How to build a marketing plan for bakery business?
You will see success in your bakery business if you manage to stay unique and relevant. With the rising popularity of different baked items and people following the trend for gluten-free products, bakery businesses are in a hotspot. The market is expanding, and so is the variety of needs.
But, if you want to craft a marketing plan for a bakery business, it has to be unique. It’s a messy process of staying up-to-date with trends, understanding your buyers’ persona and target audience, and knowing what value to market. However, it doesn’t have to be messy and difficult if you are following a proper marketing plan for your bakery business.
Want help drafting one? In that case, let us take you through a marketing strategy for a bakery business that works.
Build A Marketing Plan For Bakery Business From Scratch
The three most important components of your bakery business marketing plan include drafting the –
- Target audience and buyer persona.
- Competitor research
- Budget & Resources at Hand
Target Audience for Your Small Bakery Business
This comes with an understanding of your target market. When you start baking from your home bakery, it’s necessary that you know who will buy your products. Since you are drafting a marketing plan, start by answering these questions yourself –
- Who are your customers?
- What are their demographics?
- What is their spending habits?
- What is their pain point?
Some people are into gluten-free bakes. If there’s no good birthday cake baker on the block, are you the one filling up the spot? Some customers would love to have low sugar content in their cakes. So, what is it that your small bakery business offers? Does it fulfill any of the needs of your target customers? Once you have the answer, you’ll know who to market to and what to market.
Competitor Research
A crucial part of bakery branding and creating a marketing plan for a bakery business is competitor research. When you are conducting competitor research, you’ll identify some interesting information such as –
- What are your competitors marketing?
- What are they good at?
- What part of their production and marketing can be better?
Detailed competitor research leaves the market gap wide open to your bakery business. So you know where to hit. In fact, you’ll be able to find the latest trends in the bakery market and incorporate them into your bakery marketing plan.
Budgeting for Your Bakery Marketing Plan
When measuring your bakery marketing plan’s success, you’ll want to measure the ROI. That’s why you should start with a budget so you can measure what your money and time are worth later. Budgeting will help you reduce the chance of overspending or under-investing in your marketing efforts.
It’s also important to understand the availability of the marketing channels at your disposal. This will help you estimate the cost you need to spend on each channel and set clear expectations. When you have clarity of your limitations upfront, you know what to expect from the amount of money and effort you are putting in.
10 Tips To Craft An Effective Marketing Plan For Bakery Businesses
Follow these 10 tips to build an actionable marketing strategy for your bakery –
1. Create a Brand
There are many bakeries spread across the streets of different states in the USA. The market is vast, and there are many customers. Similarly, the number of small bakeries is also not less. If you want to outshine all these competitors, it’ll take a strong bakery branding strategy.
You have to come up with branding tactics that help you stand out from your competitors and appeal to your target customers. Ensure that your brand personality represents the warm feeling of a freshly baked cake. You can also think of your target customers and resonate their energy and personality in your brand’s image.
A good brand personality reeks of your passion for baking and also talks about what your target customers love. A brand always commits to building the right experience for its target customers through proper branding strategies.
2. Bake Like There’s No Competitor
Baking is a passion, and you should use every ounce of passion you have for baking and pour it into your bakes. Whether you are baking cinnamon rolls or fresh bread loaves, it should be fresh, fluffy, and the best. The aroma of your bakes should be irresistible.
While there are many other factors that keep your customers knocking at your storefront, the quality of your bakes is still at the top. If the bakes are irresistible in taste, smell, and quality, you’ll have customers who’d love to keep coming back.
3. Display Your Best Bakes
Think of a small storefront at the soft corner of a busy street. The man returning from the office or the kid returning from school always has a quick glance at your storefront while passing by. Why? Because the fluffy bread, or the warm cakes, cinnamon rolls keep waving at them.
The best bakes will sell out when you have the best ways of displaying them in store. In-store visual appeal matters a lot when it comes to boosting your in-store marketing initiatives. Try using different unique props and mannequins or similar models to display your bakes in-store. If you have a bakery website, try enriching your website homepage with a catchy display of your bakes. This will encourage your offline and online customers to engage and make purchases.
4. Photo And Video Content For The Win
The best part of having a beautiful bakery business is having mouthwatering products at your disposal to create content around. Yes, you can create captivating videos of your products, take mouthwatering still photos, and spread them across your bakery’s social channels.
Try making beautiful baking behind-the-scenes videos and put them on your Instagram. Try taking delicious-looking stills for your Facebook stories. In fact, you can repurpose your Bakery videos and share them on your TikTok and similar video-sharing platforms. As a part of your plan for a bakery business, try learning some photography and videography skills. There’s no need to invest in feature-heavy cameras and other gear at first. Your iPhone is enough at first.
5. Trends Are Your Friends
An important part of crafting the perfect marketing plan for bakery businesses is by incorporating trends in your marketing efforts. If you don’t want to get outdated, try staying relevant to your target customers. How? By following different bakery trends, your competitors are following the trends that your target customers quickly give in to.
