FDR is busy, and they keep our marketing team busy, too. 

FDR’s Marketing Challenges

Many businesses struggle to manage multiple marketing vendors — web developer, graphic designer, PR agency, and so on  — and FDR was no different. They were looking for one shop to take the lead on all of their marketing with little oversight. Bottom line: Richard Keys and Scott Randolph, the Head Chefs and Co-Founders at FDR, wanted to continue to grow their business but get marketing off of their plate so they could spend time in the kitchen.

Right away, The Condiment Marketing Co. worked to identify marketing goals. There were several items on the list, but the biggest marketing need surrounded the new FDR Innovation Center, their facility in Denver where taste tests and focus groups are conducted.

At the time, FDR was relatively new to Denver, and the chefs were eager to have folks understand the company’s full capabilities, especially menu development and market research. In their experience, few recipe developers test their recipes, and few researchers have a culinary facility that meets the needs of a multi-location restaurant. FDR had created a line of services and a facility to do it all, and they wanted the world to know.

At the FDR Innovation Center in Denver: CLT booths in the foreground and the test bar and commercial test kitchen in the background.

Marketing Solutions

With a primary goal to further awareness of the FDR Innovation Center, we set out to reach FDR’s audience through social media, email newsletters, a search engine presence, and media coverage. This was no small task, and over the years we’ve implemented a variety of marketing tactics including an open house at the FDR Innovation Center, ebooks, press releases, the upcoming FDR Golf Outing, and more. But one marketing effort has continued to stand out among the rest: food trend PR outreach.

Many members of the food media are hungry for fresh takes on ingredients and what new items consumers can expect to see on menus soon. Put simply, the food world wants to know about food and beverage trends. Who better to share their insights than the chefs who are developing next year’s trends right now? 

Marketing Results

On behalf of FDR, we frequently reach out to the media to announce the FDR team’s prediction for upcoming menu trends. It’s FDR’s goal to become a resource for restaurant chefs and other food industry influencers interested identifying what’s hot and what’s not.

Additionally, we work with FDR to develop website content covering trends. The FDR blog now has dozens of posts covering food/beverage trends. To support content both on and off the FDR website, The Condiment Marketing Co. team will take food photos and create custom images to further illustrate the food trends. The GIFs below, which were created in conjunction with yellowDogLab in Denver, are the most recent set of creative.

This gif made to support a blog post on the housemade ingredients trend.

This gif made to support a blog post on the African flavor trend.

All of the food trend content and PR outreach has resulted in a number of things for FDR, including nearly two dozen online mentions and links and a 25% increase in website traffic. We track that data using Google Analytics, and we anticipate those numbers will continue to grow as we develop more content and work with more food media and bloggers again to discuss 2018 food trends.

To learn more about FD visit foodanddrinkresources.com.

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These and other clichéd food descriptions are boring and do nothing to describe your beloved food product or menu item.

When enticing fans to enjoy your food from a website, social media, catalog, or another marketing piece, don’t be boring. Instead, try these copywriting techniques and get the reader to experience the flavor!

Conversational writing only.

Write like you talk. Use short sentences. Address your reader. Don’t be afraid to break a few grammar rules either…especially if your bad grammar is memorable.

Example: Hey, Colorado mustard lovers! Just in time for summer barbecuing season we’ve released our fan-favorite sriracha-style mustard.

Evoke an image. Include an image.

Great writing takes you to another place. Colorful copywriting establishes a scene and creates a picture in your mind.

Example: Order two hand rolled steaming hot arborio rice spheres stuffed to perfection. One with carefully wilted spinach in a delicate cream sauce and the other with a classic combination of ground beef, peas, and decadently melted mozzarella cheese. Both topped with our house made tomato-basil sauce.

On top of drawing a picture with your words, include an actual picture. According to a study done by MIT, the brain processes an image in 13 milliseconds. The brain is wired to immediately try to understand what it is looking at and make a judgment. Combine this with the fact that most people do not read marketing copy word for word and prefer to scan headlines and images, you can see why images in your copy matter.

