Build your brand beyond the sale.
The foodservice operator-buyer journey is a wily one – webs and weaves and tangles and fragmentation, backed by a complex supply chain and, at times, bottle-necked paths to purchase and empty sales funnels waiting to be filled.
Unless you’re promoting direct purchase through ecommerce or retail, foodservice distributors still drive sales and reps still own relationships with operators.
So what, then, is the role of advertising, and how do we attribute it to sales conversions?
Fill that funnel by thinking in three parts:
1. Paid media gets leads and drives inquiry.
Use audience segmentation and highly targeted (and retargeted) advertising to promote actionable messages, brand reinforcement, and trial-based mechanisms across digital, social, and trade media to reach buyer influencers and buyers alike. By capturing and funneling these leads into a CRM database or similar, the sales function is then set up to further qualify and nurture leads through the buyer journey.
- Pro Tip #1: Audit and assess the quality of your first party data before you embark on a big advertising effort. The better shape your 1P data is in, the better your ad targeting.
- Pro Tip #2: Determine investment levels and the size of the prize in lead gen by first understanding and calculating the monetary values of a lead / new customer.
- Pro Tip #3: Consider lead data for the long game and not just the immediate sale. When you start generating qualified leads through sample fulfillment, for example, you’re now able to retarget those to whom you’ve sent samples, furthering nurturing efforts and putting pressure on the lower funnel activities needed to cross the finish line to the sale.
2. Solid lead gen gets your brand into distributor programs.
Effective advertising creates demand and pull-through at the operator level. You want operators to request your product from distributors. As the qualified leads pile up, you also have a compelling story to share directly with your distributor partners – the demand for your product is right there in the lead data!
- Pro Tip #1: Create a succinct and visually appealing case study to demonstrate operator demand to your distributor partners. Category managers like to see the potential in your product, and it proves that you’re going to market with gusto.
-
Pro Tip #2: Using your learnings, pitch a co-op advertising effort or promotion with your distributor or re-distributor. You may find that doors to such programs open wide when you approach them with strong rationale – and a willingness to invest.
3. Continually reinforcing your brand narrative builds long-term relationships with customers.
Through advertising, you can reinforce your brand’s key messages and solidify for buyers how your offering intersects with their business needs. You can reach audiences more broadly through targeted media channels and go to specific geos or regions with your messages.
- Pro Tip #1: Ground your levels of brand awareness and equity in market research – not anecdotal assumptions. Conduct studies before and after campaign work so you can attribute growth in brand awareness to your advertising efforts.
- Pro Tip #2: Remember that some marketing and advertising efforts are about building long-term brand relationships and top-of-mind salience with customers. When attempting to attribute specific marketing or advertising activities to sales growth, be careful not to damage your long game in favor of quick wins. And vice versa.
Good media strategy leads to macro sales growth, but be prepared: It’s a long and winding effort when the path to purchase routes through distribution channels. Don’t let brand building fall by the wayside as you find your course to a bigger piece of the pie.
