3 Ways to Provide Helpful Content to Your Customers

June 5, 2018
11:43 pm

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

Imagine your sales and marketing teams working hand-in-hand to capture and nurture B2B relationships. Sounds like a winning combination! If you make “being helpful” the goal, fresh produce marketers can support the sales team through the creation of value-added content for retail and foodservice customers. Here are 3 ways to do it:

Send a Newsletter with More than Just Crop Updates

This isn’t exactly a revolutionary strategy. In fact, your sales team probably sends crop updates out regularly already. But what if you were able to create a monthly or weekly newsletter for not only crop updates, but also include exclusive insights for your buyers? For example, you could share exciting company news with your customers before it’s released to the trade media and you could also share information about your latest consumer marketing activities. This is a great way to streamline communications to your customers while ensuring that marketing and sales are fully connected to each other. Win win!

Seek & Earn Shopper Data

There is a lot of great insights we can surmise about shoppers through purchased data. But what if we told you that you can seek and earn your own shopper data to share with your customers using the right digital marketing strategy? This smart approach to marketing is known as inbound marketing. Fresh produce marketers that practice this methodology are able to capture their own psychographic data from people who purchase their products and then they can share it with their customers to add more insights into shopper preferences.

For example, California Giant Berry Farms recently shared a little about their approach to creating a quarterly shopper data report that provides retail partners insights as to what types of recipes consumers want, where the majority of their consumers purchase berries, and what items shoppers put in their carts when they purchase berries.

Proactively Address Challenges

IFCO Systems uses feedback from customers to create blog articles and whitepapers that address challenges that are commonly identified when it comes to perishable packaging and the overall supply chain.

Meet with your sales team and determine what the common objections are that they hear from buyers daily. What ends up preventing the sale, and how could you address it in advance? From there, you can create emails, blog posts, whitepapers or other pieces of content that aim to solve these common challenges for your customers. This very blog is a great example of this strategy! We create these blog posts to address common challenges we know you face as fresh produce marketers while offering ideas to make you more successful. Is it working?

As you develop your trade marketing strategy, keep these helpful ideas in mind that will maximize your sales team’s efforts and make you, the produce marketer, look like a rock star! Not sure where to start? Reach out to us and we can help!