It’s difficult for food and beverage companies to find success without the help of marketing and advertising. Marketing and advertising, when executed correctly, can increase brand visibility, build your reputation, and convince more people to purchase what you’re selling.
These benefits are, of course, contingent on an important prerequisite: you need to understand what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’re likely to waste your money on ineffective strategies.
So how do you plan for a marketing and advertising campaign?
Set Your Goals
Before you get too far in the weeds, set the high-level goals of your campaign. Obviously, you want to grow your business, reach new customers, and increase sales while building your brand reputation. But which of these priorities is most important? And how are you going to accomplish it?
For example, are you already converting lots of people on your website? If so, you might set a goal like increasing traffic volume so you can capitalize on that conversion rate. Are you already seeing lots of traffic to your website, with fewer conversions than you’d like? Attracting more relevant leads and practicing conversion optimization might help you.
Once you have a better idea of what, specifically, you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll be able to plan a much more effective campaign.
Work With An Agency
From providing marketing information and resources to helping you execute your ground-level campaign, marketing agencies can provide assistance at every step of the process. Typically, agencies charge you a monthly rate for professional services, and in exchange, you can use them for a variety of different marketing campaigns and tactics. Depending on the agency, you may be able to conduct all your marketing and advertising efforts under one roof.
Regardless of what type of agency you work with or how you work with them, agencies have entire teams of experts and plenty of experience to help you through your marketing initiatives. Make sure you review your marketing agency candidates carefully so you can find the best fit.
Better Understand Your Target Audience
It’s much easier to be an effective marketer if you understand your target audience, inside and out. With the help of ongoing market research, you can get inside the minds of your target demographics. Who are these people, how do they think, and how do they make purchasing decisions? The better you know the answers to these questions, the better you can craft messaging designed to appeal to these people. Every piece of marketing collateral you produce should be seen through the lens of your key demographics; how would they respond to this?
Solidify Your Brand
Marketing and advertising both start with branding. If you have a strong, foundational brand strategy in place, it’s much easier to craft messaging with a consistent voice and increase the effectiveness of your materials. Branding provides direction as well as consistency across all your campaigns; as long as you adhere to the standards you set, you can build more familiarity and trust with your audience over time. If you haven’t yet, take this time to solidify your brand standards and enforce them consistently across all channels.
Go Omnichannel
Omnichannel/multichannel marketing is a modern marketing approach that requires you to take advantage of multiple communication channels simultaneously. That could mean utilizing search optimization, paid advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, and even direct mail, all together and all in service of a broader strategy. It’s a way of expanding your reach and compensating for the weaknesses of certain channels.
Start Small
Even though you’re following an omnichannel approach, it’s a good idea to start small. In the earliest stages of your marketing and advertising campaigns, you won’t have much data to work with. Avoid overinvesting in tactics that have yet to be proven effective – and keep your budget lean overall.
Experiment
Within the confines of your tight budget, feel free to experiment. Experimenting with different designs, different copy, different placement strategies, and different follow-up strategies can help you better understand the best tactics for your audience.
Evaluate And Adjust
Stay on top of your key performance indicators (KPIs), especially your overall return on investment (ROI). Which channels seem to be most effective? Which messaging strategies are currently dominating your campaigns? Gradually, if you follow the data, you can weed out approaches that don’t work and invest more heavily in items that are proven to work well.
Planning isn’t everything in marketing and advertising; even with perfect data, you’re going to encounter some things you don’t expect. What’s important is that you do as much proactive research as you can and that you’re willing to adapt continually as you gain new information and insights throughout your marketing implementation. Do this, and you’ll gradually tweak your way to marketing perfection.
