Food and Beverage Marketing Strategy: How to Create Effective Food Marketing Strategies

Let's start with the basics that lie behind food and beverage marketing.

Building a strong brand

A brand strategy should take into account your overarching business goals. That includes the brand’s central ‘narrative’, who your audiences are, how you'll reach them, and a final tactical plan. 

As Jasmine Bina writes, the key to a successful brand strategy is to then lead with the story, creating an emotional connection with the consumer that elevates the product far beyond its basic offering. And the process, like Bina notes, feels like “an excavation. You dig and dig and dig until you arrive at what the core of the company is about, and then suddenly, a market path is revealed.“

The next steps will depend on this market path. Each element of the food marketing will be informed by the questions answered through the development of the strategy.

Social media

Food marketing plans should generally include a strategy to push content through social media channels, likely through image-focused outlets such as Instagram or Facebook. As we further explore these channels, social media will come in to boost engagement, conversation opportunities with the consumer, and even direct sales.

Loyalty programmes

Loyalty programmes are also good if you want to successfully market food, with apps offering bonuses after a certain number of products are bought. In the same vein, apps that let you get your products in front of consumers (like delivery providers) can also be useful to consider.

Trade shows

More traditional ways of food marketing, such as through trade shows or tasters in supermarkets, are also frequent and still great to consider for food marketers.

In-store sampling has long been a favourite tactic for food marketing, with dramatic increases in sales if it is done well. The ability to engage directly with customers creates goodwill and a personal connection, leading to the possibility of an immediate and easy sale.

At the base of all this lies a solid food and beverage marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a document that outlines a business’s strategic positioning, ambitions, and tactics to achieve its goals. It does this by noting the marketing steps and procedures required to achieve the company’s business goals.

An effective marketing plan for the food and beverage industry should include:

• Your business’s key points of difference or unique selling proposition (USP)
• The way you will communicate those effectively through key messaging
• How you'll manage outreach to stakeholders, and through what channels

You can then align all this with your budget, resources, and other planning documents (even external factors such as news or political events).

Tip: Your marketing plan should be regularly tested against changing company priorities and market conditions and updated as required.

Marketing works as a magnet for potential customers, but here are a couple of other major benefits of a food and beverage marketing strategy:

1. Greater brand awareness

The food and beverage industry is known for its fast turnover and fluid customer loyalty. Brand recognition is what helps you grow in this environment. A well-designed and executed plan increases the business's visibility across multiple channels, which in turn retains the loyalty of existing customers and attracts new ones.

2. Stronger stakeholder relationships

The food and beverage industry also relies on relationships across its stakeholder group, from producers and manufacturers to distributors and customers.

A marketing plan considering the various groups and how best to ensure the relationships are strong and fruitful for all parties is hugely beneficial.

3. Showcase competitive advantage

Customers can easily switch their loyalty to a new entrant to the market. Effective food marketing strategies ensure its brand is kept front and centre of its customers, both existing and new.

Influencer marketing can be highly effective for this. A recent trend has been towards nano and micro influencers. These have smaller but more targeted audiences. This means messages can get in front of people subtly, blending into the natural flow of a social media feed.

4. Increased sales and revenue

Rapid turnover means a good marketing plan can also have a rapid impact on sales and revenue. A well-planned and executed plan for how to market food products, backed by strategic insights, can make a big difference to a company’s bottom line.

In no time, you'll be driving conversions through promotions, discounts, and strategic pricing or encouraging impulse buying through effective advertising campaigns.

5. Gaining market share

To outperform competitors, focus on engaging previously untapped customer segments, better positioning or customising offers, and consistently providing exceptional value.

These food marketing strategies will let you broaden your customer base and cement your position in the food and beverage industry.

6. Improving consumer loyalty

Fostering repeat business through loyalty programs and personalised marketing, while building emotional connections with consumers through storytelling and engagement, creates a strong foundation for lasting brand loyalty.

By encouraging word-of-mouth referrals and nurturing long-term customer relationships, you can retain existing customers and expand your influence organically.

Before you dive headfirst into the development of your marketing plan, it’s important to prepare your company and educate your team about the purpose of the endeavour:

Focus on opportunities

The development of your marketing plan should start with a workshop of key executives considering what the business’s goals are, along with its unique selling proposition, key messages, stakeholders (including consumers) and how to engage with and influence them.

