Limited time, resources, and money can make it difficult for specialty food makers to manage their online marketing communications.
During the recent SFA Maker Prep Webinar, “How to Make Your Online Marketing More Loveable & Profitable,” Lou Nicolaides, president of Ludwig Marketing & Sales, shared best practices to specialize communications and drive online sales.
He explained the concept of a flywheel, with a core, an inner ring, and outer ring that represent different aspects of a successful online marketing strategy. At the core is a customer relationship management platform, both for business-to-consumer and business-to-business communications. Hubspot, for example, organizes a company’s leads and integrates them with a brand’s website, emailers, and social media outlets. This core powers the inner ring, which consists of Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and food influencers, which lead to the outermost ring, which includes the following goals: improve sales, enhance branding, and grow the audience.
“Love your flywheel and it will love you back,” Nicolaides said. “The idea behind this flywheel is… it’s about getting rid of the friction and gaps to get the wheel to spin faster.”
To do this, he suggests jumpstarting the marketing journey as follows:
• Start with an inbound strategy of attracting, engaging, and delighting website visitors.
• Treat your website as a marketing and sales engine.
• Consider switching to Shopify and integrating it with a CRM.
• Connect your website to your CRM and onboard contacts.
• Define your contact’s buyer journey.
After this is complete, the strategy is to get the right message to the right person at the right time. Information is crucial to targeted marketing and organizing the data for both businesses and customers will enable meaningful communications that will help turn strangers into leads, leads into customers, and customers into brand ambassadors, said Nicolaides.
“You would not send the same email to a retailer as you would to a customer,” he noted when explaining the power of segmenting your audience. “It’s about sending the right email to the right person no matter where they’re [in their journey,] and creating these lists allows you to be able to do that.”
When exploring what the “right message” can look like for different businesses, Nicolaides said not to underestimate the power of free content like recipes that can engage the customer while teaching them different ways of using the product.
After the flywheel starts spinning, it’s important to foster growth by reaching a wider audience, he said. One way to meet potential users where they are is by partnering with nano- and micro-influencers. These parties can create meaningful content, give brands feedback, and help them enter new communities. Most importantly, they build trust.
Nicolaides cited the following statistic, “89 percent of marketers currently engaged in influencer marketing are going to increase or maintain their investment in 2023.”
To learn more about how to successfully launch a digital marketing strategy, watch the webinar on demand in the Learning Center.
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