Follow tried and true copywriting rules.

Active voice and benefits-driven copy cannot go overlooked. These two copywriting techniques are a must for any industry.

Example: Get the only breaded tenderloin sandwich this side of the Missippi served with fried pickles. All ingredients sourced from local farmers!

Make them trust you.

Give your potential partners and fans reason to believe in you. Social proof comes in many forms including a professionally designed website, quality product photos, reviews/testimonials, videos, stats, a list of existing retailers/partners, social media followers, and the list goes on. Integrate these nuggets into sales copy whenever you can.

Example: Since introducing our line of sauces to Kroger customers last fall, XYZ Condiment Co. has reached more than 15,000 homes in the Pacific Northwest. The numbers don’t lie. If this many moms can convince their kids to eat broccoli thanks to our sauces, how could you go wrong?

Tell them to buy!

Tell them to BUY with a call to action. Make it direct. The best ones call out scarcity.

Example: Order a sauce variety pack before July 31 and receive a limited edition condiment gun. 

To recap: Must-follow food copywriting techniques

• Describe your product, menu items, or recipes so that your reader can nearly taste it. Avoid cliché words like “delicious” or “tasty.”
• Write in the active voice.
• Spell out the benefits, not the features. In other words, don’t talk about what your company does. Highlight what the customer gets.
• Include an image. Professional food photography is best.
• Include trust signals like a phone number, testimonials, and links to press mentions.
• End with a direct call to action.

The post Elevate Virtual Flavors With These Food Copywriting Techniques appeared first on The Condiment Marketing Co..

The group meets on the first Thursday of the month at the Enterprise CoWorking Space in the RiNo neighborhood of Denver. Members include food and beverage industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between.

The Denver Food & Drink Collective Meetup.com group has shuttered, but the Facebook page remains (although it’s about to get a re-brand), and Colorado Food Works (CFW) has its own website where you can sign up to be notified of upcoming meetings.

We hope you attend upcoming CFW meetings. If you do, we’ll see you there!

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(Tampa, Fla.) For the first time, single-origin Honduran chocolate bars produced by the Honduras Chocolate Company are available at select groceries in the Tampa, Clearwater and Sarasota areas, including Abby’s Health & Nutrition in Tampa and Nature’s Food Patch in Clearwater. The company got its start in 2015, but this is the first time their chocolate products have been sold by North American retailers.

While it’s known that some of the best cacao is grown in Honduras and other equatorial regions, very few chocolate producers are based in these same areas. Most often, consumers think of chocolate as a Northern European commodity.

“Of course, we care about making the best-tasting chocolate,” said Mike Wiesner, Honduras Chocolate Company Vice President. “But it’s about more than taste for us. It’s also about making a product in the place where it’s grown to further support the local economy. This means paying the farmers better than fair-trade prices, following environmentally-friendly processing practices and hand-selecting the best cacao.”

The Honduras Chocolate Company produces four, 2.7 oz chocolate bars at 65 percent, 70 percent, 75 percent and 80 percent cacao. Because the chocolate is only two ingredients—cacao and pure cane sugar, both of which are grown organically in Honduras—the flavor is unlike many other chocolate varieties. It has a unique deep buttery cocoa flavor. The higher the cacao percentage, the more pronounced the coffee accents. The lower the cacao percentage, the more pronounced the fruity accents.

All of the chocolates are non-GMO, gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, and nut-free. The company hand selects the cacao pods grown by its network of local farmers and completes the processing by storing the beans in its own dry processing facility in Honduras. From there, the beans are fermented and, when ready, processed into chocolate and packaged for distribution. This setup allows the farmers to focus solely on farming and the Honduras Chocolate Company to control quality and consistency without adding fillers and other flavors to the recipe.

Chocolate bar samples are available to the media upon request. 

