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Now that you already know the elementaries on how to get your start marketing your F&B business digitally, let’s take a look at the nitty gritty part of digital marketing, namely strategic advertising. After boosting and promoting your Facebook and blog posts, here are some of the other aspects you should also look into:

6. Run Facebook ads for distributorship

After having run your business for a while, if you are open to offering franchise opportunities, running Facebook ads for distributorship could be a great way to market your products. Not only will you be creating awareness about your brand and products, you will also be getting a lot of offers from prospective partners who are willing to distribute your products or even open a new restaurant under your franchise.

7. Create visual stories on social media and promote them

There is nothing as effective and eye-catching as a visual story on Instagram and Facebook when it comes to digital marketing strategies for the food industry. By using a strategic headline in its stories, you can emphasize the value offered through your services. Although the text part in the stories is very brief, it is very easy to read and understand.

Since Instagram doesn’t support GIFs, Boomerang could be your best alternative, especially if you want to appeal to the millennial and younger generations. If you’d like to upload tutorials and a longer video that needs to be time-lapsed, you can try using the Hyperlapse app to create one. Similarly, since you can link your Instagram and Facebook accounts together, you can schedule your posts to be published in unison.

Here is what you need to do if you want to create an ad to promote your Instagram visual stories:

• Connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account (if you haven’t already done so).
• Open up the Facebook Ads Manager and click ‘Create an Ad’ under a new campaign.
• Now select your objective and set your parameters.
• Give your campaign a name.
• Define your audience.
• Now go to ‘Edit Placements’ and select Instagram Stories. Here you have the option to upload a single image or a single video.
• Once you upload your image or video file, you can click on preview to see if the specs are okay.
• Select a CTA based on your goal and click on ‘Publish’.

8. Use influencer marketing on social media

Working with food influencers is one of the best strategies of digital marketing for a food business. Instagrammers love to share their photos and document their daily lives. When they see a food influencer doing the same, they will tend to want to follow.

For instance, if you get a food influencer to take a photo of himself sipping a cup of coffee or trying out a dish at your restaurant and upload it to his Instagram account, you will soon have an entire crowd of people wanting to take a picture at the exact same location, having the same food item — or at least, eager to check out the place for themselves.

There are many other ways to use influencer marketing on Instagram and/or Facebook:

• You can enter into an ambassadorial partnership with several food influencers. You can select the food influencers based on your target demographic and their viewership.
• Ask the food influencers to write reviews about your product or services.
• Get the food influencers to interview your founder(s) and publish it on social media.

• Host an event with food influencers.
• Have the food influencer create recipes with your product, make a video, and post it on social media.
• Sponsor a cookbook of a food influencer; featuring your product that they use as an ingredient.
• Like what’s popular with makeup brands, you may even co-create a product or a range of products with the food influencer.

You can use a combination of any of the above approaches or come up with something totally different to highlight your influencer collaboration on Instagram and/or Facebook. Measure your results and find out what works best.

9. Promote festive/seasonal offers via Facebook ads

Many brands in the food industry pull out special festival offers and seasonal deals to promote their products. Sharing coupons through Facebook offer claim ads is one of the best ways of promoting your products to your target audience.

Offering discounts and coupons isn’t the only way to get your audience to buy your products during festive seasons. You can also provide them with helpful holiday advice on special blog post and social media postings related to the festivities that will help many people add a personal touch to their holidays:

10. Promote product & customer review videos via Facebook and Google Ads

Everyone loves a good (honest and unpaid) review. By publishing content in the form of product videos and customer review videos you can make things very interesting and engaging for your target audience. Consider these facts:

• 83% of businesses feel that video marketing boosts their ROI.
• You can increase your conversions by 80% by adding a product video or a customer review video on your landing page.
• 57% consumers feel that video improves their confidence levels when making online purchases.
• Having a video embedded on your website makes you 53x more likely to show up on Google.

On top of that, you can even promote your video ads using Google Ads . However, you need to sign up for a Google Ads account to start with and then link it to your YouTube channel. Once you do that, you can follow these steps to create an ad:

• Open the Ads Account Manager and select Campaigns on the left-hand column.
• Now select ‘New Campaign’ by clicking on the ‘+’ sign icon inside the blue circle.
• Select Video option in the campaign type screen.
• Choose a goal for your campaign, which is optional.
• Set your budget and add a campaign name
• Uncheck the box that you see next to Video Partners on Display Network. This will make sure your ads will not appear on websites that seem irrelevant.
• Narrow your audience by changing the language, location and device settings.
• You can also limit the number of times an individual may see your ad through frequency capping.

If you want to give an extra boost to your video, you should also consider creating a Facebook video ad. Videos that add value get a lot of natural shares on Facebook. Here is how you can boost your video through a Facebook ad:

• On the Facebook Ads Manager, set your marketing objective as “Video Views”.
• Select the settings for your audience, budget, and ad placements.
• Upload or Select your video.
• Create the ad copy.
• Add a CTA.

If there is an existing video that you want to boost, all you need to do is click on the “Boost Post” button that you see on your video post.

11. Create an infographic for your food product/services

Research has it that all you get is a maximum of 8 seconds to create a meaningful impact on today’s impatient audience. Within that time you need to catch their eye, convey the message that you want to say, and lure them to take the desired action. One great way to do this is with an infographic, which is a combination of content, data and graphic design.

