Digital Marketing for Food & Beverage Industry

If you’re a food and beverages company looking to improve your brand awareness and reach the right audience, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we will discuss the top digital marketing strategies that will help you drive quality traffic, increase leads and improve your business revenue.

We’ll cover the most ideal digital marketing strategies that will help you get started right away. If you’re looking to outsource your digital marketing efforts, feel free to contact us today by filling up the form below.

So, let’s get started

This guide is exclusively developed for food and beverage businesses in Malaysia

Develop a website that showcase your food and beverages

Over the years, we see businesses rely on social media networks and avoid developing a website for their food and beverages business.

This is a costly mistake. If the social media networks choose to take down your pages in the future, you might lose all your online assets in a second. Developing your website at that time might be costly and time-consuming. That’s why you should prioritize building your own website which you have the full rights and ownership. 

Moreover, a website is the most important online asset for your business to market your food products and beverages online. Rather than having your potential customers visit your social media networks, you want them to visit your website and check out your company and the type of products you’re offering. 

So, it’s important to focus on developing a user-friendly website that is visually appealing for your visitors. 

Why do you need a visually appealing website?

94% of online first impression related to website design. If you fail to design a website that is visually appealing, you’ll be creating a negative first impression with your potential customers.

So, what are the elements you should focus on to build a visually appealing website?

First, you need to have a unique style for your website that represents your brand. 

• Color scheme
• Font style
• Image style
• Website layout

You need to make sure the above elements are aligned with your brand. It should show the unique perspective of your brand.

Next, you need to include high-quality images and videos

Adding images and videos related to your business not only makes your site visually appealing but also increases the authority and credibility of your brand. Make sure you’re using original images and videos because it shows the authenticity of your website. Try not to use stock images for your site.

Most websites often ignore white spaces. Moreover, business have misconception about whitespaces as it makes your site looks empty. But the truth is people browsing your site need to have a good user experience where white spaces will help break up your website into sections for easier browsing. 

White spaces are often used to keep your web pages organized and avoid your visitors from feeling confused and overwhelmed. 

Apart from a visual aspect, it’s important for your site to be user-friendly. It is a waste of time and money if you manage to get a visually appealing website developed but ignored the user experience part. 

Here’s what you need to develop a user-friendly website:

1. Make sure your site loads quickly. People get turned off with slow loading website.
2. Use simple navigation for ease browsing experience and make it easy for users to find the information they’re looking for.
3. Use the right CTA (Call to Action) buttons to encourage your visitors to move to the next step (purchasing, subscribing). You don’t want your visitors to leave your site without interacting with your website.
4. Make sure your website is responsive and adapts to different types of devices.
5. If you have a checkout process, make it as simple as possible. 

You need to think from your potential customer’s point of view and determine whether your site is appealing and friendly enough for you to have a business transaction.

Leverage on SEO to drive quality leads to your food and beverage website

If you’re not driving traffic organically from search engines, it doesn’t matter how beautiful and captivating your website is. When you invest in search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll help your potential customers find your site and learn more about your food and beverage business. You can’t sit down idle expecting people to visit your website without having the right SEO strategy in place.

There are various tasks involved in SEO efforts, which includes:

• Performing keyword research: Identifying the right keywords or key phrases is the first step to SEO success. Moreover, your potential is using the keywords relevant to your business when they search on search engines like Google. Rather than focusing on generic short-tail keywords, choosing long-tail keywords (keywords with more than three words) will help you rank high on the search engine while attracting high-qualified leads.
• Create valuable content: People are searching for information online. Your potential customers are searching for the right food and beverage manufacturers. You need to develop content related to your industry to tell your audience about your business and what makes your food and beverages better than your competitors. Content drives traffic from search engines. If there is no content, think about why your audience should visit your site in the first place. You need to provide the right information in the form of valuable content for your potential customers.
• Improve the technical aspect of your website: SEO is not about the front-end elements of your websites; it also involves the backend of your website. Implementing technical SEO will help you optimize your CSS codes by removing unwanted spaces in coding, and other tasks that will make it easy for search engine bots to crawl and index your site on search result pages.
• Make your site load faster: Google has mentioned that site speed is one of the ranking factors. You don’t want your visitors to leave your website and go to your competitors because your site is slow. A site that loads quickly offers a better user experience and it also influences the rankings on search results. Check your site’s loading speed using GTMetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights.

If you want your food and beverages business discovered, you must invest in search engine optimization. Rather than hiring an SEO expert, it’s better to outsource it to SEO agencies that are experienced to help you strategically position your business on search engines.

Utilize social media channels to get in front of a bigger audience

Even if you’re a food and beverage manufacturers, you want to gain brand exposure. With social media marketing, you’ll be able to connect with people interested in your brand. Even if your target market is B2B, you can still get in front of consumers and educate them about your food products and beverages.

