The DMA Solutions team has been marketing fresh food for nearly 20 years, and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way. Fresh food marketers aren’t only competing with other brands in the produce aisle – we want shoppers to choose fresh fruits and veggies over snack cakes and chips. While that can feel daunting to cut through all the noise, every day at DMA, we create a space that elevates our client’s brands in a meaningful and lasting way. Here’s how…
How To Elevate Demand For Fresh Food
Practice What You Preach
Elevating demand for fresh food has been the cornerstone of our business from day one. Keeping this idea central to what we do has helped guide us in making impactful decisions on behalf of our clients and our own company for almost two decades. What central idea is the compass for your company when making strategic decisions? Make sure that is defined first.
Make an Actionable Plan
After you’ve identified a central idea or purpose, you’ll need a plan to put it into action. When thinking through all the marketing opportunities available, consider the following questions to guide your strategy:
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- Is my messaging, graphics, and other content relevant and up-to-date?
- Do I understand my audience’s pain points?
- How can I make it easier for people to find, use, or engage with my product or service?
- What types of marketing tactics will help me connect and build loyalty with my audience?
- What tools can I use to measure consumer engagement and response?
- What is my budget?
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Tip: Use a mix of wide-reach and hyper-targeted tactics to ensure you are reaching new shoppers and reaching shoppers where they are. For example, influencers are a great way to reach a large, engaged audience for a reasonable cost per impression. Meanwhile, you can also partner with a retailer to drive foot traffic to their stores by geo-targeting social media ads around individual locations that carry your products.
Be Consistent and Patient
It takes time to build engagement, trust, and loyalty. The best way to do this is to keep your focus sharp and consistent. It’s easy to get caught up in the ever-changing marketing landscape or the new, shiny opportunities. While capitalizing on trends is important, make sure you’re staying consistent with your overall purpose and strategy. Give your efforts time to work before giving up on them completely. Adjust where needed, and monitor progress regularly.
Tip: Stay consistent with your graphics and your messaging. Show up and interact with your audiences in person and on social media the same way every time.
Your Data Tells A Story
Another huge factor in moving the needle forward for our clients has been our measuring and reporting systems. Your data tells a story if you know what to look for. Our team uses their experience along with an array of digital tools to enhance what they are seeing. This paints a richer picture of what is happening for our fresh food brands month over month, year over year. On social media, we can see what content is working by measuring engagement and impressions. In public relations, we can see what angles are getting better lift-off by measuring placements and potential impressions from those placements. Or how a digital campaign or sweepstakes is increasing brand awareness by monitoring website visits, sweepstakes submissions, and email statistics. These are powerful tools. Not everyone has the time or the resources to tap into them fully. Luckily for us, it has become a part of how we deliver on the promise of helping to elevate demand and push the needle forward.
Tip: Tools like Sprout Social for social media, Cision for public relations, and HubSpot for your website are invaluable reporting systems that our team uses on a daily basis.
If your brand needs help increasing demand, or if you need help with where to start, contact us!
