Digital Marketing For Food And Beverage (F&B) Companies

Digital marketing can be daunting for most SME owners, especially for the time-consuming and labour-intensive food and beverage (F&B) companies. Digital marketing, if done right, can bring many customers to F&B companies, in a steady stream.

For many F&B business owners in Singapore, digital marketing can be confusing. This is because many marketing agencies offer different marketing strategies for these owners to choose from.

Also, in today’s digital marketing landscape, having just a specific type of digital marketing is insufficient — you need to execute more marketing pillars to form an integrated marketing campaign.

Here are a few ways for F&B companies in Singapore that we would suggest to boost their digital presence:

1. Content Marketing
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Email Marketing

Challenges of Digital Marketing for F&B Companies

Performing successful digital marketing for your business is a challenge in its own right. What exactly is digital marketing, and what results the best benefit an F&B business? For the digital side of things, your largest considerations should be working on creating quality content (e.g. videos, photos) and marketing on social media. Click here to find out more about creating high-quality content!

F&B businesses already face significant challenges due to the nature of their industry. It is saturated with competitors who make marketing significantly harder. Even titans in the F&B industry including fast food and restaurant chains still retain some degree of digital marketing.

For F&B businesses which are especially reliant on footfall and human traffic for sales, the outreach from these platforms would be the most beneficial in drawing sales. Alternatively, partner up with a third-party promoter and conduct your own email marketing campaign. There are many viable options, but different types of F&B companies require different strategies.

Content Marketing (CM)

Content marketing (CM) is creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

Creating content to market your business is necessary, especially considering the state of Singapore’s F&B industry being saturated with competitors. Great, valuable content published under your name and brand can establish credibility and relationship with your audience. It positions you as the logical choice for your audience to engage you over your competitors. Your content needs to stand out amongst the rest and be promoted with the appropriate channels in order to yield success.

Content marketing is an integral part of your SEO efforts. Google places heavy emphasis on content. In recent years, changes in major search engine algorithm in Google has made the churning of useful and valuable content an important part of SEO as they determine most sites almost entirely by content as it tells Google what you are about.

1. Content marketing can be used to churn useful content to attract potential clients.
2. Having strong content allows you to pull more traffic when other webmasters republish or share your sites.
3. You can gather potent SEO link juice when web-masters backlinks to you.
4. You can gain high-quality traffic when the content is closely relevant to problems prospects face.

Content marketing can be seen as the foundation of other supporting marketing areas — including email marketing (EM), search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM).

If you utilise content marketing efficiently, it could serve as the bedrock for almost your entire digital marketing campaign.

Content Marketing Essentials

So, how can food and beverage (F&B) companies in Singapore smartly leverage content creation to increase their brand awareness, profits, revenue and recurring customers?

To give you a holistic view, we have categorised the content into 3 components to cover:

1. Elements of content marketing
2. Maximising the value of your content
3. Creating quality content

Elements Of Content Marketing

In order to have a good marketing strategy, it is important to have the following elements:

1. Your blog posts
2. Social network
3. Social media
4. Guest blogging
5. Press releases
6. Video Marketing

Food and beverage companies can make use of creative ideas to generate content for their users. 

Maximising the value of your content

Many companies create content but fail to maximise its value. In the article, we will explain how from just an article, we can generate the following content:

1. Presence on YouTube
2. Podcast
3. Article/content on the blog
4. Tweet material
5. Facebook content
6. Free content for subscribers and customers

The content generated can then be effectively distributed to more channels, increasing the value of the content. 

Creating Quality Content

Factors search engines look at to determine the quality of a content of a web page are:

1. User-oriented
2. No duplicated content — contents must (or preferably) be original
3. Cornerstone content

Cornerstone Content

A cornerstone is something basic, essential and indispensable, and it is the foundation upon which something is constructed or developed.

It is what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.

If you want to have an effective SEO campaign, content marketing is essential and cornerstone content is absolutely crucial. Cornerstone content is about 3 things:

1. Picking the right keywords
2. Creating cornerstone pages
3. Internal link structure

How Can Food And Beverage Companies In Singapore Use Content Marketing?

Being in the F&B industry can be advantageous — there are many ways to generate more business and reach out to potential customers via digital marketing. Having worked with several F&B companies, here is a list of content-generating ideas we have generated with our clients:

1. Offering special promotions to new customers
2. Creating members-only closed-door events at special discounts
3. Announcing a new main dish created and the hype it has created/will create
4. Invitation to new food tasting event that is limited to only 50 customers
5. Creating video interviews with customers and providing ratings
6. Organising an exclusive in-house event, having a speaker/entertainer to an outlet and inviting only frequent members to that event
7. Announcing through a press release that you have a new outlet to be opened
8. Promoting the health benefits or nutritional content of your food

There are many ways to generate ideas and revenue through a strong, integrated digital marketing campaign.

