Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Facebook’s Metrics Confirm it Should Be Used to Market Premium Food

I’ve already discussed how utilizing Facebook fan pages and Facebook advertising can be beneficial in marketing your premium food. However, I feel that having a general understanding of the metrics of the site will make it clear why you should be using Facebook to market your brand.

  • Facebook could be its own country.  With 350 million global users and counting, it would actually be the third-largest country in the world.

 

  • Its audience is far reaching in the United States. 100 million U.S. users make up approximately 1/3 of all Facebook users.

 

  • According to Inside Facebook , the average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site. Considering the number of Facebook users, that’s a lot of minutes potentially being spent to learn about your brand.

 

  • One of the more potent aspects of Facebook is its ability to integrate with multiple online platforms. Nearly 80,000 Web sites are using Facebook Connect, which allows people to view and interact with your Facebook profile without ever visiting the site itself. And, with mobile applications becoming the norm, Facebook can travel with the user wherever they go. 

 

  • The average Facebook user has 130 friends. Due to the “Kevin Bacon” effect, one mention of your brand can potentially reach hundreds if not thousands of pairs of eyes. 

 

While Facebook should certainly not be the only social media pool you utilize, its size alone presents a compelling argument for considering it as part of your overall marketing efforts.

 

And, with the recent privacy changes that make most Facebook content publicly available (unless you alter your privacy settings), search engine maximization has hit a whole new level. Google and Bing are both incorporating this data into search results – in real time. Imagine the implications of having live Tweets and Facebook updates populate as the first result of a Google search on your premium food brand.

 

Of course, in the ever evolving world of social media, usage data is constantly changing, which is why it’s important to understand the best tools to meet your needs and reach your customer.

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Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Can an iFanStore Help Market Premium Food?

It was only a matter of time before e-commerce applications would emerge to connect consumers with brands. For the most part, Facebook and other social media networks have been used as marketing tools that drive awareness about a brand or a product. iFanstore was created to turn Facebook into online storefronts.

 

With iFanstore, customers can purchase products without leaving Facebook.

 

Can social media really drive sales of premium food? Many would argue the increased awareness of your brand will push sales when customers visit retailers. Marketers are increasingly attempting to close the gap between social media and purchase decisions by leveraging location-based social media networks and online stores.

 

iFanstore is a robust ecommerce solution that enables ecommerce within the 4 walls of any social media environment and allows customers to purchase with fewer clicks and share their experiences with their friends. http://bit.ly/6SX4G1

 

“Social media is rapidly becoming a critically important vehicle for talking with our customers. Now, with our new iFanStore, we’ve opened up an entirely new sales channel for our seasonal, specialty blends,” said Helen Russell, CEO and co-founder of San Rafael, Calif.-based Equator. http://bit.ly/7QtwDz

 

*Equator Estate Coffee & Teas was one of the first companies to use an iFanstore.

 

Milyoni, a relatively new conversational commerce business, created a commerce widget that allows companies to launch a store on social media or on blogs and communities. This option allows customers to make purchases without getting out of their office chair. Of course customers can share what they purchased with their Facebook friends or Twitter followers, giving the brand increased awareness and social context.

 

milyonilogo

iFanStore Tips:

  • Use if you don’t have retail distribution; but if you do, offer what current accounts don’t sell to avoid cannibalizing them
  • Select product offerings based on what you know about your Facebook fans
  • Make products available that are inexpensive (consumers are not likely to make a huge purchase decision while surfing Facebook)

 

Not everyone thinks the move towards e-commerce on social networks is such a good idea:

  • Shiv Singh, vice president and global social media lead at Razorfish believes “what’s often ignored is whether the commercialization of Facebook will hurt its social feel.”
  • Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which develops applications and brand pages on Facebook said “people aren’t using Facebook right now to buy stuff. They use it to talk to friends, see pictures, play games, learn about new products, connect with companies and products they love. But they are not currently buying stuff directly on Facebook.”

 Do you think directly selling to your customers on Facebook, or any other social media networks is an obvious next step? Or, do you believe Facebook’s social context will further lose credibility as the network becomes more commercialized?

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Premium Food Marketers: Create an eNewsletter from your Facebook Fan Page

E-newsletters are great tools for keeping your premium food customers and prospects updated.  They can be highly informative and helpful, but they can be a huge time commitment.  Here are a few tips on making them more effective, and a little less work for you.

 

Top Two E-Newsletter Implementation Barriers:

·         Keeping your list up to date

·         Creating a sizable “opt-in” list

 

NutshellMail is a new Facebook app that provides an innovative Web-based service that lets users send and receive your messages from social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, in your e-mail inbox.