Your marketing plan, which will likely draw on such a workshop, then comes in to structure a strategy to take advantage of those opportunities. In doing so, it creates a clear focus on what needs to be done and how to do it.

Plan for growth

How much time you spend considering the various elements of the marketing strategy supports your ability to make business decisions around how to reach strategic goals. Such planning would focus, for example, on the growth potential certain markets offer over others or on whether particular relationships need to be better developed.

Measure your success

A marketing plan also offers clear KPIs as a measure of its success. The highest-level KPI for a marketing plan would generally be around brand awareness, assessed through regular brand surveys.

However, you can measure other KPIs, such as social reach, media coverage, and new customers.

The next steps offer a clear roadmap to using your food and beverage marketing ideas, but they’re only guidelines and will need to be refined to meet your particular business needs:

Step 1. Workshop it

Bring the company’s leaders together for a workshop considering all elements of the business that will feed into a marketing plan.

This will likely include the company’s evolution to date, including successes and weaknesses, stakeholders, USP, messaging, and outreach opportunities.

A workshop can be followed by one-on-one interviews with key executives to gather all the information needed.

Step 2. Understand the audiences you're targeting

From the workshop and other research, develop a clear understanding of the audiences and where they consume information, how they‘re influenced, and how and why they make purchasing decisions.

Step 3. Understand your USP

Understanding what makes your brand different to the competition is key to a good marketing plan. Standing out from the crowd means making your USP clear and attractive to your audiences.

Step 4. Create key messages

Develop your key messaging and bespoke messaging for every audience you want to target.

The key messaging should hold throughout all your communications to maintain a consistent brand position. More specific messaging, including for advertising campaigns, can be developed with the key messaging underpinning the overall positioning.

Step 5. Outline your objectives

Figure out what the ultimate objectives are (such as building market share or gaining more customers in a certain age bracket or region). Then, develop a detailed plan for outreach to that particular audience type.

Step 6. Create a tactical plan

This step revolves around considering the content, channels, and strategies for the target audiences and objectives. You may also choose to develop the content and outreach strategy in-house.

At this stage, you'll also want to choose your channels carefully. Each social media platform has subtle differences. While Facebook remains a behemoth of social, it is now an old hand in the industry. Younger audiences have been flocking to new sites, such as TikTok, while YouTube is still standing strong and largely unexplored.

Step 7. Develop a budget

Part of the decision-making will also include spending. While brands can run very successful channels through social media without advertising, investing some funds will significantly grow reach.

Generally, boosting content with some expenditure will dramatically increase audience engagement and lead to an uptick in sales or leads. It also allows for specific targeting of audience types, regions and interests.

When considering expenditure, assess the ideal ‘cost per click’ you want, and test spending against that. In digital, ‘test and refine’ is a key concept to maximise the return on investment.

Step 8. Analyse the impact of your food marketing ideas

Once the tactical plan has been implemented, analyse its success through metrics such as social reach and engagement, brand awareness, media mentions and sales.

Unleashed supports this process by providing accurate, real-time data that connects your marketing initiatives directly to sales and inventory performance. With advanced reporting, you can track which products are driving the most revenue, identify demand fluctuations, monitor customer buying patterns, and calculate accurate margins.

There are multiple ways to market a food and beverage brand. Below, we outline our best food campaign ideas and tips to ensure your marketing plan delivers the results you expect:

1. Ensure your brand has an impact

Consumers face multiple choices when shopping for a product. Having brand cut-through is key in the customer's journey toward a purchase. This may mean promoting a point of difference, or it may mean a catchy brand name, intriguing colour palette, or standout packaging.

When you establish an emotional connection with memorable messaging or a distinct visual identity, brands will remain top of mind and even expand their reach. A powerful brand doesn’t just get noticed. It says what it stands for loud and clear, cutting through what’s on offer to give consumers an easier decision to make in a cluttered marketplace.

2. Understand the audiences

A deep understanding of the target audience goes a long way in helping your food marketing strategies work.

Often, a business will create ‘personas’ for the types of people they want to target to outline their particular needs or wants.

Desktop and market research should be conducted to support the understanding of audiences. This new knowledge lets business owners and marketers optimise messages, products, and customer paths, maximising engagement and conversion.

