As more brands saturate the market, customers now have an incredible sea of options to choose from. Food businesses like yours will have to compete for the attention of these customers by standing out from the rest.
Building brand awareness and promoting to a larger audience is important if you want to increase your reach and customer base. To do this, you need to have a solid advertising strategy that fits your budget and works well for your business model. There are many different advertising approaches your business can take: You can go down the traditional route by choosing mediums like print, radio, and television, or be on-trend with digital marketing. With the heyday of traditional media steadily losing its shine, online and digital platforms are seeing an undeniable rise in popularity. Who can resist it when everything can be available to you with just a click or tap?
Indeed, digital platforms have given the food industry a great boost especially during this global pandemic where practically everyone is glued to their devices as many activities shift from physical to virtual. Now that everything is accessible online, restaurants find it more convenient to reach out to a wider audience. As a social media driven country, many businesses in the Philippines try to build their brand presence online by using social media platforms as marketing tools for their business.
The importance of advertising
Advertising is an essential aspect of every business. The average person sees hundreds of advertisements every single day, so for your brand to set itself apart from all this, you must effectively convey your unique selling point (USP) in a short amount of time before your customers shift to the next interesting ad in their social media feed.
Here are some of the ways advertising positively affects your business to help you achieve the goals that you set out:
Find and showcase your USP
Your USP defines where your company stands in the current marketplace. It lets customers know what value your business can offer them and the market gaps you are trying to fill in. Clearly differentiate yourself from the competition by coming up with a strong USP that could potentially disrupt your category. It could be as simple as coming up with a new flavor combination!
Grow your reach
For your business to enjoy more sales, having a large audience become aware of your existence and the menu that you offer is vital. Presenting yourself as an option for customers to consider requires repeated exposure through advertisement so that they can familiarize themselves with your brand, eventually enticing them to place their orders or head to your restaurant.
Discover new markets
With customer wants and needs constantly changing, advertising helps food businesses discover a new potential target audience every day. It's a great way for those established in the market to reach out to a segment they've never had the pleasure of serving before. It also gives you the opportunity to see what their dish preferences are and how you can incorporate them into your menu.
Build a positive brand image
A good image builds credibility and trustworthiness. Positive customer experiences, whether in the way your food tastes or the service you provide, translate to repeat orders and continued patronage. Posting reviews are a great way to convey business values that your customers might also hold dear.
Create desire
By utilizing emotional storytelling in advertisements, brands are able to transform their products into what customers perceive as desirable and in demand. Creating content that truly resonates with your market will make them more inclined to support your business.
Advertising on social media
Nowadays, social media is used in a myriad of different ways. No longer is it used only for communication and entertainment, it has evolved into the world's most powerful marketing tool for food. Businesses are now more concerned about monitoring customer comments, reactions and mentions on their social media pages. Many social media platforms also provide analytics where you can monitor who you’re talking to, how many people are liking your posts and how many are actually placing orders.
The greatest thing about social media is that you don't need to spend a fortune to advertise successfully. In fact, if done right, it can be the least expensive way to market your food business online. For those who are just starting out and are still trying to make do with tight budgets, the good news is that you don't necessarily have to pay for expensive advertising tools to market your restaurant. Organic growth is possible by just consistently posting interesting, mouthwatering and relatable content that your customers would find value in.
With the number of users online reaching millions, social media platforms are the easiest, most effective way to reach all your potential customers in the shortest amount of time. But before you begin creating those thumb-stopping food ads for your business, it is important to determine which platforms are the most popular among your customers.
Here are three social media channels that we highly recommend:
No other platform is more popular with Filipino users than Facebook. With an unbeatable breadth of demographics, Facebook is also the go-to platform for most businesses.
By creating a page, brands can easily share photos and videos about their products and services. This platform can also let you encourage your customers to share food reviews and testimonials that new and potential customers may find useful.
Increase your likes and follows to gain credibility. Make sure to customize your profile to reflect your brand logos, menu and colors!
If you want to specifically target a younger crowd, Instagram is the platform for you. Business there is all about visuals. Audiences are interested in well-curated, stunning photos and a uniform aesthetic.
As a food business, you must populate your feed with vibrant food shots that would make your customers crave the real thing. Edit your photos and use filters if you can to get the right color scheme, mood and vibe of your food business. As for the captions, storytelling is best and try to include up to 9 food-related hashtags for optimum exposure.
Tiktok
Tiktok is the ideal platform for highly creative brands to go all out on their advertising. Like Instagram, user demographics for this platform lean toward a younger tech-savy, content-hungry audience. It's a short-form video and trend-heavy platform, so craft your content around the latest challenges, sounds, and memes to leverage TikTok for your food business. A lot of food trends have come from this platform such as Dalgona coffee and feta pasta.
While you can always choose to utilize all three social media channels, quality over quantity still applies. If you are confident that you can maintain and manage highquality content on all three, then by all means go for it. But it's also possible to build exceptional customer relationships by focusing on one or two platforms instead.
Remember to always curate your feeds with thoughtful, resonant photos and captions, highlight customer rave reviews, maintain an open line of communication with your customers, learn from the competition, and stay updated on trends.
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