawke’s content and design experts crafted the A+ content to mirror the brand’s voice and cultural narrative, turning a simple spice listing into an engaging brand experience.
In tandem, Hawke executed a three-month Amazon advertising roadmap. In the first weeks, they launched automatic and broad-match Sponsored Product campaigns to gather keyword data and test which BBQ-related search terms drove traffic. They also protected the brand by running an AC Barbeque-branded campaign, ensuring competitors didn’t capture searches for the new brand name. By month two, Hawke’s team analyzed the data to optimize bids and keywords – shifting budget toward high-performing terms (like “BBQ seasoning gift set” and “barbecue rubs pack”) and adding negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant clicks. They refined product page SEO continuously, incorporating top search queries into the listing content and backend keywords. By month three, the Amazon campaigns were scaled up on the most profitable keywords and additional campaign types (including product targeting ads against competing spice brands). This steady optimization workflow paid off: AC Barbeque quickly gained visibility on Amazon’s marketplace, earning organic rankings for key terms and driving a new revenue stream from Amazon shoppers who discovered the rubs online. Although specific Amazon sales figures remain confidential, the fast growth contributed to AC Barbeque’s multi-channel success – ensuring the brand was accessible wherever customers preferred to shop.
Beyond Amazon, Hawke Media leveraged other paid media channels to amplify AC Barbeque’s reach. Given the built-in celebrity appeal, Hawke ran social media ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram featuring Anthony and Cedric with their BBQ products. These ads were carefully targeted using the data Hawke gathered on AC’s customer demographics and interests. “We focused on the performance side – collecting data to understand the customer archetype and create lookalike audiences, which is invaluable when buying Facebook ads,” explains Hawke CEO Erik Huberman. By creating lookalike audiences of people similar to AC Barbeque’s early customers, Hawke efficiently expanded the brand’s fanbase with new shoppers who had a high affinity for BBQ and pop culture. The recognizable faces of the founders in ad creatives (paired with Hawke’s snappy copywriting) yielded strong click-through rates. “Leveraging a celebrity can really work because the creative comes from a brand you recognize,” Huberman notes – in this case, seeing two beloved comedians on a sponsored post stopped scrollers in their tracks.
Hawke’s media buying team ensured that paid ads were not only driving traffic but also retargeting interested viewers. For example, someone who visited the AC Barbeque site after an episode would later see a retargeting ad reminding them of the rubs they viewed, along with a promotional code to incentivize purchase. This full-funnel paid strategy – combining awareness ads, retargeting, and Amazon presence – significantly boosted AC Barbeque’s sales beyond the initial TV-driven spike. It exemplified Hawke Media’s holistic approach: every channel (site, email, Amazon, social ads) was firing in unison to capture audience interest and convert it into measurable growth.
Real-World Brand Building: “Kings of BBQ” TV Integration
One of the most unique aspects of AC Barbeque’s launch was its simultaneous debut on a reality TV series. The show “Kings of BBQ” (A&E Network) follows Anthony and Cedric’s journey to master the art of barbeque and build their BBQ empire. Rather than treat the show as separate from marketing, Hawke Media smartly integrated the TV narrative into the marketing strategy. In fact, Hawke Media’s CEO Erik Huberman and team played an active role on the show itself – appearing in episodes as the marketing experts helping guide AC Barbeque’s brand strategy. This wasn’t product placement as much as it was story placement: the audience got to see, on camera, how Hawke collaborated with the founders to craft the brand (discussing branding, tagline ideas, and marketing plans), lending authenticity to the process. “Getting to work with them to help their dream come alive while the world witnesses it is incredibly exciting to us,” Huberman said of the partnership.
Hawke’s involvement in “Kings of BBQ” ensured that every episode organically promoted AC Barbeque while also showcasing effective marketing in action. For example, when Anthony and Cedric traveled to different BBQ meccas (St. Louis, Memphis, etc.), Hawke’s team was coordinating in the background to publish city-specific web content and social media posts echoing those travels. Viewers inspired by an episode’s St. Louis BBQ tour could find a St. Louis City Guide on AC Barbeque’s website that week, complete with restaurant shout-outs and grilling tips from the episode. This seamless integration of content made the marketing feel like an extension of the show’s storytelling, rather than an intrusive advertisement. It also reinforced authenticity – “They were really adamant about being real, authentic, nothing made up for the show,” Huberman noted of the founders’ approach. Hawke honored that by ensuring all marketing content (from blog articles to Instagram posts) reflected genuine BBQ culture and the co-founders’ true experiences, not contrived marketing gimmicks.
