When “To Market” Means Something Else
Food business owners know a lot about the market—going to market, farmers’ markets, that sort of thing. But if you want your business to succeed, you have to add a different kind of market to your vocabulary.
As you develop your business, it is important to market in order to grow your client base. Some successful business owners rely solely on word-of-mouth promotion—nothing can compare to a referral from a previous client. Others maintain informative websites or offer their client base a weekly email newsletter. As your company grows, you will determine which model works best. The pace at which you would like your company to grow will determine this, in part.
In this chapter we’ll provide suggestions to guide you through the process of developing your strategy and help you evaluate the advertising media commonly used in the specialty foods industry. We’ll also look at several other ways you can promote yourself and your new business, including the all-important social media, which we explore in detail in Chapter 12.
A SWOT Analysis
Before you begin advertising and marketing in earnest, develop a road map of your marketing plans. This plan should include a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for:
Strengths. It is always useful to focus on this question: What are the unique and particular strengths of your business? How do these strengths set you apart from the competition?
Weaknesses. Be honest—even if it hurts! What areas of your business are weak? Sometimes to even see weaknesses in your business you need to study similar businesses and compare. Develop strategies to combat these weaknesses.
Opportunities. As the name implies, these are things that might benefit your company, now or in the future. For instance, perhaps a new retail center is opening in your area that is going to focus on locally owned small businesses. This is an opportunity for you to grow your business.
Threats. List anything that might harm your business. Perhaps a big chain retailer is going to start making the same product you make (not nearly as well, of course, but still) or a new specialty food business is opening across town and also going to start offering cooking classes.
By focusing on these four areas and writing about them, you will help to focus your marketing efforts.
Networking to Business Success
Networking will be at the top of your list in terms of developing a strong client base—at chamber of commerce events, Rotary Club, honorary dinners. While you can’t spend all of your time trotting around to every function within a 50-mile radius of your business, networking is essential if you want to develop new business.
Networking can help your business in many ways, but basically, if people have met you and know what services you offer, they may refer business to you or use your service themselves.
The Ins and Outs of Advertising
Print advertising covers a broad range, from an inexpensive advertisement in your local weekly newspaper to an ad in a glossy national publication costing tens of thousands of dollars. Lincoln Olive Oil Shop owner Rob Baker talked about the unique “Deal of the week” the Lincoln, Nebraska, daily paper does that he participates in. They sell $50 gift cards to his shop for $25, the paper gets the money, and the shop gets dollar-for-dollar advertising credit plus new customers and customers cashing in gift cards and spending more than the card is worth. Rob finds it a real win-win.
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“Don’t start cutting corners just to try to get your product into grocery stores,” advises Winnipesaukee Chocolates owners Jonathan and Sally Walpole.
Even today in the online era, most businesses agree that an ad in the Yellow Pages makes good business sense. A line advertisement, simply listing your business name, is often provided free of charge when you connect your phone (if you have a land line). You can also opt for a display advertisement. These are the bigger, bordered ads in the Yellow Pages. There is a charge for these. If you do choose a larger ad space, be sure to include your logo.
Regional magazines can be useful if you do corporate gifts or service for weddings. These magazines can be geared to topics related to your service (e.g., gourmet food, floral design) or aimed at readers in a certain region. An ad in a regional magazine might be a good tool for reaching upscale consumers. A regional business magazine ad would reach prospective corporate clients.
Advertising in national publications can be cost-prohibitive but it also can have big rewards if you can get the attention of customers who might order in large quantities. But be sure your business is prepared for the kind of business that might be generated from an advertising vehicle with national reach.
The Small but Mighty Business Card
Don’t underestimate the power of this small but mighty marketing tool. Even in the computer age, a succinct, professional, printed business card is still critical. Consider it a diminutive brochure, especially if you opt for a trifold business card. Many businesses opt for this type of format because more information can be included than on a traditional business card, while the card remains small enough to be tucked inside a wallet or purse.
Include the name of your business, contact information (email, phone, fax, and website address, for instance), your name, specialization, your logo, and some testimonials from past clients. Always check with clients before using their testimonials and ask for permission to use both their first and last names. Testimonials signed by John D. or Jane S. just don’t have the same impact as those signed with a full name.
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As you develop strategies for advertising and marketing your company, remember that your company logo must appear on every marketing piece—from your trifold business card to the homepage of your website. This helps prospective clients remember you and your corporate image. If you haven’t had a logo designed yet, now is the time!