 

Because your newsletter list is made up of fans of your Facebook fan page, it’s more likely they will be interested in receiving news from your premium food company.

 

The application is fairly simple; NutshellMail collects recent activity from your page, organizes it into an e-mail and delivers it to each subscriber on Facebook as per their own delivery preferences.

http://bit.ly/6yHJVy

 

nutshellmail

 

Suggestions to Enhance your Newsletter Content:

  • This is another reason to keep your Facebook fan page up to date- the newsletter will be automatically generated based on your recent social media activity
  • Keep postings diverse and don’t constantly promote your products – customers get tired of being sold to constantly
  • Post relevant articles to your industry and generate a conversation with your fans – they are able to comment on any content in your newsletter.

 

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer notes the importance of good content in e-mail marketing. Companies today are focusing more on relevant content aimed at consumers who opt-in to the messaging. It’s no longer an e-mail “blast.” It’s a gift-wrapped package of goodness the receiver wanted in the first place.

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Monday, February 1, 2010

Speed Counts When Marketing Premium Food to Consumers

iPhone-codes.com recently named its top iPhone Apps for the end of 2009. The best lifestyle app was Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals. It’s a well-executed app with 55 recipes, photos, instructional videos, an interactive shopping list and really smart design. And with an average user review of four stars, consumers really seem to be eating it up.

 20-minute-meals1

But the real draw here isn’t the bells and whistles. It’s the essence of what the app delivers—exceptional food that can be prepared quickly and easily. We’ve seen this trend in various forms of development over the past several years, the most popular being the 30 Minute Meals franchise brought to us by Rachael Ray (looks like Jamie has her bested her by 1/3).

 

When you marry that trend with the increasing consumer desire for quality foods, it becomes clear that on their own, neither fast nor quality are enough. It has to be both. And that holds incredible potential.

 

Premium food marketers that target consumers would be well served to look at ways their products can be quickly and easily incorporated into the daily lives of their time-conscious customers. Whether it’s recipes or serving suggestions, providing viable applications is just as important as delivering a premium product.

 

Chef Oliver’s app also reminds us that we need to think beyond the recipe on a label and open ourselves up the new possibilities available to us with mobile technology. The easier we can make it for customers to connect with our brand, the easier it will be for them to become loyal to it.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make Jamie’s recipe for Quick Fish Stew & Bruschetta.

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Tools to Measure Premium Food Twitter Campaigns

In the early days of social media, there was a profound gap between:

 

·       Marketers who embraced the new marketing channel, and

·       Those who avoided it because it was an untested channel lacking metrics

 

Which one were you?

 

Thanks to brilliant programmers, literally hundreds of tools have been introduced to measure Twitter statistics. So that’s good news if you’re currently making plans to use Twitter as part of your premium food marketing campaign. 

 

Chris Norton of Social Media Today shared his favorites:

 

  1. TweetStats – it graphs your Twitter stats including Tweets per hour, per month and Tweet timeline.
  2. TwitterGrader – a well put together tool which looks at your profile and gives it a ranking
  3. Twitterholic – this tool looks at all of the local Twitter users in your area and gives you a ranking
  4. TweetVolume – enter a few words and see how many times they appear on Twitter.
  5. Tweetmeme – a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular
  6. TweetValue – this shows how much your Twitter profile is worth in $
  7. TwitGraph – looks at your profile and then measures your tweets and provides you with data in a colorful pie chart format
  8. TwitterMeter – was a great service which is now on hold (hence its ranking)
  9. TwitterPoster – creates a kind of picture/mosaic that represents your users with the most followers with bigger icons
  10. Twitterank – works like a Google page rank but on Twitter, also on hold

 

tweet-stats

 

Other helpful, FREE Web analytic tools that also work with Twitter include Google Analytics, bit.ly and Hootsuite.

 

·        Google Analytics provides customized reporting, advertising ROI and cross channel and multimedia tracking.

 

·        Bit.ly is specifically used to track traffic to links you post. It not only shortens your links so that they fit in a 140 character tweet, but also has a portal that counts traffic from that link.

 

·        Hootsuite is a portal where you can schedule tweets in advance and manage multiple accounts. It also provides analytics in the form of graphs about your Twitter account.

 

 

Before analyzing your tweets, Chris Norton provided an important reminder:

 

I always recommend no more than 10% marketing messages on any of your social channels, the rest should be useful, fun and engaging, otherwise people will simply unfollow you or your client.

 

That said, it’s extremely important to engage in a conversation with your customers, rather than just sending one-way tweets about your products.