Infographics have the power to convert even a dry piece of information into a captivating visual. It makes information easy to understand and lets you convey your message in a concise yet clear manner. What’s more – infographics are immensely shareable on social media.

12. Create a press release of your new product launch

Even with information going digital and somewhat informal, a press release is still one of the best ways to get others to talk about your new product launch, latest achievements or any new developments in your company in an informed manner. They can help you get premium distribution through high-authority websites and legit media channels. This is an inexpensive way of creating awareness about your business in a genuine way.

Apart from establishing credibility for your food business, a press release can also help you create a positive impact not just on your target audience but also on the food industry in general. You can optimize your press release by including keywords in it. Press releases are a natural way of building backlinks from external sources that are high-authority sites. 

By increasing your referral traffic, this will also make sure you get some real users checking out your website.

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When it comes to digital marketing, the food and beverage (F&B) industry is one of the best industries to be marketed digitally — thanks to its nature of having to be visually appealing in order to attract customers. All you need are beautiful photos with great lighting, posted at key times (breakfast, lunch and dinner) with descriptive accompanying text and you’re good to go!

If you’re not quite sure how to utilize digital marketing effectively to promote your F&B business, here are some steps for you to begin (this post will be broken into two parts as it’s quite a lengthy topic to cover):

Create a blog for your business

Blogging is a great way to shed some light on and online visibility of your business. Adding a blog page to your website and posting regularly is the best way to make sure that your business shows up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and, hence, bringing traffic to your website.

Having a blog is also a great way to introduce potential new customers to your business. Besides that, a blog will also help you create a following among strangers and convert them into customers. This is why as a business owner, you should focus on creating top-of-funnel (ToFu) content.

An example for a ToFu content is such as, when you are selling a soy-based flour to bake cookies, instead of listing down all the nutritional benefits contained in the flour; you could instead create a fun content (a short time-lapse tutorial etc.) of how to make delicious brownies using the flour. By doing this, you will be bringing attention to your product without obviously looking like you’re trying to sell it.

Share your post on Facebook and drive paid traffic to your blog

You’ve probably already learned how to boost your posts on Facebook. But did you know that you can also run ads to promote your blog posts?

Just like when you boost your Facebook posts, you may have to spend some money on advertising, but it is definitely worth it — considering the kind of audience you’re able to reach, the amount of buzz you can build for your next product launch, the leads you can generate, and the number of people you can move through your sales funnel.

Here’s how you can create a Facebook Ad to promote your blog post:

• Log on to your Facebook Page and open up the Facebook Ad Manager.
• Now click on “Create Ad”.
• You should see different ad campaign goals. Although you may want to ultimately convert your visitors into your customers, your goal here should be to drive traffic to your website. So choose “Traffic”.
• Give a name to your campaign and proceed towards setting your budget and targeting options.
• Choose a small daily budget to start with (you can increase the budget later on depending upon the performance of your ad).
• Set your targeting options depending upon whom you want to target your food product to.
• Write your ad copy, and remember to focus on giving prospects a reason to read your blog post.
• Select a featured image that relates to your blog post and captures your audience’s attention instantly.
• Write a catchy headline.
• Include a Call-To-Action (CTA) to make sure your target readers click to read your blog post.

Work with food KOLs to promote your products

One of the most successful techniques of digital marketing is for F&B business owners to get in touch with food bloggers/influencers — otherwise known as Key Opinion Leaders, KOL — and get them to promote your business and food products.

Depending on your target audience, there are a number of food KOLs who have already established a steady following of the demographics that you want to target. These KOLs also know what it takes to get to the top of the SERPs. A few kind posts from them about your product on the right blog can do wonders for your business.

Here are a few tips you can use to start working with influencers:

• Check out the social media channels and blogs of a bunch of food KOLs and choose a few that seem relevant to your product. Make sure the readers of those blogs are the audience that you are trying to target. Select the bloggers/influencers who do reviews.
• Start by writing a personalized email to the KOL. Take time to introduce yourself.
• Be helpful and respectful to the KOL and offer some publicity.
• Be unique in your approach and see what you can do to get the KOL’s attention.
• Don’t forget to ask for a quotation for their promotional service before engaging the KOL to promote your product.

Host an event and promote it on Facebook

The best way to build your social presence, boost your traffic and gain high-quality leads for your food business is by hosting an event and promoting it on Facebook. This is especially true for new businesses, however, it is also applicable for seasoned F&B businesses looking to rebrand or ‘refresh’ the public’s awareness of their presence.

Make your Facebook Ad as visual as possible by:

• Making sure the content of your ad matches the expectations of the people who click on them.
• Including a discount, offer or enticing value proposition that will make people want to click on the ad.
• Using a clear and catchy Call-To-Action.

Organize a Facebook or Instagram contest

One of the most popular ways to increase your likes, shares, interest and overall participation on Facebook or Instagram is by running a contest. This is a great digital marketing strategy for the food industry.

A suggestion for a fun Facebook/Instagram contest that will keep your customers engaged is to ask them to take pictures of themselves when they visit one of your locations or purchase one of your products and then post them on their Facebook pages using a certain designated hashtag that you give to them. Not only does this create a personal testimonial for your business, but it will also increase your sales.

If you don’t have many followers on your Facebook/Instagram page, here is a better contest idea for you to use. You can post a high-quality picture of one of your best food products and ask your audience to tell you why they love it. Offer the product to the one who gives you the best answer. Don’t forget to also ask your audience to spread the word by means of sharing your post on their timeline, and tag their friends in the process.