Are you doing everything you can to grow your food business, but nothing is getting you results? Have you visited tradeshows or virtual conferences to connect with potential buyers? You are still not growing your food business? With these four effective strategies, you will have a cost-effective approach to grow your food business.
Research is vital
Research is vital! Identify the markets with a little desk research. Find the consumption/import figures of products similar to your own and the economic growth rate of a potential new market. Look up the demographics, cultural and religious practices, and your potential competition. Part of the research is to KNOW your competition. That way, you will understand how your product differentiates from your competitors and what is the best way to market this advantage.
Start marketing to grow your food business
The best way to grow your food business is to start marketing your products. Get the word out, offer special prices or organize a giveaway for your products. There are endless marketing tricks you can use to get more people to notice your brand. If more people are talking about your brand, the greater your chances to get more sales. Create a website with content translated according to your target market. In addition, global social media platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can help you promote your message quickly and free of charge.
Although these do not cost anything to set up, they also need time invested in keeping updated. If you don’t have time to tackle social media trends and updates, hire a marketing agency to take care of this for you. Whatever you use, make sure all your marketing materials have up-to-date contact details for your company along with the person responsible for export sales.
Market to distributors
Although this may sound like an obvious strategy to use, many don’t have the time to find distributors they want to market their products to. It takes a lot of time and patience to build your own distributor database. However, there are marketing consulting companies like ours that will help you market to distributors in a cost-effective way. For marketing opportunities for your food business, contact us here.
Follow up and selling to distributor
We can’t state enough how follow-up is important when you interact with distributors or your buyers. Think of the follow-up as a firm but gentle nudge, an opportunity to strengthen your position and demonstrate how your products will perform well on the market. You’ve done your research, you know your competitors, and you now have to convince your distributor that your product will perform well in the market.
Distributors want to believe that a product can sell itself. Unless they’re ambassadors solely working as representatives for your product, they don’t have the time to market your product for you. So, what can you do to prove your product’s popularity? Ask yourself: How much did sales rise last quarter? How quickly did your product fly off the shelf at another distributor’s store?
Conclusion
We’ve covered four effective strategies to grow your food business, and all are equally important to understand. Once you know your market and you have your brand, you need to start marketing and selling to distributors or retailers. If you manage your assortment with a distributor and assist with marketing and sales, your product will be exposed to more retail opportunities and your business will make more money in the long run, and isn’t that why you are in business? Whichever way you’re engaging retailers, or distributors, having all of this information ready and each of these strategies in place will help you close the deal.