Always carry business cards. You might stand behind someone in the grocery store, strike up a conversation, and discover that she is starting to plan an event that your personalized whoopie pies might be the perfect dessert for. This is a key opportunity to pass along your business card.
You can buy blank business cards and print your own if you have a high-quality printer. But business supply stores print business cards relatively inexpensively. Choose the best stock (paper) you can afford. Likewise, if you are able to print in more than one color, then do so. For many clients, this will be their first impression of you and your business. Make sure it has a professional impact!
The first question to ask is, do you need a brochure? They are not very costly, but you certainly don’t want to spend money on something you do not have a use for. It is very discouraging to go through the time and money it takes to create and print a brochure, and then find yourself throwing a majority of the print run away a couple years down the road when you finally conclude that you didn’t need a brochure after all.
The decision will be different for each type of business. Do you have a retail location in a tourist area that a visitor’s center services with a rack of brochures to entice visitors to your place of business? That might be a great reason to have a brochure—to help drive customers to your business instead of hoping they just stumble on it.
Do you have the kind of specialty food business that the wedding industry might be interested in? Would it make sense to leave brochures with wedding planners or rental businesses or others in the wedding industry?
Like your business card, a well-designed, professional brochure can help cement your business’s image. Prospective clients will make judgments about your company based on your brochure, so make sure that it is conceived and produced at the highest level possible.
aha!
Think a bit out of the box when it comes to marketing and advertising. Rob Baker of Lincoln Olive Oil Shop never imagined that he would abandon radio, minimize TV ads, and put all his marketing efforts into newspaper advertising given the general state of the newspaper industry.
To achieve this, plan on hiring a freelance graphic designer to help you develop this marketing tool. Trifold brochures are popular and allow you to include important information about your business. Photos of your products should be of the highest quality both in composition and sharpness. You may also want to include a photo of yourself. Because this marketing piece is making a critical first impression on prospective clients, consider hiring a professional photographer to help you obtain first-rate photos—he or she will know how to style things, what colors make things stand out. Even if you pay the photographer so that you own the photos, always be sure to credit anyone who does creative work on the piece itself.
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If you decide to try direct mail, don’t try to use a rented mailing list more than once. These lists are “seeded” with control names so the list seller will know if you use the list more than once. Also, make sure you acquire your mailing list from a business in a related industry. This strategy will help target those potential clients most likely to use your services. Analyze the direct mailings you receive. What works, and what doesn’t?
Maximize your chances of success by making sure your company brochure matches the type of business you have. All materials should look professional, but if you are marketing to a budget-conscious group, a too-glamorous brochure can send the wrong message—and send potential budget-conscious clients running in the opposite direction.
A word about online DIY design-and-print services like Vistaprint. While these services can be very helpful and are often inexpensive, talk to your local printer about giving you equally competitive pricing to get your business. Unless you have background in print design and want to spend your time on print design work instead of making and selling gourmet foods, let designers and printers do what they do best and you do what you went into business for to begin with.
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Provide the vendor with a brochure rack (available at Staples and other office supply stores) so your brochures don’t end up in a messy stack on the floor somewhere—not professional!
You may choose to distribute your brochure via direct mail. If you do so, make sure that your mailing list is well chosen. Consider renting mailing lists from associations to which you belong if that’s applicable to your business. Mailing list rental can be expensive but if you choose the right lists, you will get a great return on your investment. And those new customers can become part of your mailing list.
Rental mailing lists are usually seeded with names of “spies” who will receive your mailing and 1) make sure it is what you said you were going to mail or within the parameters of what they allow to be mailed to their list and 2) that you are using the list that one time only. A person you mail to who comes into your store or orders from you online becomes your customer. But if one of the “spies” gets your next mailing even though they did not purchase from you and you did not rent their list again, you will likely be in breach of the mailing list rental contract.
Newsletters, if written in a lively and entertaining fashion, are useful marketing tools. Mail your newsletter to prospective, current, and previous clients, focusing on what is new in your business. Perhaps you have expanded your services or are offering a specially priced package. Keep the articles pithy and useful. Bulleted points are helpful to your client as are break-out boxes. Your clients’ time is at a premium, so keep the articles brief.
You may likely choose to send your newsletter via email, an inexpensive and effective alternative to the slower “snail mail,” although many organizations are still using the old-fashioned print newsletter so it must still be successful.
