You may think that food marketing is a piece of cake. Everybody needs it, right? It should sell itself, shouldn’t it?
The problem: the food industry is, uh, big. You’re up against a lot of competition. Therefore, in order to stand out amongst the rest, you’re going to need to make the most of your marketing budget. Here is some free advice towards that end.
As you can see above, 3 out of the 4 most popular keywords related to the industry come from searchers looking for food near them. So, if you’re a food and beverage marketer looking to convert those hungry searchers into customers, you need to make it clear that your product is near them and easy to access.
A great place to start: geographical targeting. If you want to rank when consumers search for nearby food, it stands to reason that you only want your ads to show to consumers who are proximal to your product. Fortunately, Google AdWords allows advertisers to target by physical location.
Here’s how it works: if your company produces granola bars and a handful of retailers in Boston carry your products, you can specify that you want your search ads to show when someone in Boston searches “food” or “food & beverage.” Pretty cool, right? There is no sense in wasting clicks – and, therefore, your money – on searchers who are nowhere near your product. Geographical targeting helps food and beverage marketers get the most out of their budgets.
Another great tool when trying to capture local consumers: affiliate location extensions. Sounds fancy, right? It’s not! If you use affiliate location extensions on your ads – whether they show on the Search network, the Display network, or YouTube – Google will tell the searcher where they can find your product and mark nearby retailers on Maps. Essentially, it’s a feature that helps advertisers improve their presences in local markets.
Okay, let’s say you’re interested in food and beverage marketing beyond purely local efforts. What can you do to stand out?
The power of social media cannot be overstated. A quick Google search for “food instagram accounts” produces dozens of articles from a variety sources that claim to have found the best food-based accounts on the photo-sharing platform. The same happens when you search “food pinterest accounts.” Plus, quick Facebook recipe videos are some of the most captivating content out there.
It’s simple: whether it’s for cooking inspiration or pure aesthetics, social media users love to see and share content that involves food. Marketers in this industry should take advantage of users’ food obsessions and develop strong cross-channel brand presences. Use hashtags across your social accounts to build a community out of your most loyal fans and turn their networks into paying customers!
Tangential to the power of social media is the power of trends. There are trends in nearly every industry (cargo shorts were probably cool at one point, right?), and the food and beverage industry captures this perfectly. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Google has a tool for that. It’s called Google Trends, and it allows marketers to track the popularity of particular keywords over time – both across the world and in specific regions.
So, if your company makes smoothies and you sense that pineapples are gradually rising to domination in the fruit world, you can use Google Trends to monitor the volume of searches for “pineapple” and “pineapple smoothie.”
Finally, when it comes to ads across the Search and Display networks, it is crucial to optimize your CTAs. People already tend to struggle when it comes to resisting food, so you’re pretty much halfway there. In order to seal the deal, define the goals of your campaign and let those goals inform your CTAs. If you want to drive foot traffic now, tell visitors to treat themselves. If you want to promote a new item, tell them to try it today. A little creativity goes a long way!
For more tips and tricks about marketing across industries, read all the words on our blog.
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