Foodservice distributor lead generation programs convert distributors to order-takers
A robust food marketing plan cannot begin and end with consumer marketing. Yes, consumer marketing is essential, and truely effective programs can create amazing results in sales. But any excellent consumer marketing program begins with a well-thought-out business to business (B2B) marketing strategy.
NewPoint is a team of marketers who understand that volume sales in non-retail channels can increase the volume of ingredients to purchase – typically bringing pricing down as well as optimizes production whether you have a stand-alone operation or use a co-packer.
In this post, I continue discussion points on building a channel marketing program to support foodservice food sales.
Stay Top of Mind with Foodservice Lead Generation
Just because you have a distributor does not mean you get to sit back and count the sales and money. Since food distributors carry thousands of products, you should be worrying about keeping your product lines the top of mind and sales push.
I said this a few posts ago: like any good partnership, one way to appeal to a distributor is to find ways to help their business.
Now that we’ve covered a few foodservice sales and partnership tactics, let’s pull it all together and look at how a full plan to introduce brands to foodservice channels looks:
1. Strategic Message Development Targeting Buyers
Why your food brand?
2. Lead Generation Tactical Programs
Develop foodservice channel-specific buyer personas
After the foundational messaging and program is created, it’s time to generate leads. Your brand should be represented in as many places (as your budget can stretch) that foodservice buyers are at:
Trade pubs: Ads and sponsored content/reviews
Digital
Traditional
Tradeshows
NRA
Regional & distributor
Direct
Digital w/ email programming
Traditional w/ samples
And since marketing is a process – heck it could take years to sell a great account – you need to create and drive the marketing plan.
Lead Generation To Customer & Order
This may be oversimplified, but we’ve seen it work hundreds of times – when a call comes in – you take it, verify it and cultivate the account – then send the order to your distributor to fulfill.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how to grow sales and margins in new channels like foodservice, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out my book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.