With a solid social media presence and a strong in-house list of customers to email to, a business can solicit many repeat businesses sufficient to bring in huge profits over the years.

After creating the content, it is helpful to keep in mind the ways to maximise the value of your content. Increase the number of ways you can turn the content and send it through as many social networks as possible.

How Can Content Marketing Be Used With Other Digital Marketing Campaigns?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) allows you to gain traffic and potential customers online. With the surge in mobile usage, more customers are looking for information online. You can reach your target audience by sharpening your SEO strategy to be on the top pages of Google for critical keywords.

A simple Google search is all it takes for you to find your favourite food in Jurong or your favourite laksa in Katong. But how are you going to capitalise on this? The answer is SEO.

SEO can be divided into 4 main categories:

1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Optimisation
4. Link-building

1. Keywords

We have written in-depth ways you can use SEO in the F&B industry, but here are the few main ways you can start planning to get ranked:

a. Geographical keywords

Although Singapore is small geographically, keywords related to the location of your business can be helpful.

For example, appearing on the first page of Google for “best places to eat in Jurong” or “best eateries in Katong” can bring specific, targeted customers to a particular F&B restaurant.

Such keywords may not have high traffic, but they are targeted — there are people, tourists or locals alike searching for answers to these keywords. Optimising for such geographical keywords can help F&B businesses get more customers to patronise their restaurants.

b. Niche keywords

Whether you are a strictly vegetarian restaurant or a coffee gourmet company, you can use niche keywords describing your F&B business as a starting point.

When people search for places to eat within your particular niche, they tend to type in your niche.

For example, “vegetarian restaurant Singapore” or “coffee place in Singapore”. Combined with geographical keywords, you have “Vegetarian restaurant in Tanjong Pagar” or “Coffee place in Jurong”.

Such niche keywords may have very little traffic, but you can be sure they can bring in high-quality customers — those looking specifically for your type of F&B restaurant.

Optimising the content in your website according to your particular niche can be crucial for healthy SEO development.

You can start building your brand name in related niche forums (such as the best cafe in Jurong) and blogs (top 10 vegetarian restaurants at Novena) to attract sizeable potential customers coming to your site monthly.

c. Brand-related keywords

One of the easiest ways for most companies to quickly boost their SEO presence is to optimise their company name and build brand awareness.

For example, ABC cafe can quickly build up its SEO presence by focusing on optimising its name “ABC”.

Brand names are usually unique and can be easy to optimise — there is little to no competition you will face when ranking top for your brand name.

Weaponizing and researching for keywords is a time-consuming process that takes a few months to get the foundation right and another few more months to see concrete results. Learn more about how to optimise specific keywords for your content and pages.

If that sounds like too much hassle for your business, Leading Solution can help with your web development, on-page optimization and digital marketing strategy off the ground.

Case Study

A screenshot is shown below showing how many searches there are for the particular keywords:

As shown in the Google Adword keyword planner, business owners consistently miss out on these potential clients.

Combined with geographical, niche-related and brand-related keywords, a business can gain significant traction from this online stream of customers.

This is a massive amount of profits F&B businesses are losing unknowingly every month. Efficient F&B businesses know how to harness this potential traffic and convert them into lifetime clients as they understand the immense value of lifetime customers.

There are various SEO strategies, on-site SEO as well as off-page SEO strategies. Check out our blogs for more options.

For more information on how we conduct market research, find out here.

To know more about market research for related keywords, click here.

2. Content

With the right keywords, it is time to create the right content. Creating content is one big field by itself, but in summary, there are 2 aspects of content — content creation and content dissemination.

a. Content Creation

Create the content for humans, not search engines. Constantly producing content allows Google to know what your site is about. All content on your web pages must be well-written and readable for humans.

This has to be emphasised as Google’s algorithm focuses greatly on user engagement i.e. how the traffic interacts with your pages. User engagement is a litmus test for how relevant and valuable your content is to Google.

User behaviour tells Google about your pages: Do users leave after landing on just one page of your web? If so, it tells Google that your page is highly unreadable or does not provide what users are looking for, pulling down your ranking for a particular keyword.

