January 21, 2022
Brands in the food industry, are you still relying on recipe content and fancy photos of your food to generate engagement? This is especially important if your marketing strategy needs to encompass B2C as well as B2B – we’re here to remind you that you’ll need to do more to cut through on social.
Food content on social has always been huge, whether it’s your relatives sharing their Sunday roast or a friend showing off with a smoothie pic at the beach, we all love it.
There were 17 million mentions related to the food industry and trends on social in 2021, 52% growth from 2019
(Source: Brandwatch)
There’s SO much chatter about it – but this means there’s a noisy opportunity! You can test and learn, sure, but we advise starting with some strategy, really!
Business To Consumer
For consumer marketing, the majority of brands know they need to be inspiring. This can come in many forms from guest Chefs going live to recipe breakdowns and unusual food combinations (yes, we’re looking at you, Bix & Beans!). But the standard “Ooh, yummy, try it!” caption just ain’t gonna cut it anymore.
Are you championing your brand advocates by resharing their UGC?
Have you considered including trending ingredients or the latest cooking techniques?
But most importantly – do you know who your key consumers are?
This last part is the key – if you’re mostly targeting busy mums, what is their motivation to choose your brand over another? Or for students, will the provenance of the vegetables come into their decision, or is it really all about cost and convenience? Once you’ve dug into the audience behaviours, you stand a far better chance of gaining quality engagement and awareness growth.
Business To Business
To reach a key buyer is slightly more challenging. Yes, they want to be inspired in the same way they would when they are “consuming” food content – but buying decisions are a complex mix of inspiration and meeting expectations – both at the influencer, buyer and senior decision-maker levels.
Has your business nailed down all the reasons a business would be looking for your services – AND robustly tested these?
Are you not only aware of the key industry trends but actively participating in developing them?
Have you factored in the buyer’s sleepless nights in order to create engaging content?
You’ll have to go way beyond the food images and ensure you’re talking about sustainability, food wastage, eco-friendly food practices and much more.
Use of 🌱 in tweets around eco food practices were +263%! (’21 vs ’20)
(Source: Twitter Birdseye report)
And lastly, the latest data from LinkedIn has shown that buyers need 5-9 marketing touchpoints in order to take action – do not expect that top quality lead to land in your inbox after one organic post or a single paid ad!
We’re all humans!
Your strategies approach cannot spread your marketing efforts too thinly – at some stage, you’ll need to make choices about which channel to focus on and of course the type of content you share there. Remember that we do not have a button in our brain shifting our behaviour from “consumer” to “buyer” just because we clicked on the LinkedIn app – buyers will be receptive to engaging business content on most channels if you go about it in the right way. Consider, perhaps, the change in mindset where a Facebook user is more likely to expect connection and familiarity, where a Twitter user will expect shorter content pieces, sometimes news and fact-based – how can you tailor your content to meet their expectations?
If you’ve ever read our content before, you’ll know we’re huge lovers of data!
When you’re measuring success, really ensure you’re looking at judging like-for-like, at not expecting a single post to be a stand-out winner but grouping your content into themes and objectives in order to learn more about what your audience is responding to. If you’re going to change some of your strategic approaches after reading this – take the time to let it bed in, start to measure at the end of month 2 or 3 to get a better picture of what’s really worked.
If you’re hungry for more and want our help to fill up on food content, get in touch!