About the Honduras Chocolate Company

The Honduras Chocolate Company develops deep, personal relationships with its Honduran farmers, pays better-than-fair-trade prices and provides farmers with essential business training, micro-loans and access to farming resources. These relationships result in greater crop yields of a higher-quality compared to mass-produced cacao. The net result: better chocolate for you, and a positive, sustainable solution for a country rich in culture but poor in financial resources. The Honduras Chocolate company sells four chocolate bars ranging from 65 percent to 80 percent cacao as well as cocoa powder and culinary chocolate online and at select retailers. Additional information about the Honduras Chocolate Company and products are available at honduraschocolatecompany.com. 

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As you interview potential food marketing agencies, ask the following questions and expect straightforward answers.

Is There a Price Minimum?

Some marketing pros are real cheap — there are places you can go to get blog posts for $10. On the other hand, big agencies working for big brands could charge $600 an hour. Before calling around, you need to consider your budget. What can you reasonably afford and how much help do you want? Do you want full marketing support or do you have small projects from time to time?

An agency isn’t likely to give you a price quote on that first phone call. However, they can tell you their minimum, or the smallest amount they are willing to bill for a new client.

What Is Your Marketing Specialty?

Every marketing agency, even a full-service agency who says they can do everything, has a couple sweet spots. For some, it’s a marketing activity like branding, web development, or content and for others, it’s an industry niche, like food! In many cases, an agency will work outside its sweet spot if it’s a desirable project. If you don’t get a good answer to this question, another good one is, “What work do you enjoy doing most?”

And, in case you are wondering, the work we enjoy doing most involves branding and content strategy.

How Long Do You Typically Work With Clients?

This is a good question to ask a marketing agency because it illustrates the type of relationships they keep and whether or not they value loyalty.

Are All of Your Clients Food Businesses?

If the agency can say some of their clients are outside of the food industry, then you know they are likely getting referrals, too. A great sign of reputable business.

Do You Have Case Studies?

A case study is a write-up detailing a problem and solution. Many agencies will profile a working relationship to showcase gains made through marketing. To see what we mean, check out the marketing case studies on our blog. If an agency doesn’t have a case study, testimonials or references are the next best thing.

Will You Provide Reports?

Anyone managing your marketing should be monitoring your brand names and focus keywords and tracking your numbers. At The Condiment Marketing Co., clients get reports at the end of every month. You can see how we track ROI here.

What Extra Fees Are There?

In some cases, a food marketing agency will quote a project fee which includes their fee and hard costs all rolled up into one price. In other cases, you’ll get a quote for the agency’s fee and all other costs will be billed separately. Either scenario is fine, you just need to understand how it’ll work and what the numbers mean. Some of the extra fees could include advertising, printing, photography, and videography for example.

Will You Do Recipe Development?

An important piece of food business marketing involves serving suggestions and recipes. Is this something you can create internally or will you need your marketing agency to handle this instead? (FYI – The Condiment Marketing Co. does recipe development.)

How Accessible Are You?

Are you the kind of person that wants regular face-to-face meetings and to be able to pick up the phone whenever you need? Or do you want your marketing agency to just handle it without much direction from you? Will you be billed for meetings? Will you need to schedule phone calls? Think about what you need and then choose an agency with a style to match.

Why Should I Hire Your Marketing Agency?

This question may seem aggressive, but I think the sales person will appreciate it, at least we do. Finding the right food marketing agency is a lot like dating. You need to find someone you get along with, share values with, and want to spend time with. By asking why you should hire the agency, you open the door to a genuine conversation about what makes that company different than the rest.

The process of finding a new food marketing agency can be cumbersome. We hope this list of questions to ask before hiring a food marketing agency is helpful and that you’ll call us when considering your next marketing move.

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So how do you do this? Here are our top five tips to get you comfortable.

Tip #1 – Get Started!

