Going Beyond Sell Sheets

March 3, 2015
5:20 pm

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

Helpful Digital Content Produce Companies Can Provide Buyers

Jay Baer, author of Youtility, said that good marketing is about help, not hype. Focusing your marketing efforts on being helpful has a plethora of benefits, from requiring you to better understand your audience to allowing you to create information that your audience actually needs. So just what kind of information can you create that will actually be helpful to your audience? When it comes to retail and foodservice buyers, many fresh produce companies are comfortable creating sell sheets. Although sell sheets can be helpful, there is much more you can be developing to offer your buyers that will make your company a “go-to” resource. Consider the ideas below for helpful digital content you can provide your customers:

Helpful Blog Articles

The perfect example of this content is what you’re reading right now! We’ve emphasized the importance of having a blog before, and it’s something that we not only preach, but practice weekly. Creating regular blog content for your buyers isn’t as difficult as you may believe. Simply by going through your website, talking to your sales team, and going through marketing collateral that you already have developed, you could potentially break up content to a while series of blog posts. What do your retail and foodservice buyers need to know from you regularly? What are they calling and asking your sales team about? Answering these questions will help to uncover more content than you can imagine.

eBooks and Whitepapers

If you want to expand on a subject beyond what is contained in a blog article, eBooks are the way to go. These can range anywhere from 5 – 25 pages, and can include things like research, study results, thought leadership ideas, and tips for how your buyers can make the most out of any of your products. Example: “10 Ways to Merchandise Fresh Avocados,” or “Best Practices for Fresh Produce Managers,” etc.

Email newsletters

Keep your customers in the loop with crop updates, events, and even promotional pricing or deals you have for your current crops through regular email newsletters. Applying this practice will require you to keep an updated contact database, which will open the door to more possibilities when it comes to email marketing. Consider these different types of email content that you can automate and use to nurture your customers regularly.

Infographics

Infographics are a popular way to visually communicate high level stats and tips that your audience can digest quickly. Best of all, they’re highly shareable! You can include these as a part of your blog content, eBooks, emails, and social media activity. You could even turn sell sheet content into an infographic to put a new and interesting spin on otherwise drab content.

Slide Share Decks

Slide share offers marketers an easy way to upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars – in short, CONTENT. Slide share has the added benefit of boosting your SEO by transcribing copy from your presentations. Use slide decks to share marketing information that will be valuable to your buyer customers.

Webinars

No need to explain the helpful nature this type of content can offer! With software like Webex, Webinars are easy to put on yourself. Consider hosting a webinar for all of your buyers to attend where you discuss a new product, merchandising best practices, or hot topics in the industry.

Videos

Another form of visual communication, videos are growing increasingly popular for not only consumer audiences, but for business to connect to their customers about virtually any topics. The skies the limit on what you can share via video format, but we love that videos have the added benefit of being able to drive traffic back to your website, the ultimate hub for your helpful content!

With these ideas handy, consider going beyond the sell sheet in 2015 to provide buyers and customers with a variety of helpful content that will suit their needs. Having trouble deciding what to create first? Take a look at your website analytics and consider who is visiting your website and which of your pages are garnering the most traffic. From there, have a meeting with your sales team to pick their brains about what problems they are actively trying to solve for your customers. This will help you identify the area that is plaguing your audience the most so you can deliver on their needs. Want to talk about this in more detail? We can help!