How can you align F&B marketing with overall business goals?

F&B marketing is unique as the competition is not just other hotels and stand alone restaurants but also your kitchen. Few things to do for your strategy; a) define the catchment area for your outlet b) who’s more likely to buy vs who you’d want to position this for.(These two are totally different audiences) and create customer profiles c) create a reason to visit the outlet - it can’t just be tangible benefits. d) have multiple messages that appeal to these profiles e) create consumption moments

I think the most important criteria is Consumer Insight. Consumer insights help identify gaps in the market and uncover unmet needs. By leveraging these insights, we can differentiate our brand from competitors by offering unique value propositions and positioning as the preferred choice for consumers.

It is also important to remember that many food and beverage products have more than one target market. As such it is important not to be afraid of having more than one message. The goal is to ensure that each message reaches its unique audience or all of the messages will flop and not help reach the business goals

F&B marketing efforts contribute to the overall growth and success of the business. Start Implementing an integrated marketing communication strategy that ensures consistency of the message and visual across all channels. Whether advertising, social media, content marketing, PR, and any other touchpoints with our audience. This also enhances a brand recall value. Secondly, everything needs to be measurable - KPIs revenue, website traffic, engagement metrics, and customer feedback. UTM parameters

With over 5 years in marketing, I've mastered the art of digital storytelling. Aligning F&B marketing with business goals involves understanding objectives, segmenting the target audience, data-driven decisions, creating unique value propositions, a multi-channel approach, ROI tracking, collaboration, feedback, and long-term brand building. It's about integrating marketing into the broader business strategy to ensure cohesiveness and common goals.

In my experience, one of the first key steps in aligning food and beverage marketing is to understand the short-term and long-term business goals of the company. Both of these goals must align with your marketing strategy and ultimately your marketing plans. Some marketing tactics could be short lived to achieve a short-term business goal. For example, a trade promotion or an LTO (limited time offer) menu item are typically used to achieve short-term goals. For long-term business goals, a sustaining marketing campaign like an advertising/branding campaign, or a loyalty program can help achieve these goals.

Additionally, In F&B marketing, the primary objectives would also be to: 1. Increase Brand Awareness: Create strategies to make the brand known and recognized in the competitive F&B market. 2. Drive Customer Engagement: Develop campaigns that engage customers through appealing content, promotions, and interactive experiences.

I believe that setting clear marketing objectives aligned with business goals is pivotal. These objectives should be measurable and time-bound, serving as a roadmap for F&B marketing campaigns. Whether it's boosting revenue, market share, or customer satisfaction, defining these objectives helps maintain focus and measure success. Regular tracking and budget allocation are essential for ensuring campaigns stay on course and yield desired outcomes.

Develop a clear understanding of your brand's positioning, once defined it'll draw lines for you to run along and define your goals. Major business goals could be considered as only X amount of revenue generation, or focusing on growth. Growth is not limited thus it can be achieved within one unit or expand towards multi branch model. Bigger growth would require clear processes to be defined and clear objectives to be aligned with business growth strategy and brand's vision.

Unless you’re converting on your own site. Optimize for reach and awareness. For a beverage company, top of mind awareness is essential.

For many food and beverage products point of purchase materials such as shelf hangers, displays and floor graphics, are the most important components of the marketing strategy. As these marketing tools reach the consumer when they are in a buying frame of mind they are extremely cost effective for driving sales

A great focus should be set upon digital marketing while crafting a strategy. just like the traditional marketing has mend its ways to digital the digital marketing has also revolved so quickly into social media marketing. An important tactics is to involve influencer marketing and business platform listings like yelp and delivery apps. While defining marketing strategy a 360" approach should be implemented with defined timelines and milestones to unfold all tools step-by-step.

Marketing strategy must also be aligned with the stage of your business. If you're a startup, it's all about getting product into the hands of consumers to try, and ideally convert, so your focus in the marketing funnel is very different than a brand that has mass awareness and scale. In many instances, if everyone knows you and can find you, it's all about making sure your brand is the product of choice, which is all about reminding consumers why they like you and why they should come back.

Test a lot of different creatives to learn, for both your team and your creative agencies. Also, make the creatives move. It will stop thumbs better than static ads.

Taking the time to build a genuine dedicated loyal consumer base allows for maximum profitability. This interaction is absolutely targeted as prescribed by your loyal customer base. With the addition of recognition of the loyal customer base with swag/ awards it will grow as your customer base does a great job of influencing potential new customers.

Regularly evaluating and improving your marketing performance isn't just a periodic task; it's a strategic imperative to ensure that your F&B marketing aligns with overarching business goals. By scrutinizing metrics and adjusting strategies, you're not just running campaigns; you're sculpting a marketing approach that resonates with your target audience and drives tangible results. The desired business outcome extends beyond a boost in brand visibility; it's a marketing engine finely tuned to attract and retain customers, contributing to increased foot traffic, revenue growth, and long-term business success. Through this meticulous approach, you're not just marketing; you're strategically shaping the narrative of your F&B establishment.

Don't sleep on the evaluation step. The end of this process should launch the beginning of the next cycle with more focus, understanding, and effectiveness. A moment to reflect on your hard work with key stakeholders validates your efforts and opens the floor for more opportunities to connect with your customers. The pace in which this industry runs is fast - yet slowing down to evaluate will save you extra steps to outpace the competition and give your customers more of what they want.

The evaluation step becomes an Intergrated part of the total experience as building a loyal and highly interactive customer base is self serving with both the manufacturer and consumer obtaining the desired end result happy, loyal and contented consumers.

Make sure you determine the right way to measure performance that aligns back to both brand and business goals. If you're not selling DTC, you'll likely have either limited sales data or delayed data, so consider looking at directional, softer metrics in addition to hard metrics. Are consumers talking more about your brand in a beneficial way (did you increase relevancy), are they showing you how they consume on social media, are they engaging with a campaign or brand asset that keeps your product top of mind?

Most marketing efforts end up being unsuccessful as most marketers do not plan to revaluate their implemented strategies. Some times any fine marketing strategy does not produce required results for a particular campaign, it may have resulted differently for another business as marketing is always very subjective. setting an ROI from the beginning and evaluating the success of an implemented strategy provides a chance to improve any plan to acquire better results.

Get your basics right! Most of the time, bars and restaurants in hotels don't have the basic sorted to drive booking and footfall. Before you think about you TikTok Strategy or which influencer to work with: - Is your business profile complete on Google? - Does anyone answers the messages and reviews? - Can your guest book on-line? - Does the team know how to process the bookings? - Do you have a PPC campaign running? For a lot of F&B outlets, the basics are not there. Get your basics right, then you can develop the fancy fluff.

Keep evolving in your own business model, marketing strategy and even in operations. Pizza hut was once the market leader to introduce amazing dine in experience in Pizza industry and they had actually amazed the F&B world with this new concept in which they took pride, but with changing trends they have already transformed into a delivery/take away concept discarding their own initiative and that's the reason they exist until today.

Retarget all of your own site visitors across meta, using different ad formats. This will also better inform you of what types of creative resonates.