How To Develop A Marketing Strategy for Your Food Related Business

Defining your marketing strategy for your food business can be pretty complex. If you are a local restaurant, your requirements will be completely different than if you are preparing foods to be packaged and shipped out to residential addresses or as a B2B service.

But what remains the same is how you develop your strategy and what your marketing needs to be based on. 

Having worked with lots of brands in the food and beverage industry, I’ve learned that marketing for your food business is vital. You need to be able to reach the right people and attract attention to what you do to gain maximum success. These tips can help you to tweak your marketing to get better results.

Image Credit: Amy Shamblen

What Are Your Goals?

You need to know what your goals are before you start marketing. Do you need to get people through the doors or break into a new state or sector? Or do you want to bring awareness to an offer or campaign you have running right now? The objectives from your marketing goals and what you want to achieve will dictate the direction you go and the angle you take when it comes to the content you produce.

Develop your Brand Identity

You need to ensure that your brand identity represents exactly what your food business is and what you are about. It includes your brand's values, the wording and visuals you use, and the colors representing your company via signage, social media imagery, or packaging, for example. It all needs to be cohesive, tell a story, and be synonymous with your company. If you possess a distinctive product and methodology, consider demonstrating it through video on social media. Aim to produce a video utilizing a video editor to effectively showcase your offering.

Image Credit: Shamblen Studios

Research your Market

You need to know precisely who you are advertising to. If you want to supply ready-made lunches to local offices, your audience will be different from soccer moms looking for easy meal ideas or healthy snacks for training, for example. Knowing who will use your services and what their needs and pain points are will help you to hone down your marketing to press the right buttons and get the desired results. So, be it a cooking a turkey service to households to reduce Thanksgiving turkey-related disasters in your local area or catering for parties and events, knowing who to market yourself to is vital.

Identify your Niche

As we mentioned in the above point, finding any niche you can move into, such as appealing to soccer moms or providing a Thanksgiving family meal service, can help you to attract more customers than by being generic and offering the same as established businesses. Not only can this help you tap into a new market, but it also gives you a more direct focus for your marketing as you are cutting out the rest of the noise and looking in this direction.

Identify your Marketing Tactics

There are so many marketing tactics you can use for your food business, but it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, and nor should it be. Your marketing tactics must be solely based on your needs and what others are doing.

Let's say you need to drum up footfall and fill seats in your pizzeria; then, you can look at local social media-targeted ads and ad words for searches relating to your industry via search engines. You can run in-store promotions, advertise on local media channels, and so on. But suppose you are supplying wholesale foodstuff. In that case, you need to look at different angles and identify where your ideal customer will be online and what they are looking for and incorporate a digital approach as well as using cold calls to reach out, email marketing, and even in-person visits to demonstrate your products and services.

Image Credit: Shamblen Studios

Set your budget

Finally, you need to make sure you set a budget for your marketing campaign. This budget is typically 1-3% of your protected profits, but regardless of how much you have to spend, you need to set your budget so things don't spiral out of control and you end up not knowing your ROI.

That being said, there are no official guidelines, and how much you spend is entirely up to you. But your spending needs to be broken down to consider costs, maximize your resources, and balance the books; the last thing you want to do is spend more than you're likely to take from any one campaign.

Marketing for your food business should be done carefully to help you find the right approach and ensure that you are targeting the right people to get the required results. A marketing campaign without thought can lack direction or goals and result in you simply throwing money into the wind.