Bite the bullet and just do it. People want to connect with brands they like and are more inclined to share, like, or comment on posts that sound like they are coming from an actual human. This could be as easy as sharing helpful cooking tips, a funny anecdote from the day, or your favorite product recipes. Start slowly and find a comfortable level of sharing who you are with the people who may eventually be customers. We’ve put together a list of pros and cons of each social network for food businesses for you to reference.

Tip #2 – Use A Social Media Management Tool

The best way to stay engaged on social media is to use a social media management tool. We like to use Sprout Social*. With a management tool, you can easily schedule out posts, track mentions, and view your audience demographics. Your social media strategy should contain a mix of 20% business content and 80% fun and informative stuff that targets your audience. Don’t let this overwhelm you. All you have to do is start small and be consistent.

Tip #3 – Prioritize Social Media Platforms

There is no need to spread yourself thin by trying to interact on every social media platform. Start by considering the top three  – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Each platform has a wide reach and has its own tone. Do some research and figure out which social media sites your business should be on.

• Facebook is casual and informal
• LinkedIn is business-like and formal
• Twitter is great for brief content and conversations
• Pinterest and Instagram are great for sharing photos (especially useful in the food industry)
• Snapchat is great for promo codes and behind the scenes content

Tip #4 – Manage Your Marketing Expectations

It takes time to build a following, so don’t give up if you don’t initially get the response you’re hoping for. It can take months to build a social media following that consists of a true fan-base. Also, know that you will receive criticism. This is normal and unavoidable. Keep your responses positive and keep truckin’.

Tip #5 – Have Fun!

Having a social media presence should be easy. If it’s not, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t take yourself too seriously and make sure you try experimenting with different kinds of posts. If you’re having fun, chances are, so is your audience.

What’s your favorite way to have fun on social media? Comment below or shoot us a message. We’d love to hear from you!

*As users of Sprout Social, this is our affiliate link.

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Once you decide to have a blog on your restaurant website, then you have to commit to publishing once a week or every other week. A content plan will ensure it gets done. As you begin your planning process, use this list of 30 restaurant blog post ideas for inspiration.

1. Weekly restaurant specials
2. New menu items
3. Are there stories behind any menu items? e.g., grandma’s recipe with a twist; alcoholic beverage inspired by a trip, etc.
4. Extraordinary customer testimonials. Bonus points if you can get that customer to take a photo or share their review on video.
5. Share recipes from your menu that you don’t mind giving away, or share recipes that you don’t serve but are still in line with your restaurant concept.
6. Answer a frequently asked question.
7. Promote an upcoming event and then post pictures of the event after the fact.
8. Does your restaurant support your community or a charity somehow? Write regular blog posts showcasing that work and inviting others to participate, too.
9. Have local or special artwork on the walls? Tell us about it.
10. Profile an employee as he or she approaches an anniversary.
11. Choose an employee of the month and/or a customer of the month to showcase.
12. Are you in a business district with lots of neighbors? Why not feature a neighbor each month, too?
13. Profile the farmers or food manufacturers you source from and are proud to work with.
14. Talk about current food and menu trends. We love what Kimpton Hotels did here.
15. People love their sports. If you have TVs in your restaurant and will be airing an upcoming game or games, what can you say about it? Perhaps, there’s a rivalry among your employees worth sharing or a special dish and drink you’ll serve this month to support the team.
16. Every one of your menu items could be paired with an alcoholic and non-alcoholic drink or two. Talk up the flavors of each and why a particular wine, beer, cocktail, or mocktail would go hand-in-hand.
17. Lists! Readers enjoy lists of all kinds (like a list of 30 Restaurant Blog Post Ideas for example!). The possibilities are endless.
    • The top 10 ingredients we use in the kitchen.
    • Our 5 most popular menu items.
    • 3 new trendy flavors coming to a plate near you.
18. Just like “lists,” “how-to’s” are very popular on blogs. Do you have complicated or unfamiliar menu items? Create a how-to on the best way to cook seafood, or season food, or cut your steak. The sky is the limit here! Great opportunity for video, too.
19. Write a blog post featuring links to and summaries of all press mentions of your restaurant. If you want to encourage the media, including local food bloggers, to cover your restaurant, hold a media preview or private meal/tasting.
20. What are your favorite food television shows? Top Chef, Chopped, Ina Garten? Write a review of your favorite episode. Or, perhaps, rant about a food show you hate. It’s ok to have an opinion on this one.
21. Write a review of a new cookbook.
22. Look at the popular mainstream news. What is happening in food right now that you can weigh in on?
23. When a celebrity chef comes to town on a book tour or a friend participates in cooking competition, attend and share the experience.
24. Get comfortable with your camera. Practice taking photos regularly for social media and create themed blog posts of your best photos.
25. Cooking and/or baking tips straight from the chef.
26. Write a thank you letter or love letter to your customers.
27. Write a re-cap of a social media campaign. While MailChimp isn’t a restaurant, they’ve done an awesome job with this campaign, which appears both on social media and on their website.
28. Generate menu ideas from your customer base. Looking for a new item to put on your menu? Why not go directly to the source and ask your customers what they’d like to see.
29. Showcase your holiday spirit. If you decorate, dress up, or have holiday-themed menu items, create blog posts about them.
30. Start a monthly or weekly “staff picks” post. No one knows your restaurant as well as your staff. Why not post about their favorite menu items?

