Digital Marketing for Food Industry – 6 of the Best Strategies to Use For Your Food & Beverage Business
It doesn’t take a lot of searching around the internet, whether it’s in Google search or on social media to appreciate just how significant the food and beverage industry is.
So, when it comes to your foods’ brand strategy, you’ve also decided to jump straight into exploring some digital marketing strategies – smart idea.
In this post, you’ll learn what digital marketing types there and which ones give you the best bang for your buck.
Who Uses Digital Marketing in the food industry?
The beverage and food industry is one of the most diverse when it comes to the different types of brands and companies operating digitally in some form.
This range includes everyone from the biggest brands in the world to successful restaurant chains and fast food outlets, all the way down to the actual distributors and producers.
It’s not surprising because whether they are working at a local or national level, they are providing an essential service.
But there is only so much attention to go around for food items, and if you aren’t using digital advertising to gain traffic to your business, you’ll quickly be left behind.
Why? Well, over 57% of customers now order their food from a website according to an industry report. You can’t afford not to be a part of the online conversation.
How Digital Marketing Has Affected the Food Industry and Food Business
The digitization of the food and beverage sector like so many others have had a huge effect.
In fact, over 40% of people learn about food via a digital method
We are not just referring to the fact social media sites, Instagram in particular, are overrun with food and drink promotional posts and reviews, but looking beyond that there are also all the review sites, the bookings sites and delivery services. Everything has been affected.
As a result of this shift, there is one form of marketing that is most important to any business and that’s digital marketing. Food and beverage brands like yours need it.
If you are a food brand or have a business in the food and drinks industry and are looking to capitalise on digital marketing, you may feel a little like a fish out of water.
Don’t worry as we are here to help. In this post, we are going to discuss what some businesses and brands do when it comes to having successful digital food marketing strategies, as well as offering some tips and suggestions as to how you can market your food brand.
How Do You Market a Food Brand?
When it comes to having success in such a busy industry, you may be wondering how you can push your food brand ahead of the rest and have success.
What you need is an outstanding digital marketing strategy. If you are new to the industry in general or digital marketing, you may wonder how you go about marketing a food brand.
You have many options including:
- video ads (food is very visual)
- social networks and social media influencers
- SEO (search engine optimisation)
- Content marketing
- Email newsletters
- Press releases
In this next section we will look at some of the above in greater detail and provide tips you need to put into action and the trends you need to be aware of to have success marketing your food brand digitally.
Content Marketing – Make Sure Your Content Is Relevant and Engaging With Video and Images
People are more likely to watch, read and learn about your brand if you make the content relevant and engaging.
Food blogs as a form of content marketing are incredibly popular right now, so it is very easy to use that as a platform for creating and publishing content regularly.
Remember that food is a visual thing, and that a wall of text on a blog page will not sell a product or attract your target market as much as some high-quality images of your products.
You can take it one step further still and make videos which get even more engagement than images and text.
Although we would state it is important to not write content solely to target specific keywords to attract Google (aka writing for robots!).
Writing for humans should be your number one priority and will gain a greater number of visitors to your site and keep them there. To increase sales and trust, you need to make good use of content .
Good SEO is Paramount
It doesn’t matter what company you have or the products and services you are offering, with any digital marketing campaign, Search Engine Optimization is paramount.
It is by far the most effective way to consistently grow your business and maintain the results. SEO involves marketing strategies that ensure search engines find your business and brand and improve your search engine rankings.
In many cases, if you are not easily found on Google, your target customers will not know anything about you, so SEO should always be a top priority.
Social Media is a Must
When it comes to social media content, food is king. Lots of data and research proves this. For instance, on Instagram, food and beverage is the most popular topic.
When you consider that in 2019, there were 3.48 billion users with active social media accounts and the numbers for 2020 when they come in are likely to exceed that, you can see why your brand must be active on social media.
By active we mean more than just having a placeholder account, you need to interact and engage with your target audience and followers, by posting content that is not just relevant but aesthetically-pleasing (especially when it comes to Instagram).
Make use of as many of the social media channels as you can, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and even TikTok.
Instagram is considered to be the most popular platform, with an ever-growing number of users.
Influencer marketing is a particularly useful and effective form of social media marketing that many food brands already use.
Make Sure You Are Utilising the Current Keywords and interests that Customers Are Using
Keywords are important to any successful digital marketing campaign, whether it’s for SEO, hashtags on social networks, or advertising.
In the food industry, what we have seen, however, that the keywords associated with business and brands changes with the dominating trends.
At the moment, customers are interested in keywords like health and sustainability, as well as other related terms.
They are actively looking for environmentally-sustainable products.
Whereas in the past, these keywords were quite niche, they have shifted to the mainstream.
When marketing your goods and brand, where possible, emphasise any packaging cutdowns you have made, if you use plastic-free packaging and recyclable packaging.
These are the most popular terms used by customers. As there has been an increase in the focus on how food impacts our life, health and fitness, and any related terms are also popular keywords.
If you have food products that you are promoting that have specific health benefits, highlight them.
Any case studies that you can include or quotes from experts on your website about a food product will also help your food marketing strategy.
Personalise Content and Target Customers and Target Audience Directly
Whatever approach you take, whatever social media platforms you use and whatever other methods you use to target your customers and target audience, personalisation is vital.
When you personalise content and your correspondence with customers, it shows you understand them.
There is lots of evidence to support the fact that when you are using email marketing, people are more likely to read and react to emails, for instance, that are addressed to them specifically. The same is true of ads.
It shows them you are more than just a faceless entity and that you emphasise with them and are there to help them.
Press Release
Press releases still work if you have the right contacts or you have a large budget. The other way to get featured in a high traffic publication is to ensure your story is SO newsworthy that it can’t be ignored.
Often what we think is newsworthy and what enters a busy journalists inbox are two different things.
Make the news as interesting as possible, perhaps focussing on a trend with some interesting statistics.
To finish, make a journalists work as easy as possible when publishing your story. Don’t expect them to chase you around.
Stay away from cheap press release distributors who tend to send your story to automated, low quality sites for the purpose of SEO only. Good food pr either costs or takes effort to do well.
Email Marketing
While this has been placed at the bottom of the list, it’s certainly not for lack of importance.
If you have a website or an app, capturing your loyal customers or potential customers on to your own email list is like gold dust.
You can now send special offers, interesting information, competitions, or market to them in whichever way resonates with your audience.
People who are on your email marketing list are far more likely to buy from you because they’ve already had to make a small commitment to you by giving up their email address. It’s up to you to nurture that relationship.
You can do this by using an email broadcaster or autoresponder like MailChimp.
In closing, a great way to approach your new digital adventure is to pick one or two of these strategies (depending on your budget) and once you’ve mastered them, expand into a new strategy.
Some may work better for your particular product than others, so don’t be afraid to double down on the most effective strategy for you. On the flip side, keep nurturing the other strategies too. The digital landscape changes as quickly as the British weather and keeping your eggs in one basket could be dangerous for your business.
If you need help your food marketing, we’d be happy to share our expertise. Contact us today to see how we can take your food product to the next level!