Other factors besides words can play a critical role in your SEO. Having more images and videos that can capture attention and provide valuable information will ultimately help you in the Google ranking as well. Just as reader-friendly sites are important, it is useless if you create content aimlessly. Be sure your content is tilted towards SEO-optimised keywords (which you have already done research for) so your efforts are not discounted.

The best content is those that ultimately capture real human attention and traffic. Over the years, search engines have placed greater emphasis on readership and sites that attract users to go back again and again. As such, if your content is not reader-friendly or not beneficial to readers, it will ultimately be reflected in your analytics. This tells search engines how little value you are providing your users. This is definitely not a good approach to your digital marketing strategy.

If your business is just finding its footing, Leading Solution can help you find your keyword niche. The correct digital marketing strategy can generate leads for your business and spur further growth, so get started with us today!

b.  Content Dissemination

There are various ways of distributing your content after you are done creating them. Here are a few ways you can use content dissemination to your advantage to bring more traffic and customers into your funnel:

• Guest posting
• Blogging
• Social media marketing

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3. Optimisation

After getting the right keywords, the next important step is to ensure the optimisation of your SEO campaigns. To sum up, optimisation consists of 2 main categories — on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation. Find out more about optimising your pages and content with keywords.

On-Page Optimisation

On-page optimisation refers to all measures taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. To state a few, on-page factors are as follow:

• Quality content
• Fast loading page
• Internal linking from other pages on the site
• Bounce rates
• Time a visitor spends on your page/site
• Number of pages/sites visited

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the actual website to improve its position in search rankings. To state a few, some of the off-page SEO strategies consist of the following:

1. Backlinks
2. Click-through rates from SERPS
3. Social media
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Forum postings

For more information on on-page optimisation, visit our articles on important off-page SEO factors.

4. Link-building

Link building refers to the practice of getting your pages listed on other web masters’ websites and as a result, creating a link back to your listed page — this link is known as a “backlink”. Backlinks have been and will be an important factor in SEO — it has always been a critical factor Google looks at when they rank a page. As such, you must create an SEO campaign that includes building backlinks.

Google penalties are actions taken by Google Webmasters against your site if it is found to be violating their guidelines. A hit might set your SEO progress back by a few months, so be careful when link building! Be sure to vet the sites you backlink to and safeguard your business. Read more here about Google Penalties and how to avoid them. 

Backlink strategies can be a little tricky — too few backlinks can cause your link velocity to be slow and have little effect, whereas too many sudden backlinks can hurt your SEO ranking.

Find out more about in-depth Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies.

Linking Building In Social Bookmarking Sites

For instance, there could be forums or other social media platforms that are ranked for the keywords “best places to eat in Singapore”. One such site is TripAdvisor, which can send many valuable clients to your business.

Linking Building In Forums

Another way to drive significant traffic to your site is to make yourself visible in various forums. An example shown below is Hardware Zone, a Singapore-focused forum where users constantly share their thoughts and suggestions with one another. Notice the amount of traffic it generates — which can be very significant for a new F&B business.

Linking Building Using PR

Using PR and forums for link building in SEO can bring significant customers to their business. Successful websites such as http://www.foodprocessing-technology.com/press have thousands of monthly traffic, which can potentially drive customers, partners or suppliers to your company. This can be an excellent way to build credible and influential brand awareness.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media has become an integral part of SEO, with social signals often playing a part in a site’s SEO. More importantly, social media pages (such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube) have been seen to rank good on Google search results, implying their increasing importance in the SEO factor.

Social media platforms, which can consist of Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube, can be a way to distribute your marketing materials to your target customers.

As mentioned above, content ideas to be shared on social media include introducing a brand new dish, having an exclusive in-house invite to a new food tasting, publishing a press release on the health benefits of your food, and creating videos showing hype about your current dishes etc.

The number of ways to promote is limitless. Still, you need a strong social media presence to reach out to as many people as possible, and Social Media Marketing (SMM) is also a useful tool to keep constant contact with your clients.

SMM can be especially useful if you are a B2C business that is using it for various purposes including:

1. To promote your products (food in this case), superior services
2. Conduct sweepstakes or contests to gather more databases of your potential clients
3. Disseminate your content from the content marketing campaign
4. Induce customers to buy from you again through promotions or special discount events

Email Marketing (EM)

Email marketing has been around for a long time, but it is still one of the most powerful tools to remain in contact with your clients as well as to stimulate sales. Below are some of the ways you can use email marketing in your F&B business:

1. Use emails to send useful promotions and discounts to bring old customers back
2. Sending mouth-watering pictures of your food to stimulate their cravings
3. Remain in constant contact with your customers

The strength of email marketing lies in lead generation for more clients, which could be great for caterers, suppliers and restaurant franchises in F&B. We will look in detail at how email marketing can potentially benefit us in our Email Marketing (EM) article for F&B companies.