BONUS TIP! Topics Based on Long-Tail Keywords

You might be able to rank for “Denver restaurant” in the search engines, but it’s going to take a lot of work. However, it won’t take a lot of work to rank for terms like “summertime Denver restaurant” or “Denver hamburger restaurant.” In the biz, we call these long-tail keyword phrases.

Our tip is to write a lot of blog posts about Denver incorporating a mix of longer keyword phrases. Using our keyword examples above, appropriate blog posts could be “The 2017 Summer Foodie Events in Denver We’ll Be Attending” or “10 Hamburger Restaurants We Visit on Vacation.”

And how do you find out what restaurant keywords people are using in search? Well, you could hire us to do complex keyword research and make recommendations, or you could look at Ubersuggest and Google Trends for some basic ideas.

Happy blogging!

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Title Cap

Do you care about proper punctuation, grammar, and headline capitalization? Us too. While we believe the clarity of the message supersedes all things, consistency in your writing and proper formatting support the message. If your headline and subheadline capitalization is different from blog post to blog post or even from subhead to subhead, it can be distracting and make you look amateur. In Title Cap, you input your headline and it provides the appropriate capitalization according to your style guide of choice. (We prefer Chicago Manual of Style.)

Frontify

Speaking of style guides, all of The Condiment Marketing Co. clients get a style guide using Frontify. We love the way you can easily add your brand fonts, colors, and image files plus outline other on-brand and off-brand elements in notes. Even the free version of Frontify provides many worthwhile features.

Landscape

Landscape allows you to upload a single image and resize it for various social media sites. We use GIMP (open source image editing) and PicMonkey regularly, but when all you need is to resize an image in a hurry and effortlessly, Landscape is the way to go. We use it daily.

Foodie

Hey, food fans, this one is for you. Foodie is a photo taking/editing app specifically designed for sharing food photos on social media. Here, you can see two pics. The first I took with my ordinary old iPhone camera. The second I took using the Foodie app. Pretty slick, huh?

IFTTT

If This Then That (IFTTT) works like this: IF a particular action occurs, THEN the tool will produce a result (the THAT). We use IFTTT for several Instagram and Twitter functions, like automatically posting an Instagram image to Twitter and putting all Tweets into a Google spreadsheet. One of our favorite IFTTT applets sends us an automatic email notification and summary every time NPR publishes a story on food.

We hope this list of marketing tools are useful for you, whether you are into food marketing or not. If you have a tool in your toolbox you can’t live without, tell us about it here!

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You know they’re important, but coming up with your tagline, slogans, and elevator speech can be difficult. We’ll walk you through it.

Why are taglines, slogans, and elevator pitches important?

