Despite the fact that there are 750,000 restaurants in the US and Canada, the foodservice industry is extremely competitive so you need to make sure that all your sales and marketing resources are put to good use. This means focusing your efforts on ultra-effective techniques like target marketing. Target marketing is an effective technique that can help you get the most from your marketing dollars. However, this approach doesn’t follow conventional marketing wisdom, so you need to adjust your messaging as well as your sales process to get the best results.
Let’s take a look at target marketing in the foodservice space and why it’s important for you to analyze your audience.
Before diving any deeper, let’s take a moment to define target marketing.
In simple terms, target marketing is a promotion strategy where you break down the entire market into groups or segments with similar traits. The idea is to group clients with similar tastes, needs, and interests, then identify the group or groups that are more likely to have interest in your offerings.
Once you have broken down the market into segments and identified the groups with the highest revenue potential, you should start focusing your marketing efforts and dollars on advertising your services to these individuals.
Keep in mind that each segment has distinct needs and interests, so you need to identify the different marketing elements that may interest specific groups. For instance, some audiences may be more interested in getting a discount, contract-free supplies, or a similar deal.
While food and beverage distributors have been using a few specialized ways to connect with their audiences including print and online publications, B2B businesses only reach their marketing goals about 3% of the time.
One of the reasons for this is that every conventional marketing strategy works like a fishing net.
In most cases, a foodservice provider would pay for ad spots to promote their offers to businesses in the restaurant target market and even the local food truck scene. This could be at a food expo or a similar event. However, these B2B providers rarely ever researched the restaurants, food truck businesses, and other clients.
This usually resulted in a marketing strategy that wasn’t aligned with the market’s needs.
So, instead of finding interesting social media marketing ads and other types of promotional content, the target audience would not be engaged due to the messaging. This is a direct result of using a message that’s too broad and not personalized at all to local businesses and their customers’ markets.
Now, how does your strategy look with target marketing? The first step is to establish a target market.
A target market is a market group or segment that you’re focusing your marketing efforts on. But, instead of creating content for entire target markets, you should take the time to create buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customer. Buyer personas can help you figure out the desired price range of the local restaurant industry and help you create a better overall strategy. Not only this, but buyer personas can be a compass that helps you maneuver the B2B social media marketing world and help you connect with each individual food truck or business.
Why is it important to analyze the target market for a restaurant business? The short answer is that it can exponentially increase the positive results you get from your marketing efforts.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits that target audience marketing brings to restaurant industry providers.
Whether you run your own commercial kitchen operation or provide another type of food-related service, your company can learn a lot from the menus of your potential clients. In short, a restaurant’s menu can help you understand what type of supplies it needs, how often it has to place orders, and how it purchases goods from.
In short, a restaurant’s menu can help you understand what type of supplies it needs, how often it has to place orders, and from whom it purchases goods. Not only this, but the menu of your potential clients will shine a light on its target customer, so you can adapt your messaging to contribute to your audience’s ultimate goal.
By analyzing the target market for the food industry, you can also assess the reviews and ratings of each potential client. This will help you determine if they need help with their food photography efforts, ads campaigns on social media platforms, and supplier relationships.
Do you know what platforms your clients use to take bookings, organize events, and launch their marketing campaigns? This information can help you prepare a better pitch that engages decision-makers and target marketing can help you do exactly that. For instance, if you provide a holistic restaurant software solution, you can use analytics for food and beverage manufacturers to determine the pain points that pester individual target audience members and prepare distinct pitches for each one.
The biggest advantage of target marketing is that you learn from general industry trends. Unlike B2C companies, foodservice providers can learn a lot from one single restaurant, food truck, or other culinary establishment. For instance, if you notice that restaurants in your target area like to support local entrepreneurs, you can create a program that gives special perks to the establishments participating in the movement.
Target marketing is a superb technique that can help you identify the right audience based on your potential client’s menu items and unique traits. That said, you need to adjust your strategy to adapt to this new approach and make sure that the aesthetics of your social media account and all other client-facing profiles are aligned with the same branding message. Whether you want to focus on the commercial kitchen operation, coffee shop, food truck, or conventional restaurant markets, having a targeting strategy will help you take your social media and overall promotion strategies to the next level. Learn more about Brizo FoodMetrics and how it can help you create better marketing strategies today.
