Millennials have a long time ago earned a reputation as a generation that takes excellent care of its health. They smoke less, exercise more, and, most importantly, they pay great attention to what they eat. Speaking in numbers, recent studies have determined that as much as 26% of Millennials are vegans and, out of the rest, 34% eat at least four vegetarian dinners per week.
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So, if you were planning to launch a healthy food business, the time couldn’t be better since this health-obsessed generation also makes up the vast majority of the contemporary consumer base.
But, keep in mind that favorable market circumstances always draw out heavy competition. If you want to successfully take off, you need to use every trick up your sleeve to put your business on the radar. So, let’s take a look at a couple of neat marketing tips that should help you along the way.
Use the power of content marketing
People who pursue a healthy lifestyle tend to do quite a lot of research to find out how they can meet their wellness goals. Here lies an excellent opportunity for you to entice this audience with a series of quality, well-researched and engaging pieces of content regarding healthy nutrition, but also related topics like fitness, and wellness. These articles, videos, and infographics won’t only lure in people who show a general interest in your industry but also turn your website from the place where people come to buy to the place where they come to learn. This will drastically increase the authority of your brand.
Make informed marketing decisions
In order to do that, you will need to get to know your customers, current market trends, the state of the competition, consumers’ purchase habits, and countless other factors necessary for creating a viable marketing strategy. Some of these insights can be gathered by traditional methods like market surveys, asking clients for feedback, etc. But, if you want to get the best possible insight into the market, you should start developing a comprehensive big data strategy. So, start identifying your business goals, find which data sources could help you to get there, prioritize data use cases, and create a big data roadmap.
Provide customers with detailed nutrient breakdown
The people who are putting effort to eat healthy like to know what they are consuming and how that nutrients affect their health and fitness performance. So, you can summon a lot of goodwill by giving your visitors a detailed breakdown of the meals you offer in your store. You can take a couple of cues from services selling fitness supplements like protein powder where you can easily access a comprehensive list of all ingredients that were used for production and their nutritional breakdowns. Providing extensive information will make you look very professional as well as lure in the more committed consumers.
Encourage chatter on social media
People tend to put great trust in their peers when making purchasing decisions. So much so that a recent study determined that 92% of consumers around the world said they trust word-of-mouth above all other forms of marketing, while 64% of marketing executives cite this as the most effective form of marketing. Do your best then to encourage your customers to share their positive experiences with your brand and invite their friends and families to try out your meals. You can do that by offering small incentives, starting social media challenges (e.g., sharing the images), and using other similar methods.
Engage in frequent promotional activities
You know how they say – a good product is capable of marketing itself. You only need an opportunity to give your consumers an opportunity to fall in love with your healthy meals. And as long as you are aware of that, these opportunities can be found wherever you like. For a start, make sure to give your brand exposure to local and national food conventions and fairs. Once you get some experience, you can work your way to local music festivals, charities, and sports events. Finally, you can always take your booth on some square, take some time to talk with the locals, and give them a chance to try your products.
Establish relationships with like-minded companies
By that, we mean gyms, fitness centers, wellness businesses, and all other companies concerned with the personal health of their clients. What are you getting out of these professional connections? Well first, there is an opportunity for cross-promotion. If you agree to promote the services of these businesses at your stores they may feel inclined to return the favor. Furthermore, using the services of one company can earn various discounts with the other partners and your associates may even agree to sell your food on their premises. At some point, you and your partners may even engage in joint marketing actions.
Keep the clients coming back
Last but not least, we would like to remind you that a large bulk of one company’s money comes from repeat purchases. According to some estimates, that would be more than 50% of the total annual revenue. Repeat customers are also spending 67% more than the new clients. You can easily use this situation to your advantage both in terms of revenue and marketing. Namely, by offering your existing clients some kind of referral program you will motivate them to reach out and invite their social circles to give your meals a chance. At the same time, the discounts they get will be used within your company.
We hope these few suggestions gave you a general idea about the strategies you can use to put your healthy food business on the map or even inspired you to come up with a couple of ideas of your own. The most important thing to remember is that even though the market circumstances are more than favorable, establishing a healthy customer pool requires a lot of time, effort, and dedicated marketing. These tips won’t immediately solve these problems, but they will certainly put you in the right direction.