Sitting at the table and staring at your inventory, it’s hard to forget everything that’s gone into producing those products and developing your food brand. Now you want sales. Everyone is telling you to get online. So how do you get started on social media and sell online? Have you set up your digital food marketing strategy with the food industry in mind. We are in the business of selling food, but that’s just between me and you. To our customers, we are selling experiences, tasty experiences.
Let’s go through the best ways to develop your digital marketing strategies and marketing channels to work effectively for your food business.
Whether you’re looking to develop your brand or sell your food products, your plan needs to start with content. A blog is a great place to share all the excellent content your target audiences wants to see about your products.
It can be a written piece about the best ways to use your product at mealtime or a short video documenting your creative process. Your blog posts can be anything you want.
Think of blog posts like a diary that allows you to share helpful content to your audience and consumers.
Through the power of significant authentic content, search engines like Google will pick up your content, ensuring that your website is and that will help your product and brand reach more people through the power of great authentic content.
Pro Tip – Instead of giving your header the best ways to use my food product, title the piece, 5 ways to enjoy my food. Adding the number makes it more accessible and easier to browse.
A recent study found that Millennials want to know more about how their food is produced and want to “see the story behind the scenes” (81% and 80%, respectively). This statistic encapsulates the heart of your social media marketing strategy. Your social media presence can share more than posting to encourage people to buy your products. Different content on different social channels. Create a content calendar to organise your content. Split a page in half; on one side, write the different areas you can create content to promote, fr example, product promo, branding, behind the scenes. On the other side of the page, list the content formats; written, images, video. Now you can choose how you create and plot creation through a month or quarter: one-day branding video, another day written product promo.
Pinterest – infographics and images
Youtube – Video
Instagram – Images
Facebook – All types of content
Pro tip – Always mix up the content. Be creative and authentic.
You have been busy! You are taking your content marketing seriously. How many people are seeing your content? We want much more people to see this great content. A great way to reach more people is through food bloggers and food industry communities to share your content and promote your food to a wider audience. Find bloggers and communities that are focused on particular products or trends. For example, you might find a blogger focused on beverage products or a community sharing latest on meatless meat products. These groups will have great engagement with your customer base and the influence to promote your food products.
Pro tip – This sounds familiar because it is the digital marketing version of getting an article in a newspaper or magazine. See this as a full-blown digital marketing campaign; define what you want to achieve and experiment.
Your audience wants to know more about you and have a relationship with your brand. A great way to give them more access is to host an event. The type of event is up to you. It can be a cooking event online where you can show people creative cooking and recipe options. It could be an in-person event where you are an influencer talking about food trends in the food industry. Promote the event on Facebook and other social media channels to increase reach and attendance.
Pro tip – Decide beforehand a webpage or blog product you want people to visit. Make sure it’s the best it can be to increase conversions. Extra pro tip – create a campaign page version of that chosen page and tailor the messaging or offer to the event the audience attended.
Facebook contests are a powerful way to increase engagement with your target audience. It doesn’t matter what food and beverage business. Create a contest, share a picture at our restaurant, share a photo using our product in your cooking, an image with friends enjoying our product. Shared pictures will be submitted for a prize. User-generated content has converts traffic much better and encourages potential customers.
Pro tip – Contests are more effective if you offer better prizes based on the number of shares. Increasing shares increases the reach of your brand.
As we mentioned posting on social media takes planning. Instagram, as a stand-alone social media platform, is its world. Use Instagram as part of your digital food marketing strategy to post authentic snapshots of your food products and beverage brands. You want to share strong stories.
Pro tip: Dont sell. Tell a story. Share your personality through pictures and videos. Images taken on your cellphone are of adequate quality. For better results, choose brand colours and brand appearance and stick to those brand details.
You can use your content calendar to plot festivals and seasons to allow you to plan your sales. Preparation is essential in Digital marketing, whatever the business. Then, with your campaigns chosen, we can promote them with digital advertising. You can launch your food advertising campaigns with your social media ads on Facebook’s advertising platform and search engines like Google Adwords and Bing ads. The best advertising practice for your food and beverage ads is always to run three ad groups; the first is to reach relevant consumers who haven’t heard of you to expand reach. The second is to reach consumers who have heard of you but haven’t purchased; the third is consumers who have made a purchase. This structure will effectively encourage the broad top tier to buy, gradually develop your customer base and repeat orders.
Pro tip: you want to have more than one advert for each group. Mixing and matching images and messaging will allow you to test and improve the ads you are running.
A recent study showed that 60% of consumers made decisions based on influencers. Finding a good food influencer can be tricky but managed correctly can increase engagement and sales. You will need to create great content to share or provide clear guidelines for what content or messaging you expect. Just like any marketing for food products, it’s about the experience.
Pro tip: There are different food influencers; you can have a food influencer with 1m+ follows down to a micro food influencer with 1000’s influencers. Focus on their measured influence. Use a digital marketer or marketing agency that can manage the introductions and expectations on both ends.