 

Your customers will be more connected with your premium food brand and impressed if you directly contact them.

 

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Monday, January 25, 2010

A Facebook Connect Primer for Marketing Premium Food

Facebook Connect is a powerful set of APIs for developers that lets users bring their identity and connections everywhere. http://bit.ly/17gJ1Y

 

Translation: If you currently have a Web site for your Premium Food, you can create a secure connection between Facebook’s data and your Web site. This increases the engagement between the user and your Web site.

 facebook-connect1

Developers can access a user’s:

  • Identity: name, photos, events, and more
  • Social Graph: friends and connections
  • Stream: activity, distribution and integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and Publishers

http://bit.ly/17gJ1Y

 

Facebook Connect Overview:

  • You can choose whether you’d like a simple or advanced implementation of Facebook Connect – if you’re just looking to drive traffic to your Web site, you can add “Facebook Share” to any piece of content. If you’re looking to further personalize your approach you can create a “Social Experience” by allowing users to interact with one another and their friends.

 

  • The simple approach takes less time to implement, but has an immediate impact as users share your Web site.

 

  • The more advanced option has a deep, pervasive use of social context and social loops across site. This option takes more time and resources and require continuous iteration. That said, it has a much larger impact on users.  

 

Importance of Social Context:

Facebook is a great resource for marketing because it’s a way to reach your customers without being too pushy. Most people value their friends’ opinions more than marketers. If I see that my friend is connected with a Web site, it’s pretty likely I’ll click. Facebook has many tools to ease the process of Marketing Premium Food.

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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Premium Food Consumer Shopping Trends: Mobile Marketing

Great news for premium food marketers; a recent intelligence report from Compete Web analytics showed phones such as the iPod and Android are not just trendy products, but also have a dramatic effect on shopping!

 

mobile-marketing

According to a report from Web analytics firm Compete: 

 

  • 40% of iPhone and Android users look-up prices online while out shopping
  • 39% read consumer reviews before making a purchase
  • Nearly four in 10 (37%) smartphone owners have bought something not phone-related over their devices in the last six months

·         8% of those surveyed who tried to purchase a product on their mobile device could not do so, mainly because the site wouldn’t load.

What can marketers learn from this information?

It’s imperative for premium food Web sites to be mobile friendly. Unresponsive sites can ruin marketing efforts, while engaging mobile sites build brand loyalty. Moreover, food marketing campaigns that focus on action can utilize mobile phones ability to look up information regardless of location.

Engagement with products builds loyalty.  Make information about premium food accessible across all media platforms so opportunities don’t slip away.

 

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Friday, December 18, 2009

Why Mommy Bloggers are All The Rage For Marketing Premium Foods

Tip: Develop marketing programs for moms that foster one-to-one interaction with your brand

If you’re a premium food marketer, (and you don’t work for a beer or liquor company), you’re most likely marketing to moms. Moms are powerful. They are influential, but they can also be influenced. A recent survey by MomConnection® shows how you can tap into this valuable market.

So where do moms get advice on product purchases?

Moms’ most frequently-used* sources of product research and buying advice:
(*Percentage that use chosen sources “all of the time” for advice)

1.      Mom-focused Web sites (41%)

2.      User reviews on shopping Web sites (34%)

3.      Magazine articles (32%)

The survey also found that moms interact with brands on a surprisingly high level, actively requesting information and resources from the companies whose products they use. One-on-one interaction with brands is their preferred way to receive info:

·         81% have visited a brand’s Web site for more information

·         65% have signed up to receive a newsletter from a brand

·         36% have posted a link or joined a fan group on Facebook

Chances are, you’re connecting with moms already through traditional marketing such as:

·         Your Web site

·         Magazine advertising

·         PR editorial and product placement 

The study also found that the role of social networks in moms’ lives is still largely for entertainment and personal communication; it’s not a channel where most moms are receptive to gathering product information.

Only 24% of respondents have used Facebook for product information and buying advice, while 5% have used MySpace for product info, and 3% have used Twitter.

 mommy-bloggers

Consider how to get moms to sign up for e-newsletters that can help them interact with your brand in a meaningful way. Will your product help them get a meal on the table faster? If so, give them educational tips so they don’t have to do the research.

Is your brand’s Facebook Fan Page full of interesting and helpful ideas and resources? Can they easily share with their mommy friends and family?

Do you provide a forum for open discussion about your product?

The research found that nearly all moms are “influencers” in some way:

·         94% of moms give advice to other moms in at least one product category.

·         The average mom gives and gets advice in more than 8 product categories.