Email marketing (EM) used to work very well in the past years, with the majority of people primarily communicating online via email. In these times, businesses used to “strike gold” if they managed to get hold of a list of high potential customers through purchasing, renting or asking partners for this list of customers.

Through the years, email marketing has become less effective for businesses simply because we are getting bombarded by so many emails and messages a day — there is simply too much spam by businesses to get the customer’s attention.

Through the years, email service providers like GetResponse, Infusionsoft and MailChimp have stepped up to ensure a higher quality email marketing practice.

As such, they introduced a two-step process: an email confirmation is needed even after they have typed in their email to register on your mailing list.

In other words, verification is needed after you have typed in your email and agreed to join their mailing list.  Besides this, they implemented strict filters and greatly reduced spam mails, and many strict measures were in place.

Such methods have greatly helped in clearing up the messy email situation we had years ago, with viruses and millions of spam emails sent daily.

In that case, how can businesses especially food and beverage (F&B) and retail businesses harness the power of email marketing for their business?

How Email Marketing Can Help In Your Business

Let’s examine the following: Email marketing has been used by most B2C multi-national corporations for customer relationship management (CRM) purposes.

Email marketing can be used as a special CRM tool for your business. By having constant contact with your clients, you have the ability to do a few things:

1) Maintain top of mind awareness

Businesses can focus on email marketing to maintain top of mind awareness. Marketing ideas such as giving customers promotions during non-peak periods can enhance the use of your facilities (such as restaurants and cafes) and provide more opportunities to interact with your clients when they come by.

By conditioning your clients to come back regularly for a meal, your business can strike a deep relationship with the customers, maintaining top of mind awareness with these customers.

2) Re-active non-active customers to do business with you

Every once in a while, customers with a buying relationship stop buying for various reasons.

One reason could be their circumstance render your product or service useless or less helpful in their lives after some time. Another is that they simply forgot about the buying relationship.

Instead of letting customers stop buying from you, you can stop the attrition rate by sending them an e-mail with a welcome gift to reignite the buying pattern.

Special in-house events, preferential pricing and vouchers can be given especially for clients to come back buying from you again, reigniting old customer relationships and starting the buying process again.

3) Stimulate sales during off-peak hours and months

By giving the customers a reason to come back again to frequent your business, one aspect is to tell them a reason why and communicate via email.

You could miss them and want to give them a special discount just by dropping by. Or, you hope they could introduce their friends to the great food you have and you give a 1-for-1 to the clients. The idea is limitless.

The point is that your business (retail outlets, restaurants, cafes) are sunk costs and it will be better off if the customers come by your business during lull periods.

This way, you can fully utilise your space and costs and strike a deep customer relationship.

4) Gathering database

Another way is that email marketing can help you get a strong database. Having a list of customers or prospects has always been gold; one way is to build your own list. It is one of the most crucial ways businesses retain recurring customers

Having an email marketing campaign in place allows you to do exactly that – giving the customers a reason to keep in contact with you. This way, by growing your database and slowing the attrition rate so that they can engage your business on a regular basis, your business cannot help but grow substantially as there is tremendous potential to up-sell and cross-sell your customers to earn revenue and loyalty.

Ways you can earn more revenue and loyalty include:

1. Having a once-a-week email including enticing food pictures to stay in the minds of your customers
2. Having exclusive in-house (e.g. wine-tasting) sessions with your current clients
3. Inviting your current customers over for a heavily-discounted meal during off-peak
4. Inviting only current customers to try the brand new dish created

Here are only a few examples of how we can solicit businesses from old, patronising clients. With a strong digital marketing presence and infrastructure, you will also be able to monitor your best customers and customise your “gifts” and invites to earn even higher loyalty.

Check out the best Singapore SEO agencies for all your digital marketing needs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, food and beverage companies can leverage tremendously with a strong content marketing campaign. There are numerous ways a food and beverage business can gain higher traffic and loyal customers, but integration with strong digital marketing is key to achieving this goal.

Leading Solution is a digital marketing agency in Singapore, talk to us regarding your digital marketing needs today. With the PSG Grant in Singapore, you can save up to 50% on your digital marketing costs.

We provide all sorts of digital marketing services such as:

• SEO services
• Developing Website
• Social media marketing services
• Google PPC services
• Creating High-Quality Content