Following are the top social media channels you can use:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. Pinterest (not good for the Malaysian market)

These are the best social media channels that can help you reach a large audience and share information about your products.

The strategy that you use for social media marketing depends on the channel you use. You can’t apply the same strategy to every channel. Different channels have different target groups and you need different types of content to stand out.

For example, Instagram is a visual platform that revolves around images and videos. For this channel, you’ll need to publish images and videos about your food products and beverages.

You need to perform in-depth research about each social media channel and find out the type of content that works well. As the organic reach of social media channels is gradually decreasing, you can still reach people by implementing the right strategies.

For example, in Facebook, you should target Facebook groups relevant to your industry and share your posts on those groups. 

If you want more exposure to social media channels with paid social method, we’ll look at it in the next section.

Drive more traffic to your website with paid social advertising

If you don’t have enough following to drive organic reach with your social media channel, paid social ads is something you should consider. 

Although your target audience is business owners looking for food and beverage manufacturers, they are people spending time on social media channels as well. There are hundreds to thousands of people looking for the right food and beverage manufacturer. 

You can use social media ads to get in front of them. If you think your target market is not on Facebook and Instagram, you might want to focus on LinkedIn instead. As LinkedIn consists of professional individuals and decision-makers, it might be the most suitable social platform for your business.

Once you’ve chosen the right social media channel to advertise your business, you need to research and determine which ad will be suitable to reach your target audience. What is the advertising goal you want to achieve?

These are some of the goals you should consider:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving traffic to a website
• Generate qualified leads
• Increase number of subscribers to email newsletter

You should choose the goals that are aligned with your business.

The targeting options offered by social media channels will allow you to reach the right people. These people should be the ones that are more interested in your food and beverage business.

Once you’ve decided on your ad objective and target audience, you can determine the budget for the advertising and get the ad campaign launched.

Although social media advertising can generate quality traffic for food and beverages business, in terms of ROI, SEO and Google Advertising is the best digital marketing solution.

Utilize Google Advertising to drive traffic that are easily converted

If you want to focus on generating leads, Google Ads, a form of pay-per-click *PPC) advertising should be your ideal choice. With Google Ads, you’ll be able to position your website at the top of search results, above the organic listings.

To run a successful Google Ads campaign, you’ll need to choose the relevant keywords to your business like what you should do for SEO. The keywords you choose will determine how much you need to pay per click and where your ads will appear in the search results. Even for Google Ads, you should target long-tail keywords as that’s what people are typing in Google’s search box.

Moreover, long-tail keywords are cheaper compared to generic keywords. Businesses often target generic keywords and tend to waste a lot of money without generating proper leads. Once you’ve chosen the right keywords, you need to set the maximum amount you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. 

Tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Spyfu, and SEMRush will provide the average Cost Per Click for keywords. Sometimes you need to test out the CPC and optimize your bidding strategy to avoid paying extremely high for keywords. That’s why you will need continuous experiments to determine how your ads are performing.

Other than the bidding strategy, you need to focus on Quality Score. The higher the quality score the lower your CPC. Quality Score determined by the following factors:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) of Ads
• Landing page quality and relevance to targeted keywords
• Ad to search term relevance

You don’t have to be obsessed with Quality score because conversion is what you should be looking for. Some of your top keywords will always have a low-Quality Score, but the cost per lead and conversion rate will be better than the ones with good Quality Score.

Google Ads can be a valuable part of digital marketing for the food and beverages business if you do it right. 

If you want to get instant traffic right away to your website, you should consider starting with Google Ads.

Start a business blog to share information about your food products and beverages

Most businesses don’t realize the importance and benefits of having a blog on their website. You have tons of information about your products that you want to share with your audience. But how do you do it?

Having a blog will help you publish and share information that your audience is actively searching for. With valuable content being published consistently in your business blog, you’ll establish your business as an authority in your industry.

Blogging will fuel your SEO efforts because you need to focus on coming up with topics that people are searching for online. So, blogging starts with keyword research. As you find relevant keywords to your business, you will come up with valuable topic ideas.

You just simply need to search for the topic that you’ve shortlisted and see how other websites have written about it and what type of content is ranking high on search result pages. This kind of research will help you understand what people are searching for and you can align your blog post with people’s search intent.

For the food and beverage industry, you just need to make your content easy to read. You don’t have to be technical.

Once you’ve developed your content, promote your content and get it in front of your target audience. You need to invest in content promotion in the initial stages until your content starts to rank organically on search engines.

Start using the right digital marketing strategies for your food and beverage business

Investing in digital marketing is the best marketing you can make today. With consistent implementation of digital marketing strategies, you will grow your business by driving visitors that are more likely to convert and become a paying customer. 

If you’re unable to do it on your own, choose the right digital marketing agency that can help you improve your brand awareness and increase your revenue.