• Provide focus to all of your marketing.
• You and your team can communicate what you do quickly and clearly.
• Guide your design choices.
• Give customers the right first impression of your brand—something they can walk away with and remember next time they want to make a purchase.

First things first. Understand your brand.

Before you can communicate your brand, you need to understand what your brand provides and and what makes it different.

• What are the consumer benefits of your product or service?
• What words do you hope others use to describe you?
• What are your company’s features VS benefits? (Features describe what your product/service is or does, like gourmet, gluten-free, or convenient. Benefits answer the question “What’s in it for me?” Such as “Makes me look and feel like a foodie”, “My son won’t end up in the hospital”, or “I don’t have to make dinner while my kids are crying and my spouse is still working.”)
• Know the difference between features and benefits. Now edit your benefits list to only include benefits, and use them to create your taglines, slogans, and elevator speech.

What are Taglines and Slogans?

A tagline is a concise, memorable catchphrase used to summarize abusiness’ mission and the products or services it offers. The bit under your business name. What you might see in the logotype.

Examples:

Apple – Think different.
Dollar Shave Club – A great shave. Delivered.
Disney – The happiest place on earth.

Depending on who you talk to, a slogan is a phrase describing a specific product or campaign. What you might see on marketing materials or in a commercial. It makes good use of rhyme, alliteration, repetition, and double-entendre.

Examples:

Apple iPad Air – Change is in the air.
Dollar Shave Club – Shave time. Shave money.
Disney Resort – Where dreams come true.

Get inspired!

Some good taglines and slogans:

Dos Equis – Stay thirsty.
Glad – Don’t get mad. Get glad.
Mazda – Zoom zoom zoom.
Bounty – The quicker picker-upper.
Wendy’s – We don’t cut corners.

Some bad taglines and slogans:

Delta Airlines – We get you there.
Exxon – We’re Exxon.
Denny’s – Denny’s. A good place to sit and eat.
FedEx – Our most important package is yours.
Singer – We make it better.

Brainstorm

Using your list of words that people use to describe your company, what ideas for taglines for your brand come to mind?
Think of a single flavor or single service you offer. Brainstorm slogan ideas.

What makes you, you?

Personable and friendly
Spontaneous and high energy
Modern or high tech
Cutting edge
Fun
Accessible to all

Vs

Corporate and professional
Careful thinking and planning
Classic and traditional
Established
Serious
Upscale

Choose one term in each row only.
Source: http://www.bigbrandsystem.com/uncover-your-brand-personality-quiz/

Get writing!

Goal: Make it memorable. Show benefits. Differentiate the brand.

Do: Think of it like speed dating. You don’t have time to tell her how much money you have. Just tell her where you’re taking her on vacation.

Don’t:

• Worry about length. It can be short or long.
• Be cliched. Avoid things like “built from the ground up”, “handmade with love”, and “one-stop shop”.

Read more about branding and taglines here.

Elevator speech

An elevator speech is a longer summary of what you do andwhy it matters. Your tagline is a distillation of your elevator speech.

Why is it SO hard? Because it’s personal. And sales-y. And it’s tough to be succinct.

Goal: Define your position. Describe what your business does. Tell what problem you solve. Connect. Discuss what is in the works for your business.

Do be prepared.

Don’t be scripted.

Write your elevator speech.

Expand on your tagline. You have 30 seconds (70 words max) to explain why you’re great. (No pressure.)
Revise your elevator speech.

And then:

• Read it out loud.
• Delete or re-word anything that is awkward.
• Make every sentence active voice.
• Delete adverbs, that/which, so/because, and other filler words.
• Add color.
• Stay true to who you are.

What has been your experience writing your tagline, slogan, and elevator speech?

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Small Food Biz comes out with a new podcast episode every couple weeks. Each one is tailored to issues facing those in the food industry and is hugely informative. We hope you’ll check it out, not just our episode, but the other Small Food Biz podcast episodes, too! And very big THANK YOU to Jen for having Sara as a guest.

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