YIMA Fruit Products: The 30-Day Sprint That Found the Audience

30-Day Sprint • ICP Research • Creative Direction • Email Automation • Paid Social

Spring 2026

Ghana (brand) | United States (market)

Define who the customer actually is for a Ghanaian family-owned DTC brand

Build a marketing system where none existed

Produce campaign-ready creative for a product with no existing content library

Launch paid advertising that could pass Meta's algorithm scrutiny on a real budget

Answer the most expensive question in marketing: who is your customer?

$0.18 cost per landing page view on Meta ads (industry average $1.00-$2.00)
1,878 landing page views on a $342 ad budget
38,700 people reached across the target audience segments
52,152 ad impressions served over a 12-day campaign flight
64% email list growth (47 to 77 subscribers) with zero unsubscribes
4.01% click-through rate on the top-performing audience segment
20.8% email open rate across the welcome sequence
100+ creative assets produced in a single shoot

YIMA had a product worth talking about. What they didn't have was a system to talk about it.

The 30-Day Sprint built that system from scratch and answered the most expensive question in marketing: who is your customer?

The data delivered a clear answer. VBG tested three audiences. The broader African and Caribbean diaspora responded at a 4.01% click-through rate and absorbed 93% of the campaign budget through Meta's algorithm optimization. They clicked more, visited more, and engaged more than the other segments.

The winning message: "We're not a brand borrowing a story. We're the family that lives it."

Before this sprint, YIMA was marketing to everyone and reaching no one. After it, they know exactly who their customer is, what message works, and how much it costs to reach them. That answer now informs every marketing dollar YIMA spends going forward.

"The market told us who the buyer was in eleven days. We put every remaining dollar there."

— Todd Valentine, CEO, VBG Creative

VBG executed a 30-day marketing sprint built on four deliverables, each one feeding the next.

Ideal Customer Profile Research. Through direct conversation with the founding family, we defined three distinct audience segments: the Ghanaian and Nigerian diaspora, the health-conscious everyday snacker, and the broader African and Caribbean diaspora. Each got its own demographic profile, psychographic data, buying behavior analysis, and Meta ad targeting criteria.

Creative Direction and Product Photography. VBG's creative team, directed by Kimmone Martin and photographed by Djouny, produced over 100 lifestyle and product images at a location shoot in Central Florida. The brief was simple: show the product in the wild. In a pocket. By a pool. At a picnic. On a desk. In someone's hand. The shoot produced product heroes, infographics, lifestyle shots, and campaign-ready compositions.

Email System Build. A three-email welcome sequence installed in Mailchimp with automated triggers. Email 1 tells the farm-to-drawer origin story. Email 2 shows the product in everyday life. Email 3 delivers social proof. A site-wide signup popup was installed on the YIMA website with a 15% first-order incentive to drive subscriptions.

Meta Ad Campaign. Three ad sets mapped to the three audience segments, each with tailored copy and creative. The campaign ran for 12 days on a $342 budget with the objective of driving traffic to the website and growing the email list.