Reaching the Food Ingredients Customer
The highly competitive global food ingredients market is continuing its steady growth trajectory, particularly through expansion in emerging markets. The global hydrocolloids market alone is expected to reach US$13.61 billion by 2025, as new applications come to the fore and traditional markets open up for processed foods multi-nationals. A historic spate of recent mergers & acquisitions within food ingredients further demonstrates corporate confidence in the future of this dynamic sector, as new giants expand into adjacent non-traditional areas or venture into the natural raw materials space e.g. IFF’s recent acquisitions of Frutarom and mega-merger with DuPont’s nutrition business.
But with so much competition out there, when it comes to marketing your specialized food ingredients are you still putting all your eggs in one basket? Or, are you adapting to the technology, tools and personalized approaches that are now standard in the best consumer marketing?
Top Three Tips to Maximize Your B2B Food Ingredient Marketing
Customizing your B2B food ingredient marketing might feel like an overwhelming challenge. However, following a few key strategic steps can help you to provide an engaging and compelling customer experience that helps to increase brand loyalty and drive revenue.
- Know Your Food Ingredients Customer
It may sound obvious but customizing your marketing doesn’t mean developing an individual experience for every potential buyer, so it’s important to use some strategic criteria to help you identify the prospects that you most want to target. This way you can gear your articles, social media, videos and other content to specific segments of your target audience with messages that resonate with them.
Through our experience at EMG in creating messages with our clients, we know that often you have more than one customer model. While you may have one overarching messaging, reaching that customer may involve slight variations based on their pain-points and how you can help them. For example, you may have a customer base that is strongly focused on promoting the sustainability and “naturalness” of the composition of their products. They might be looking for social media posts, infographics, blogs and articles that show you connecting with local growers and suppliers or how you are reducing waste or energy by turning your side streams into fuel for your factories, animal feed or even value added ingredients. Another customer group might be more interested in the science and technology behind the ingredient and its potential functionality and nutritional advantage. Content such as white papers, science-explainer videos, press releases and more science-driven articles in trade publications might appeal more to their wishes.
- Use Big Data for Big Impact
Data will tell you almost everything that you need to know. Collecting it is the easy part. You’ll find data from your social media tools, your web traffic, your sales and lead tools. But critically analysing, and making full use of, this information is where things can become difficult. This is especially the case when it comes to food ingredients as so many people from food bloggers to fitness trainers are talking about food. Investing in media monitoring programs might be useful to help cut through the noise and find the content relevant to you, but many of these are focused on tracking B2C media and not industry specific media.
Working with an agency that specializes in food ingredients marketing like EMG can help eliminate all the “fluff” and put together a complete picture of what your data is telling you. We work solely with trade media and B2B clients. Because of this, we have developed an in-house media monitoring portal and a process that looks specifically for mentions and pickups in your industry.
- ‘Help’ Your Customers Complete Their Journey
In today’s digital world marketers face the challenge that customers have multiple channels and devices through which they receive their information. When creating your communications strategy, think about your different audiences and how they will find information about your company. Some might be using social platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram. These are ideal platforms where images that show your food ingredients, and the farmers and growers further down the chain will visually capture their attention and help convey your messages. Other customers will come across your company or food ingredient through an online search or from an article. But once they find you, where will they go?
Gartner, has shown that customers are more likely to buy if they are given information that aids their purchasing decisions. So no matter how they find you, where they click through afterwards needs to have the information they need. This means that having a content plan in place that covers all angles is key.
If you need help in charting the content journey of your food ingredient customers, get in touch to find out how we can work with you to develop and implement a customized strategy to reach your audience.
More on these subjects
Content Marketing Marketing Communications Food Ingredients