We’ll discuss enewsletters later in this chapter.
Sending press releases is a fantastic and inexpensive method by which to boost your business. Send releases when you have business news to report—perhaps you have changed locations, released a new food product, or have some other event that is newsworthy. Newspaper and magazine editors need this so-called news “hook,” so don’t send press releases without news content. Editors won’t run these.
A press release should include:
Release date. Unless your release shouldn’t be printed right away (in which case it should have an “embargoed” release date clearly stated), write “For Immediate Release” at the top.
Contact name. Include your name, email, and phone number.
Headline. Editors may change your headline, but give them an idea of the release content with a to-the-point, accurate, but somewhat tantalizing headline.
Dateline. This is the city from which the release originates. So if your business is in Des Moines, then you should write “DES MOINES” in uppercase type. It should be placed as the first word of type before the press release text begins.
Text. This is your news. Make it interesting to the editor so he will run it!
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If you have a high-quality, stunning photo to accompany your press release, all the better. Although the newspaper may rewrite it, be sure to include a caption, name any people in the photo (with their permission), and give credit to the photographer or, if it’s your own, mark it “courtesy of” and your business name.
Most magazines and newspapers prefer that press releases be submitted via email so staff does not have to spend time typing in releases sent via regular mail.
Although the editor may not choose to run all your releases, it is still worthwhile to email them off periodically. One reason for this is that the editor may turn to you when she needs a news source for a story on specialty food. Or, she may choose to use one of your releases as the framework for a feature story, which is a larger newspaper article.
Any business owner—or customer, for that matter—knows the one essential ingredient in running a successful business: customer service. You can be hard working and dedicated, construct a flawless business plan, and have a bottomless source of financing, but if you don’t keep customers satisfied and coming back, your business will never succeed no matter what business you are in. Gourmet food is no different.
One of the best ways to keep customers coming back is to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas and for ways to improve the product and the service you provide. Toward that goal, consider the following:
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Don’t immediately dismiss a customer’s creative idea as wacky or not doable. Thoroughly investigate all ideas—not only will your customer be impressed that you took her seriously, but she will also be more understanding if you have to tell her it’s not a feasible idea if you can back your decision up with some concrete evidence from your research.
Invest in an hour (or more) with an industry consultant.
Accumulate a group of testers that you can try new products on before deciding to bring them to market. Include the whole soup-to-nuts experience; that is, if your new whoopie pies will have unique packaging, present them to your focus group in that packaging.
Constantly visit other gourmet food retailers or browse catalogs and websites to see what others are doing. Are they providing free shipping? Is the retailer in the next town using an iPad and the Square point-of-sale system? And how are those things impacting customer service?
Attend as many arts-related functions as possible (e.g., arts exhibits, theatrical performances) to gather ideas.
Join trade organizations (see list of organizations in appendix).
Subscribe to at least one professional newsletter or journal.
Retaining Customers through Top-Notch Customer Service
You are sure to gain loyal customers if you are willing to do the following:
“Go to the wall” for clients. You need to “make it right” at all costs. This could involve anything from handling last-minute emergencies to a willingness to “throw in” something extra for free, simply because the customer’s experience with your product or service would be incomplete without it.
Offer customers something they can’t get elsewhere. Specialty food businesses have an innate “original” aspect of the work they do. More and more, customers want “different” and “unusual.”
Make customers feel valued. If you get a huge order from a customer or are regularly used by one customer for an ongoing service, consider doing something special for them—a discount coupon on other things they purchase from you, throwing in a box full of a new product you just brought to market. Or give them a gift certificate to some other aspect of your business such as cooking classes. Besides giving gifts, however, there are other ways to make sure customers know they are appreciated. A simple note with a personal message to convey thanks, congratulations, or birthday wishes can mean a lot, as can a phone call.
Think less in terms of services and more in terms of problem solving. Work with customers on budget restrictions or special timing or how to get products to them in another city or whatever.
Besides providing excellent customer service, earning (and keeping) the goodwill of clients and the community is important. Volunteering your company’s help in planning charitable events or donating to your customers’ favorite charities will win you many friends in the community.
The Win-Win of Charity Work
The main impetus for your donations or volunteer work should be because you believe in the cause you are supporting and want to donate in some way. However, volunteering and donating for a charitable cause can have business payoffs in the long run. If you donate some of your specialty food items to a charitable event, make sure at the very least there is a sign beside your food station with your name on it. Better still is if you can leave business cards and/or brochures so that anyone attending the event who likes your food knows where they can find you.
