How to get started with content marketing for Food & Retail Businesses 

Content marketing is great for small businesses, startups and others who have limited marketing budgets, but time to spare. If you can put in the time and effort it requires, you will need little to no investment to get started with one of the internet’s most effective food marketing strategies.

Here’s our quick guide to becoming a successful food content creator:

Set clear goals

Are you looking to raise brand awareness? Increase sales? Get your new product noticed? The clearer and more detailed you can define your goal(s) the better you can tailor your content to reach said goal. Take your time and if possible, consult a marketing agency to help you define your goals — that way you’ll save yourself a ton of expensive and time consuming mistakes going forward.

Tell your story

You have probably heard marketeers claim that there is a story behind every business. And if you are a family owned company who have been in business for generations, you probably have a pretty good idea what your story is. But for startups it can be a little more tricky.

Nevertheless finding the narrative of who you are as an organisation makes it significantly easier to get people to remember you. A recent study shows that millennials — the largest group of content marketing consumers — find it very important to know the story of when, where and how their food is produced.

Pro tip: The story does not need to be told with words. Have a look at this campaign we created for La San Marzano. Here it’s the visual images and careful choice of props that tells the story of traditional Italian cooking and family values.

Deliver VALUE

Start by thinking about why consumers should read or watch your content, i.e., what value you will be providing. Creating funny and/or entertaining content is a great “spice” to keep it interesting, but the “base ingredients” should always be something that is useful for your targeted audience. Why do you think 1 minute cooking videos like Buzzfeed’s “Tasty” series has become so popular? Or videos about “mind-blowing kitchen hacks” go viral? — Because they deliver recipes and tricks to make cooking easier, faster, simpler… Just what busy families need.

The value you choose to offer can also be instructional videos on how to use your cooking products like these we produced for iSi.

Be Consistent

Long periods without new content kills your following no matter how good your content is. So consistency is key to keep when it comes to getting your content read and shared on social media, commented on, etc.

When your followers know when they can expect new content they are more likely to stay engaged. Therefore you should start by creating a schedule for when you want to post new content — Daily? Weekly? Every Monday and Friday? By having (a) specific day(s) of the week when you post content your followers have something to look forward to.
 

Share Your Content Where Your Customers Are
 

Sharing your content on all the social media platforms you can think of might give you a lot of views or clicks. But how many of those views actually converts to paying customers? Many businesses tend to get caught up in like-hunting and forget why they are creating content in the first place — to generate sales and retain customers. A banner ad on a cooking site might give you significantly less traffic than one on Facebook. But if that ad converts multiple readers to paying customers it can be a profitable (and often overlooked) way to promote your content and business.

For every industry different platforms are more or less useful for posting and promoting your content. This is where a culinary content agency like Foo-Food.com can be your short cut to finding the most profitable and effective platforms for your content. Foo-food.com specialises exclusively on the food industry, and can help your content marketing put your products on the tables of hungry consumers. Learn more…

BONUS TIP: Recycle content in different formats. If you have written an article or blog post about a specific topic, why not break that up into short videos (and save the time coming up with new topics)? That way you can use the videos to link traffic to your blog and from your blog to your sales pages. After all, as a busy business owner the more traffic your can generate with the least amount of effort is worth at least thinking about.

To get started creating food content that gets noticed and gets consumers in your door, get in touch with us right here.