10 Effective Ways To Market Your Food Brand Online
Humans spend a lot of money on food and the advertising world knows that, so how do food brands stand out online when there is food literally everywhere you look? Finding ways to leverage the social media platforms can help you figure out how to get your food brand in front of more people that are actually interested in what you have to offer.
This means targeting your advertising to fit in with the lifestyles and taste preferences of the people who would be looking for something similar to your food brand.
You’ve been online looking at Pinterest or Instagram and you see a recipe that interests you and you click on it, let’s say for spaghetti with meatballs. You finish reading over the recipe and then go back to scrolling, maybe even you save the post for later. Then within minutes, you start seeing ads for spaghetti sauce, pasta, frozen meatballs, garlic bread, Italian restaurants, or maybe even tours of Italy!
This is the world of targeted advertising, and companies big and small use it to market everything from food to beverages, to makeup, and even clothing and online courses. You can target anything and get very very specific in your targeting.
You still need to know how to work with the audience you’re trying to reach, and how to do it in a smart way instead of spending way too much money on ads and marketing and blowing your budget in a few days, especially if you have a small budget or a new product that you’re testing.
10 Effective Ways to Get Your Food Brand In Front of Your Customers
Food Bloggers
Some food bloggers are technically influencers, but most are not. Working with food brands is how a lot of food bloggers make the biggest part of their income, by creating recipes and photographing them (sometimes video too) and posting whatever amount of content is agreed to in exchange for a paycheck. They know their audiences well, they are already doing this work, so they are familiar with what is needed and they are good at what they do, this makes them a great pool of resources for you to partner with.
Food Content Creators
Food Photographers, food stylists, and the teams that help food bloggers are all great options for food brands to reach out to as well for product marketing. They often are helping food bloggers or do a lot of the same content creation as food bloggers in one way or another. Sometimes a food photographer will also be a product photographer for food-related items and they will provide images for you to use while also promoting the products when they share on their social channels and in their portfolios.
Social Media
Facebook - Facebook is a great place to use groups and pages that might have interest in your food brand to get your products in front of the people that are already there. This can be recipe groups, cooking classes/courses, cooking schools, social influencers, chefs and cooks, and others that talk about food a lot and people trust to recommend great products they would use. You can use these groups and pages for research and find people that will talk about your product in different ways to create buzz around your food brand.
Create your own Facebook account to promote your products and get the word out about your food brand. You can create a group to build up traffic about the brand and products and invite people to join.
Instagram - Online influencers spend the majority of their day on Instagram posting about just about everything they do, eat, places they go, and things they like. They work with brands of all kinds to promote them. You can easily find influencers through the use of hashtags or by searching out brands that are similar to yours and seeing who has tagged them in posts. Then reach out to those accounts and find a way to work with them to get them talking about your products.
Create your own Instagram account and use hashtags to help people find your products. Use trending hashtags and some with a medium and small amount of traffic to make sure you hit each level of ranking.
Pinterest - Food Brands rule Pinterest, it is the place most home cooks will go first to find new recipes and variations on recipes to try. You can find accounts on Pinterest that post things similar to yours or have a following that would match your audience and work with them to promote your food brand easily. Pinterest uses hashtags and captions to help users find what they are looking for like Instagram does.
YouTube - Find accounts with large followings and see what they are using and talking about, then read through the comments to see what kind of engagement and feedback they are getting. This will help you find out what kind of content is doing well on YouTube and how your channel should be used when you set it up. This is another platform where you can find users that align with your food brand and ask them to partner with you.
TikTok - The most popular platform currently for trending food videos and reaching a younger demographic is going to be TikTok. These are short videos that are made without anything fancy, just people in their kitchens making what they like or strange foods that somehow become the most popular item for the week. This is both a blessing and a curse, as many of the trends found on TikTok make their way to other platforms quickly and everyone jumps on the bandwagon, and then it is quickly forgotten too. Many companies quickly realized the importance of finding accounts on this platform to partner with to have their food brand featured in different ways.
Twitter - If you want to find celebrities and larger traffic sources to work with to move your brand forward and also network with and tag quickly and easily then Twitter is just right for you. This is the old-school social media platform and it still carries a lot of devout users that are larger and don’t want to deal with the constant need to be on Instagram and Facebook in order to have an impact.
Podcasts - Podcasts are popular with a lot of people that are on the go, that listen while they are doing things like driving, working out, or sitting on public transportation. A great way to get your brand “in front” of the podcast crowd would be to sponsor a podcast episode on a food-related podcast account. This is basically a commercial that runs during the podcast and is generally recorded by the host or part of their team. You can work with them to try your product and then work out a way to get a contract and have your food brand talked about during a set number of episodes.
Influencers - I have talked about influencers either directly or indirectly in almost all of these sections, but they are who the social media users look to in order to figure out what they want to be trying, if the influencer supports it then they will try it. Social media influencers make a living by promoting brands and products just like yours for a paycheck and product trials. You can pick which size audience you want to address and how much you are willing to pay, many times even a higher ticket influencer will be less expensive than an ad agency running commercials for you.
Relationships Matter
No matter what platform or plan you choose to use to get your food brand in front of the audience you want to start impacting, you can always count on the fact that “you get what you pay for” in everything in life and business. You need to keep this in mind with whomever you work with and make sure to vet them well and have contract terms in place to get what you need and form a good relationship with these people.
Creating your own accounts, using hashtags, finding people to partner with, and getting your food brand out onto the internet in any way you can, sounds like a lot of work, but you can repurpose the content and use it in multiple places and multiple ways. This is working smarter not harder in the content arena, and it is very effective.
Take longer videos and use short sections for TikTok and reels, place the longer video on Facebook and YouTube. Take photos and use them in any way you can. Use the copy that you have from blog posts and web copy for social media captions and in emails and newsletters. You can also use the copy that is online as scripts for podcast content and videos.
You can get your food brand out to the masses easily and quickly, you’ll be surprised at how little time this process actually takes. Networking is the name of the game, and it can make or break you. Find your crowd and form relationships with them so they trust you, and make sure you are fair and consistent in the agreements you make. The foodie world is a large community with tight connections, let them help you get your products and food brand into every hand you want to see it in.