·         69% recommend specific brands by name to other moms.

·         54% have rated or reviewed a brand online.

·         37% have posted their opinions about a product in an online forum or blog.

The mom “brand magnets”

The MomConnection research also identified six key characteristics that draw moms to one brand over another. Moms are most likely to talk about brands that they feel are:

1.      A good value

2.      Trustworthy

3.      Responsive to moms’ needs

4.      High quality

5.      A money-saver

6.      A time-saver

http://bit.ly/IG6GO

Harness the power of moms by knowing what they want from a brand and where and how they want to receive information. 

 

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

2010 Predictions Series for Marketing Premium Food

I have developed three posts dedicated to trends. I’ve been combing through my favorite resources for trend predictions and have picked a few I thought would resonate with food marketers. Part 1:  Mobile Marketing, Part 2: Flavor Trends, and Part 3: Consumer Behavior. I hope you find these useful. Do you have any predictions to share?

Part 1

2010 Predictions for Mobile Marketing of Premium Food

Nearly 40 years ago, The Who’s Pete Townsend sang about “Goin’ Mobile.” In the New Year, premium food marketers need to be singing the same song…or risk being left behind. 

Remember when Pizza Hut’s app for iPhone/iTouch helped the chain reach over $1 million in sales in 3 months? According to Millennial Media, 100 million unique users will tap into the U.S. mobile Web in 2010. Premium food marketers need to learn their customers’ mobile habits. And fast.

pizza-hut-iphone-food-app-11

Here are some of the top mobile marketing trends related to premium food marketing as predicted by Mobile Marketer:

Augmented Reality

Using the GPS, the camera and even the compass, your smartphone can sense what you are pointing at and show relevant data for that place, such as reviews for a restaurant or virtual signposts to direct you to a place.

 

Geo-fencing

A geo-fence is a virtual field around any location that is used to trigger a mobile marketing message to a user when they enter or exit the area. Expect to see retailers take advantage of this capability in a variety of ways, from sending personalized messaging to consumers leaving a sporting event or concert, to blanketing a place like a beach or skateboard park on a Saturday.

 

Mobile commerce and retail will grow
According to Deloitte’s 24th Annual Holiday Survey, of the mobile shoppers identified in their survey: 55 percent said they will use their mobile device to find store locations, 45 percent to research prices, 40 percent to find product information, 32 percent to find discounts and coupons and 25 percent to make purchases. Mobile-driven retail activity and commerce will continue to increase with retailers leveraging new mobile-specific technologies to convert browsers into buyers.

 

Linking CRM databases into mobile marketing
Marketers generally are recognizing the uniquely personal relationships that consumers have with their mobile phones. For retail marketers, combining this with the CRM data that they are collecting about their customers – like past purchases and categories of interest – offers the opportunity to deliver personalized messages when a user is near one of their stores.

 

 

There are many other Smartphone predictions in this article.

 

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Tuesday, December 8, 2009

When Marketing Premium Foods, Don’t Confuse Customers – Reward Them!

There are lessons to be learned from major retailer rewards programs. Don’t confuse customers, reward them with policies that are easy to understand and earn.

 

A perfect example of this is Starbucks’ new My Starbucks Rewards program. Starbucks tested their previous reward cards and found consumers had difficulty understanding the terms of their card programs, which ultimately led to dissatisfaction.

 

An e-mail statement sent from Starbucks to DMNews said:

 

“We tested our card approach over the last year and customers told us that we needed to make our card programs simpler to understand. We also gained insight that our members preferred a program without an annual membership fee and one that is more inclusive and accessible for everyone to join with benefits that appeal to a broad range of our customers.” http://bit.ly/5fPine

 

Instead of combating these claims, Starbucks listened and made changes for the better.

 

The previously confusing Starbucks Card Rewards and Starbucks Gold initiatives were combined into a hassle-free program that is easy to understand. Bottom line, loyal customers gain new permanent specials with repeat purchases.

 

starbucks

 

Specific card benefits include:

 

  • Once registered, customers qualify for a free drink on their birthday and free Wi-Fi.
  • After five uses, customers are on the “green level” which gives free refills on coffee and tee, free flavor syrups and soy, and a free tall drink with whole bean coffee purchase.
  • After 30 uses, members qualify for a personalized Gold Card representing their new earned status of a free drink every 15 purchases and exclusive offers and promotions

 

With the new benefits system more transparent, customers can continue to enjoy and appreciate Starbucks, rather than get discouraged and unsatisfied with rewards.

 

What do you think? Which rewards programs do you like, which ones are hassles? Please post your comments below.

 

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