3. Use memorable visuals

Food and beverages lend themselves naturally to impactful visual advertising. Whether we're talking about a simple image on a social post or a detailed television commercial, visuals are must-haves for capturing the consumer’s attention and increasing sales.

Unforgettable images bring out sensory images that resonate on an emotional level, turning the product into something one must try and ideally never forget. Regular use of bright colours, powerful photos and design elements conveys a strong, cohesive brand identity.

4. Pay attention to packaging

Packaging always matters. When faced with numerous choices at the point of sale, packaging can make a difference in what the consumer picks in the end.

Packaging is also a consumer's first physical interaction with a product and can make or break first impressions in a matter of seconds. Sustainable packaging, for example, from recycled or fully recyclable materials, is something that strikes a chord with eco-conscious consumers.

Graphic design elements, such as colour, typography and shape, are also not just eye-catchers. They can reflect on the brand’s values and the quality of the product, making it compete in a saturated industry.

5. Track (and respond to) metrics

Almost all marketing tactics are measurable. It’s easy to track a certain visual on social media, for example, to see how it performs against others.

Through A/B testing, you can see what resonates most with customers and optimise as needed. Measuring metrics goes beyond demonstrating what works. It's what you rely on to make improvements to future strategies without having to spend money on a plan that's likely to fail. This real-time analysis enables brands to remain nimble and respond with speed to shifting consumer tastes and market dynamics.

Some of the ideas above also apply to the beverage and brewery space, but let's hone in on a couple of specific for this slightly trickier space:

1. Contract brewing

Contract brewing is an arrangement between a contracting brewery and a host brewery. It works to help the contract brewer reduce costs and the host brewer to optimise capacity and increase revenue, also creating a more efficient beer supply chain.

Entrusting recipes and production to another business means you’re potentially handing over the overall success of your brand to someone else. However, it becomes more appealing once you consider the cost benefits and potential long-term opportunities.

Contract brewing also acts as a bridge to geographic expansion. Order fulfilment is quicker, freshness is guaranteed, financial gains can be made through a reduction in shipping costs, and you lower your environmental impact by brewing where your market is.

2. Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is an equity or reward-based form of alternative financing. It’s how you can fund a project or venture by raising varying amounts of money from many people.

For a specific strategy, reward-based crowdfunding is a one-time transaction between the campaign backer and the business they are supporting. People back the funding campaign with a monetary contribution and receive merchandise or something else in return. Generally, the gift received varies based on the size of the donation.

Equity crowdfunding is also different to reward-based crowdfunding in that you are primarily selling equity ownership in the company. Some campaigns will also include rewards and discounts, but it is mainly a way for interested parties to invest a small amount of money in return for a small amount of ownership.

3. Brewpubs

A fusion between a brewery and a restaurant, brewpubs brew and sell a significant portion of their beer on-site in combination with food services and offerings.

The trend towards brewpubs continues to grow with breweries looking to new strategies as the competitive landscape of craft brewing becomes more crowded. Where previous strategies looked to grow sales by expanding market reach, breweries are now concentrating on growing their business in their local areas by gaining a loyal market share. Brewpubs offer a way to do this.

Most brewers come into the industry through a love of the craft and a flair for the creative. But it is one thing to build and run a production-based brewery operation, and another to manage a hospitality business. Any brewer looking to go the brewpub route really needs to have someone on staff to manage the hospitality and restaurant areas of the business.

4. Growing a direct-to-consumer channel

Diversifying sales channels is important to keep your beer flowing. In the current climate of snap lockdowns due to even a single case of the coronavirus, it becomes obvious that you don’t want to be selling only to pubs and restaurants.

Some useful tips to consider when setting up a B2C channel:

• Know what you are selling, B2C customers are likely to purchase six-packs or cartons
• Ensure your eCommerce site is uniform in design, easy to navigate and on-brand
• Know the legal requirements, as in most countries, this involves an 18+ condition of entry
• Connect to effective inventory management and brewery software tools
• Market to a new B2C audience through social media and digital marketing spend
• Have the logistical side of eCommerce sales sorted for smoother shipping and delivery

Now, say you've implemented some great food and beverage marketing campaigns and sales are rolling in. How do you know your business is ready to handle an increase in sales?

This is where it pays to have efficient food and beverage manufacturing software like Unleashed in place to ensure you're fully stocked with the right products so orders are fulfilled quickly.