8 Digital food marketing trends every strategy needs

If you’re in the food business, adopting digital food marketing trends is a powerful way to reach your target audience. You need to be where consumers are searching for information and that is online.

Our handy guide highlights seven of the best digital food marketing trends and why it’s important to use them in your strategy…

1. Blogging

Blogging is an easy way to create relevant content for your customers. An interesting blog is an opportunity to connect with people as it gives customers the chance to get to know your business, products or services a little better.

Get Google onto you

Crucially, blogging is a successfully tried and tested method that increases traffic to your website and social media channels via SEO. New, well written content with relevant keywords alerts Google, as well as other search engines, providing the opportunity to find new content to index.

Top tips: Use the right key words and related expressions. Keep content relevant to your food business. Post links to your blogs on your social sites. Use good quality, interesting photos and videos to bring posts to life.

2. Incentives to boost zero-party data capture

Zero-party data is when customers share their information with a brand willingly and proactively. The key is to give them incentives to do so as they are a great way to capture data on your target audience and with the right incentives, it’s an easy way to do it.

Free pizza anyone?

Domino’s Pizza used this digital marketing food trend to great effect in the US; customers were offered a free pizza when they spent over $5 or more. To take part, customers had to visit the Domino’s website and enter details to receive a voucher coupon. Overall Domino’s – received 20,000 campaign entries.

Top tip: Consider incentives or giveaways where customers can sign-up and opt-in to receive marketing.

3. Social advertising and social messaging

Regularly publishing and boosting posts or running sponsored campaigns on social platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram where your target audience are likely to be, helps raise brand awareness, extends your reach and increases conversions.

Top tips: Write engaging posts and add eye-catching images. Boost posts to your target market. Be consistent with posting and research the best time of day to post for your audience.

4. Get behind your posts

When it comes to digital food marketing trends, don’t just focus on social posts though, look behind your social platforms and get onto social messaging. 

Just look at the figures: over 1.3 billion monthly users are active on Facebook Messenger, with 10 billion messages sent between people and businesses every month. And it’s not just Facebook, the other top social messaging apps – WhatsApp and WeChat are also relevant with billions of messages sent – 55 billion daily on WhatsApp.

Send them a message

Such astonishing stats show just how popular social messaging is and it makes sense to head on over and use social messaging as a way to market your services and products.

Top tip: Personalise your messages for maximum impact. 

5. Create your own set of branded GIFSs

Who doesn’t love scrolling through GIFs to add into their social media post or Instagram story? Creating your own branded GIFs is a clever and stimulating marketing tactic as they deliver emotional impact in an easy to consume way.  

They’re also a great tool to use when it comes to setting the right tone, as well as keeping you ahead of the competition when it comes to new ways of using marketing strategies to draw people in.

Top tips: Create your own set of branded Instagram Stickers and promote them to customers to use when posting online. Use GIFs as an easy way to convey messages you want to deliver.

6. Utilise social media stories

Visual stories on social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat (the first pioneers of the ‘My Story’ concept) are powerful at hooking in customer’s attention online.

FOMO

The main benefit is that, because these types of stories disappear after a set period of time, they appeal to the FOMO (fear of missing out) aspect of social media, as well as being a great way to increase brand awareness and engage with followers.

Top tips: Add incentives such as location tags, links and clear call-to-actions. Try live videos or use polls for further engagement. 

7. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO continues to be a key digital marketing trend but use it wisely and use it well. And, if you want to go further, add a dash of content marketing.

Let it flow

A major update over at Google in 2019 was the BERT system. Designed to help Google understand the natural language people use when they search online, it means that, when it comes to SEO, we should be mindful of writing content that is natural and for people, not for Google. 

Simply dropping in lots of keywords for Google won’t work; especially since the Google Hummingbird update which places greater emphasis on natural language. Content needs to be written in a way that flows and your keywords need to flow in your sentences too.

As Google’s John Mueller said: ‘Rather than chase the latest SEO trends, it’s more important to ensure a site has fast speeds, useful links, and well-written content.’

Top tips: Research and use targeted keywords that your customers are searching for online to ensure you’re found locally. Create content marketing that shows you’re a credible business that writes to its customers as opposed to writing for Google hits.  

8. Use good quality photos

Customers eat with their eyes online so make sure wherever you’re using photos of your food (whether that’s on your website or your social media outlets) you’re using good quality, styled photos that look as delicious as they taste.

Top tips: Invest in a good camera and learn about lighting and positioning your food in different ways for maximum impact. Consider investing in good quality food photography via a specialised food marketing agency such as Eat Marketing for promotional material or big campaigns. 

Post regularly on your social media sites and show a wide selection of your food offerings to whet customers’ appetites.

Which digital marketing trend do you want to try first? These strategies are easy to apply, and they can make a huge difference to your sales, and the way customers interact with you.