Your target customers are always ready to get excited about the latest bakery trends and creative food options. It can be related to a new flavor, design, decoration, or any particular marketing trend. Try staying active on social media and follow industry leaders who are creating these trends. Follow these trends to stay relevant in the bakery industry.
Do use intriguing copies on your social media posts. Try to humor your customers and give them a good laugh. You’ll be surprised to know how many people love good bakery memes.
6. Set Up A Sampling Table
When fishing with a fishing rod, you have to throw some of the bait in the water so that fish swarm around that area of the pond. A sampling table works just like that. Keep a sampling table at the high-traffic area of the store. You want your customers to have a taste of the baked goods before they consider those for purchase.
A sampling table helps your customers understand the quality of your products and build up cravings for your baked products. Try keeping a sample of every item you are selling in your store. Start with cakes, cookies, pastries, and bread. A grocery store’s high-traffic area is the best place for setting up your sampling table and helping customers build up interest in your products.
7. Invest In A Website
The best way to get visibility in the world of the internet is by being on the internet. Build up a website for your bakery business to show your bakery business as an authentic and trustworthy place to buy bakeries from.
When your bakery business taps into the limitless power of the internet, you are opening your business to millions of audiences. Your business becomes more accessible to your target customers.
Add all your branding strategy and branding elements to the website to showcase what your brand stands for to the target customer. This is a one-time investment that will keep adding new customers and leads to your business. Here are a few tips you can follow –
- Use SEO to optimize your website for high ranking on the Search engine ranking page.
- Create landing pages for each of your paid advertising campaigns.
- Do use attractive visual assets on your website.
- Write captivating website copies after properly incorporating your marketing methods.
- Use your website to tell your brand story.
- Showcase the best product of your brand.
- Use data analytics software on your website to analyze sales, click rates, and customer behaviors.
8. Content Marketing For Bakery Business
If you are selling your bakes through your eCommerce platform, then try investing in a good content marketing strategy. Content marketing helps you promote your business both online and offline.
Your bakery business’ content strategy isn’t just for creating website content and social media platforms. In fact, it carries your brand voice and markets your brand throughout both offline and online channels. Consistent branding requires efficient content marketing and good-quality content. This is one investment that you can repurpose in many ways to keep your branding consistent across channels.
But how to get started? Hire content marketing professionals to help you build your content marketing strategy and content roadmap. Here are a few steps you will follow –
- Build a brand voice that you want to show consistently in your content marketing.
- Create your content calendar and publish consistently.
- Outline your business’ narrative.
- Use your websites and social channels to consistently show your brand’s story on different channels.
- Use your brand’s visuals and unique behind-the-scenes photos to attract your customers.
9. Host Cupcake Contests
Your customers can be part of your bakery business marketing plan. You just have to learn to include them in your marketing initiatives. Start by introducing events where your sweet-toothed costumes can take part. A cupcake contest is the best way to get your customers involved with your bakery brand.
Here’s how you’ll host your cupcake event –
- Come up with catchy themes that people find interesting. For example, think of a “Creative cup cake contest.” ensure that people of all ages find this theme interesting.
- Once you have a theme ready, make sure that you promote it enough for all your target customers to know about your content. Do share them through cold emails. Did your customers take in-store delivery and leave their contact? Use it to send them a captivating WhatsApp text with the news about this contest. Get on social media and start to keep posting. In fact, try to count down posts till the contest day arrives.
- Have many prizes for customers to win. Make sure the winner of the top cupcake goes home with some memories and smiles on their faces.
- Don’t make the contest difficult to enter. Your customers should be able to easily participate online or in person.
- Make it fun and have fun. It’s a contest for the customers. For a day, they might overtake the store. They will celebrate hard, and it’s just what you want. Let their creativity flow as you sit back and enjoy.
A cupcake content will spread the word about your bakery in town. It’s a friendly competition that helps small businesses grow. You should use these tactics to their fullest potential to get the best out of your bakery marketing plan.
10. Set Up Your Google My Business Location
Your target customers might be looking for your store, and they are most probably using Google Maps. It’s really important to set a clear location on Google Maps so that your customers can easily find your store.
Optimizing your store’s location on the map helps customers easily navigate to your storefront. Keep your store’s location prosperity optimized so that it doesn’t seem misleading to your customers who might be looking for you on the internet.
Final Words
When developing a marketing plan for a bakery business, you should follow the ten marketing tactics mentioned in this article. Small businesses should use all the creative means at their disposal to come up with the best marketing strategy. However, these aren’t the only marketing tactics that your bakery business needs to follow. You can also try giving out branded items or offering special discounts and referrals.
So, did you find the answers you were looking for? Do share your insights about what you think the marketing plan for a bakery business should be like. Also, if you need any help brainstorming, reach out to us. Thanks for reading.
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