Whether you’re an established brand or just starting out, there’s one place your buyer can always be found; online.
With all food and drink brands, the initial focus of any design and strategic work is based around branding and packaging, but once these stages of your journey are complete, it’s digital marketing that will get your product selling.
It’s simply no longer enough to open social media accounts and upload endless photos of your product to try and expand your reach and brand awareness.
In a market that’s saturated with me-too products, achieving any form of market penetration needs either a huge marketing budget or a food marketing agency that’s full of clever ideas.
Get help with your digital marketing or check out our work
Getting your branding right is just the first step.
We’ve worked with food and drink producers for over a decade to create strong brands and awesome packaging.
However, no matter how great your product, branding and packaging is, these three elements alone will not help you reach new customers and improve brand awareness.
Consumers are now literally bombarded with new and exciting food brands on a weekly (if not daily) basis, so how do you cut through all the noise and make sure it’s your brand that remains top-of-mind?
Without question, a solid digital marketing strategy is the best way to achieve this and presents the most cost-effective way of reaching the largest number of customers.
So where do you start with digital marketing for food and drink brands?
Research, research and more research.
Without building a solid understanding of your niche there’s a real risk that you simply get into the post-and-pray method of digitally marketing your food product. Creating every single social profile you can and posting the same content everywhere will quickly get you nowhere.
We can help you…
We work within the Food sector to help new and existing brands create a digital marketing strategy that works.
We’ll help you to:
- Define and understand your niche
- Find where your target customers are online and what they are talking about
- Identify what resonates with them and how to align your product with them
- Find keywords that will bring quality traffic to your website
- Improve your website’s landing pages to better convert these visitors
- Build mailing lists
- Sell product
This forms part of a fully-integrated service that we offer to Food brands at Toast.
With over 20 years of experience in branding, design and digital, our clients come to us for the full service – we do everything in-house.
This will save you time and money and removes the need to have multiple agencies working on disjointed campaigns.
Our services.
If you need the full range or just want help with certain aspects of your food digital marketing, we do the following, all in-house.
- Google Adwords / PPC
- Web design and build
- Optimising your website (if you already have a site)
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Content production and promotion
- Landing page optimisation
- Mailing list growth and development
- Social Media
- Social Media advertising
- Graphic design and artwork (for everything else you need post-branding project)
- Strategy and consultation
Whatever you need, we can help – we’re a friendly team of 14 designers, developers and marketers that love working on Food projects!
We’ll help you find what works for you.
Let’s be honest; it’s very easy to burn through a lot of money when you are trying to market a new brand.
It can often seem like you’re just throwing budget at different channels and ideas to see what sticks.
At Toast, we understand that most Food startups (and many established brands) simply don’t have the budget to invest in everything.
This is why we use a simple approach to quickly identify what is going to be the best channel or campaign for you and then start slowly, generating the concept works before suggesting you invest more in it.
Be prepared to invest.
If you are new, you are going to have to spend some money.
What you actually need to invest depends on several different things including:
- How soon do you want a return on your investment?
- How quickly can you scale-up production if your products takes-off?
- Is everything ready (your website, your social channels, your PR, your customer service etc)
If you want a quick return on your investment, be prepared to invest a lot over a short time.
If you are not able to scale quickly, then do you really want to increase your sales by ten-fold overnight?
If your digital footprint is not complete, you could be wasting your time. Poorly built and optimised websites that you push traffic to do nothing more than leaving a bad taste in the mouth.
You don’t need to do everything NOW.
The way that we approach digital marketing for our clients is based 100% on what they want to invest each month.
You can start with a small, targetted investment which means you’ll see results over a longer timeframe or invest more and see them quicker.
In fact, for most clients, we generally suggest that they start small and go for ‘easy wins’ first – this is often improvements to websites and Search engine optimisation to start ranking higher in niche product-based searches and improving on-page conversions (not always a sale – it might be a mailing list sign up of other engagement).
This route has the benefit of not burning budget on things that don’t work.
We go for the easy win to prove ROI and then expand from there.
With all digital marketing, you do have to allow at least three months before coming to any conclusions – whilst we do often see very quick results, digital marketing for food brands takes time and it’s important to keep expectations in check.
Keeping things going.
There is no set-and-forget option for digitally marketing your food or drink brand.
Digital is a channel that has an ever-changing set of rules and algorithms. Your competitors are always producing and promoting new content, the search engine results are in a constant state of flux.
This is why having a solid, strategic plan and sticking to it is crucial.
Regular posts and new content are a must and everything needs to be joined together or you’ll have no way of measuring the effectiveness of everyone’s efforts.
Getting started is often the hardest bit!
If you want some help with digital marketing, or just don’t know where to start, give us a call on 01295 266644 or complete the form below.
We can have a quick chat about what you want to achieve, do a concise review of where you currently are and suggest the best steps forward.
Our initial consultation and reporting are free, so there are zero risks on your part – we’ll just let you know how best we think we can help you get where you want to be.
Just complete the form below. We guarantee no-nonsense and no prima donnas; just a hard-working, creative team that will get you results without burning your bread!