The TV integration also included strategic PR and influencer efforts around the show. Hawke helped organize watch party events and influencer outreach during the premiere, turning the first episode into a live marketing moment. Social media buzz was amplified with behind-the-scenes clips of the Hawke team brainstorming with Cedric and Anthony, blurring the line between entertainment and brand marketing. This approach paid off handsomely. “Kings of BBQ” quickly became a fan favorite, drawing strong ratings and engaging a broad audience in its rich narrative of BBQ’s cultural significance. And crucially, it translated into business results: as TV viewers learned the AC Barbeque story, they converted into customers online and at retail. The show’s exposure helped AC Barbeque secure a major retail deal – shelf space in ~2,200 Walmart stores nationwide – an almost unheard-of retail rollout for a new, independent food brand. This retail expansion, achieved within weeks of launch, validated the immense demand Hawke had helped generate. AC Barbeque went from zero to a national presence in stores, on Amazon, and in digital communities, all in the span of a single season of television.
Results & Milestones: From Launch to Lift-Off
In just a few months of Hawke Media’s comprehensive marketing engagement, AC Barbeque transformed from an idea into a thriving omni-channel brand. The measurable outcomes speak volumes about Hawke’s effectiveness:
- Nationwide Retail Footprint: AC Barbeque’s sauces and rubs gained placement in over 2,200 Walmart stores and on walmart.com shortly after launch. This massive distribution was facilitated by the brand buzz and credibility built through Hawke’s marketing and the TV integration. AC Barbeque effectively “launched on national TV” and was on shelves coast-to-coast to meet the resulting demand – a milestone many startups take years to achieve.
- Robust E-commerce Growth: The ACBarbeque.com Shopify site saw a surge of traffic and sales from the coordinated campaigns. Within the first month, thousands of visitors (driven by the show, press, and ads) explored the site and shopped for products. Conversion rates climbed steadily as Hawke optimized the user experience and checkout flow. By September and October 2023, the site’s direct online revenue was growing week over week, with email marketing alone contributing 22–38% of monthly sales. The groundwork in SEO also began paying off, with AC Barbeque appearing in search results for relevant keywords and gaining organic traffic alongside paid channels.
- Engaged Community & Repeat Sales: Thanks to Hawke’s lifecycle marketing, AC Barbeque cultivated a loyal following rather than one-time customers. The email list, which started from zero, quickly grew into the thousands of subscribers comprised of BBQ enthusiasts, fans of the show, and everyday grillers who identified with the brand’s community feel. Engagement metrics were exceptional: email open and click rates consistently double the industry average, and social media followers and interactions (comments, shares) surged each time new content tied into an episode. This engaged audience translated into repeat purchases – many customers who bought the “Midnight Smoke” rub came back for the full trio set, and those who started with a sauce returned to buy gift bundles for the holidays. AC Barbeque’s customer lifetime value is on track to grow, thanks in part to the foundation of trust and authenticity laid by Hawke’s storytelling approach.
- Brand Equity & Cultural Impact: Beyond the numbers, Hawke Media helped AC Barbeque achieve a brand positioning that money can’t easily buy. By aligning the brand with cultural storytelling and genuine community engagement, AC Barbeque now stands for more than just condiments – it stands for celebrating Black excellence in barbeque and bringing people together. This narrative strength is a direct result of Hawke’s strategy to “build a brand that felt authentic and resonant, not just commercially successful”, as CEO Erik Huberman envisioned from the start. The success of this approach has set AC Barbeque up for long-term differentiation in a crowded market. It even caught national attention in media and press beyond the show – for instance, AC Barbeque has been featured in Brand Innovators and other industry news as an example of an innovative brand launch strategy.
A Holistic Recipe for Success
AC Barbeque’s launch is a testament to what’s possible when a holistic marketing strategy meets a passionate brand story. Hawke Media served as the behind-the-scenes pit crew, orchestrating every aspect – from website code to email copy to ad campaigns – with a unified goal: make AC Barbeque a household name in BBQ. By combining creativity (storytelling, design, content) with data-driven execution (SEO, email analytics, PPC optimization), Hawke turned the founders’ vision into a tangible, growing business with multiple revenue streams and a vibrant community of customers. Each team at Hawke (web, SEO, lifecycle, paid media, and more) collaborated seamlessly, exemplifying the power of an outsourced full-service marketing team that operates as an extension of the brand.
For brands reading this case study, the key takeaway is clear: an integrated marketing approach yields compounding returns. AC Barbeque didn’t win on just one channel or tactic – it succeeded by aligning product, brand story, digital platforms, and even entertainment media into one cohesive push. Hawke Media was the strategic partner making sure no opportunity was missed, whether it was a trending TikTok dance or a prime-time TV moment. The measurable outcomes – booming sales, engaged customers, retailer buy-in – flowed from that comprehensive strategy.
Is your brand ready to turn up the heat? Whether you’re launching a new product or looking to rejuvenate an existing brand, Hawke Media’s cross-functional experts can craft a custom strategy to ignite your growth. We pride ourselves on delivering results that matter – increased revenue, stronger customer relationships, and lasting brand equity – all tailored to your unique story. Contact Hawke Media today to explore how our services can help your brand soar. Like AC Barbeque, you too can achieve the perfect blend of strategy, creativity, and execution to become the next great success story in your industry. Let’s spark your growth together.