I sell supplies for F&B industry, besides ads on Google and F&B trade media, what are other more cost effective ways to get acquire new customers in this niche? My customers are restaurants, cafes, bars, food trucks.
Wow! Good question. The way is endless and could yield you so much. Think of innovation and creativity. These are just some ideas that I used and it worked and cost less and yield much profit. Depending on where you are some might not work but for what it's worth give some a try. Crowd gathering would have been ideal, but since we are in a pandemic try some of the others. Depends on how wide you intend your product to go, how far will you go.
a) Posters and flyers distribution.
b) Use your directory and connect either through phone, email or drop off.
c) Sample products to prospected clients.
d) Parish to parish, city to city or state to state drive through promotion.
e) You can put an advert on your vehicle with all the details.
There are other creative methods. Try these and let me know.
Thanks for using this forum
Hello. There are a lot of ways to market your F&B distribution business. I would recommend cold calling and e-mail restaurants, cafes, and bars in your area. Cold calling still works for your niche. Contact me so I can help you get started.
The first question I would ask will be are your targeted customers actively transact/ respond on ecommerce platform?
Next, do you know the size and whether they are in the same location?
Please be very specific and true to yourself.
If your first answer is no ... then you know the result.
If your second answer is no ... your survival and cost of logistic will kill you.
Another thing - cost effective does not mean profit effective, please becareful.
You should first investigate your strengths in reaching out before searching the appropriate approach to find leads.
Having Google Ads and F&B trade media tells me that you have an initial process setup for Inbound Sales.
Why not go ahead and launch Outbound Sales? One of the key advantages here is that you basically can target whoever you want and, if this is done right, this will be very cost-effective.
There are 3 approaches you can consider applying here:
1. Account-based Sales.
Depending on what CRM you are currently using, this can be a great opportunity. I used Hubspot for this approach, but I'm sure there are other tools that will make it possible. One of Hubspot's many tools allows you to see the companies that have visited your website. You (or your sales team) then need to go through the list of companies that visited your website and see which ones fall under your ICP. After having done that, you reach to them either via highly target email or via Social media (f.e. LinkedIn) or a mixture of both.
2. Cold Targeted Outreach.
I normally use this approach to reach out to prospects from the mid-market segment. I apply this in a way where 50% of the focus is on quality and 50% on quantity. Most of the time you will be using a mix of highly personalized email sequences, social media approaches, and direct calls to reach out to prospects.
3. Personalized Outreach.
Similar to the previous method, but slightly different. Usually, I use this for the Enterprise market segment only. It requires a lot of research to be done from your end before you reach out to the prospect. The difference here is that this is highly personalized and very targeted than any other. While the number of such outreaches will be smaller, this approach is supposed to bring enterprise clients onboard.
Some of the ways to make sure your message stands out:
- You address their specific pain points;
- You do your homework before pitching them to make sure your product actually makes sense to them;
- Again, it's all about personalization and you can go about this in many ways - from checking out their social media all the way to sending them a recorded (specifically for them) video, instead of sending an email, making a phone call or approaching them on LinkedIn.
Final note - of course, some of these notes might more/less helpful, depending on the specifics of your business, product, market, etc. In any case, I hope this was helpful - feel free to reach out, in case, there is anything else you think I could help you with.
Best of luck!
Warm regards,
Bogdan
1.Send business card Yes, by post. This is a great way to reach out to all of your customers, whether they are already tech-savvy or are about to become ecommerce converts. Reminder, and it shows that you have invested the time and effort in providing them with improved services.
2.You can also send an email when you have your customers' email addresses. Be short and to the point and highlight a single action by inviting them to explore your web store. You can even customize it with a link so that they can see your most frequently purchased products in your webshop.
3.Inform your customers with instruction videos. Create short how-to videos that show your customers how to order online and share via email and social media. Aside from being helpful, it's also a great way to increase brand awareness and attract new customers.Promote online shopping with special webshop discounts Offering exclusive webshop discounts is a great way to encourage your customers to try out your new webshop.
4.Invite them to get free shipping or a promotional code. You can even get creative and organize a scavenger hunt in your webshop at a discount for all attendees. Help your customers log in. Challenge your customer service or sales team to encourage customers to order online.
5.Redirect all phone calls with questions about invoices and orders to the online self-service portal. Even if your customers aren't ready to order online, you can still refer them to the portal for an instant overview of prices, order history, current orders, stock levels and more. Request access data as soon as possible to encourage the use of your online portal.