While you may think when you first start up that you can’t afford to give away to charitable causes, if you limit your donations and choose activities that give your business exposure to the maximum number of people who also support that cause, you will have spent a lot less on some good marketing than other avenues would provide for the same dollar amount.
Supporting charitable activities that give your business exposure is often referred to as “cause marketing”—having your business name associated with a charitable cause.
Your image—the way your company and its services are viewed by the public—is very important. Some, therefore, will direct much of their advertising and promotion dollars toward building a good company image. You will have to decide how much you can afford to spend to establish, improve, and maintain your image. Increased revenues may be able to compensate for this expenditure.
Most important by far, however, is what your product says about your business. The quality of the specialty food items you produce is the most powerful shaper of your company’s image and reputation.
Don’t forget that small details also reflect on you and your company.
Traditional Media with a Digital Twist
Social media and electronic delivery of traditional media is taking on new dimensions all the time. From LinkedIn to Facebook, enewsletters to eblasts, tweets to blogs, Instagram to Snapchat and everything in between, no business can afford to ignore social media marketing and communications. However, before you dive in, it is also important to think through all the options, decide which work best for your business and your schedule, and tie them all together to back up each other’s message wherever possible. In other words, you shouldn’t just “do” social media because you are supposed to in today’s world—you should pick the things that work for your business and post things that hold meaning.
Much of traditional media—newsletters, for example—are still used prominently in the business world. However, they are now typically generated digitally and transmitted electronically rather than in print on paper by post. Sometimes, depending on your typical customer base and their computer expertise, companies offer their materials both ways and let the customer decide whether to get their news, ads, brochures, or whatever—in print or electronically.
An enewsletter is perhaps the most basic way to communicate with clients—it incorporates a standard format that most people are comfortable with (the newsletter) and integrates it with the digital format that is part of most people’s everyday life (email). Newsletters that are sent via email are a great way for businesses to keep in touch with their customers. An email newsletter is like a little reminder to your customers that you are there and waiting to fulfill their or their friends’, families’, and associates’ needs. Do it on a regular basis, keep it short, and offer something like tips, coupons, recipes, or information on new products in each issue and your subscribers will look forward to your e-news popping up in their already overcrowded email box.
Netiquette
Email, like any customer interaction, requires good etiquette. The last thing you want to do is offend a customer. Here are some guidelines:
Never use all uppercase letters; it is considered the equivalent of shouting.
Spell-check your emails. Just because email is quick, it doesn’t have to be sloppy. Not as much of a problem when you are emailing with friends and family, but not professional when you are engaging potential clients. Also, check that the “autocorrect” function hasn’t “corrected” your email to be inaccurate.
Be enticing but also give an accurate sense of what your email is about in the subject line.
Create a signature for your email so that every email you compose automatically includes your business name, address, phone number, and email address so the recipient can quickly see how to contact you.
Keep your messages short and to the point. If you are including “articles” in your enewsletter, provide a capsule version of the article and a link to your website where a longer version of the article is available. For those interested, you also get a chance to get them to your website.
There are two key things to keep in mind about an enewsletter:
1. Creating a newsletter is time consuming. Just because enewsletters are cheaper to send (no printing, no mailing costs) doesn’t mean you don’t need to spend time pulling the newsletter content together. Think carefully about whether a newsletter at all is right for your business and whether the time it takes to pull it together will bring you a return of equal value.
2. You need to solicit subscribers. Sending enewsletters out unsolicited is considered “spam”; spamming is not only illegal but it creates ill will with your potential customers. But once you create a useful, readable, information-packed newsletter that might even contain a coupon or special or even a giveaway, people will readily subscribe. Post it on your Facebook page and other places that might gain wider attention and more subscribers.
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Keep an archive of your news releases on your website—it’s easy to do and is a great way for the casual browser to check you out.
Press Releases vs. Event Listings
Press releases, also called “news releases,” should be just that—news. If you have a piece of news to send to the media, by all means do it. A new hire, an expansion of your business into a new market segment, relocation, and accolades for you or your business are all news items about your business. News sources love to get press releases via email; attachments are usually fine but you should check with each publication you plan to send to and submit accordingly.
Event listings are not news and should be directed to the calendar or events section. Many online event calendars can be updated well in advance.