Digital Marketing Plan for Dessert Businesses

Dessert makes everything better!

Desserts are a form of edible love! It makes every occasion a little sweeter. With COVID-19, it left an impact on the world; it separated families across borders, countries and even made some businesses close down. But in times of challenge, there is always an opportunity. Many people were laid off, and with time on their hands, they started pursuing what they loved! One major favorite is dessert businesses; whether it’s chocolate-covered strawberries, chocolate smash boxes, cake pops, donuts, and many more. Desserts became a medium to connect families and friends that were distanced from one another.

Every successful business requires a great digital marketing strategy!

If you are a small business specializing in desserts, keep reading to find out how your business can skyrocket through a solid digital marketing strategy.

Secret Ingredients to Success for Dessert Businesses

1. Measure your current success

Creating digital marketing is extremely important as it helps you set the direction you want your firm to lead in the future. It involves a series of actions that the firms need to take and consider which channels the company should use to achieve its strategy; however, before a digital marketing strategy is set, the firm needs to analyze its current business success.
For instance, if your firm solely depends on social media, there are a couple of tools that you can utilize to check how you are currently doing like:

If you use Instagram, then a convenient tool would be Instagram Insights because it allows you to analyze your content, activity in terms of engagement, and audience, which is the demographics that engage in your content.
If you use Facebook, then a convenient tool would be Facebook Analytics because it also allows you to track your audience, see engagement with your Facebook page and track your performance.
If you are a small dessert business that utilizes more than two social media accounts, please check out this blog!

2. Identify your Goals

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Now that you have evaluated your business analytics, you need to set your goals. Goals need to be extremely specific as they will help you decide what explicit action plans you have to achieve your goals.

Goals can either be short-term (ranging between 0-6 months), or you can have a long-term goal (6 months +).

For instance, if you just started an at-home bakery where you sell donuts, cakes and cake pops from the comfort of your home, here is an example of what your goals may look like: (*disclaimer* this is purely and example for explanation purposes)

Short- Term Goals:

Within three months, I want to have 30 cake orders per month.
Within four months, I want to have at least 350 followers on Instagram.

Long-Term Goals

Within 7 months, I want to have 45 donut orders per month.
Within 8 months, I want to have at least 1000 followers on Instagram and 1000 followers on Facebook.
Within 9 months, I want to make enough profit so that I could donate 5% of it to a local charity nearby.

*Tip: make sure that your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely).

3. Create a Digital Fingerprint

When you have an online business, no matter the size, the main goal is the get sales, right? The problem is that you are not the only one doing it. GoDaddy, the giant of web hosting platforms, says that last year, just between February to April, they increased 48% on new users making their websites. Because of Covid19, more people than ever are deciding to jump into entrepreneurship and have their E-commerce. This means more competition no matter what product you are trying to sell, and that is why having a digital fingerprint is so essential, and the best way you can do it is by making a Webpage.

Why having a webpage is so important?

Because 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying any product, you need a place where they can easily find information about your business. What you sell and why, who are you, your product, reviews from previous buyers to bring that extra credibility to your brand and could convert a visitor into a client.

A professional-looking website is not a luxury anymore but an essential part of your E-commerce if you want it to succeed.

Google My Business

Google My Business is one of the best and easiest ways to provide visibility to your E-commerce so it can be found online.
With a few clicks, you can set it up totally free, list your business location on Google Maps and local search results and gain reviews from customers that already got your product/service

Google My Business is critical since the digital world is changing into a fast-phase buying model. more and more people buy online using their phones. They do little researches on the type of product/service they want to get, and Google My Business will automatically show first the best-rated and optimized business nearby.

4. Focus on your Unique Selling Position

You may have heard of Emirates, Airbnb, HelloFresh, and Tiffany & Co, but why? Well, because they all have a unique selling position (also referred to as a unique selling point), a particular characteristic of their business stands out from the rest. A unique selling position is an essential part of a marketing campaign because it is a foundational activity to help you achieve your strategy. As a small dessert business, you need to pinpoint your unique selling point and start focusing all your efforts on it.

A few ways to narrow down your unique selling point are:

Narrow down your target audience: this will help you focus all your efforts on a particular audience that would be interested in purchasing your product. Additionally, when the target audience’s characteristics have been defined, it will become easier for you to connect with the audience that they best understand and provide your product in a way that benefits them.
Explain what problem you solve: As a dessert business, you are fulfilling social/hunger needs! With desserts, people can connect from distances. Additionally, if you offer delivery services, you have even solved transportation for those that find it difficult.
List what is something unique that you offer that no one does: There are many small dessert businesses in the market, so you have to make sure that your business stands out from the rest. How can you do that:
- Create an exclusive flavor of the month: This will make it hard for competition to copy you and will attract people to your business. For instance, for Fall, you offer pumpkin-spiced donuts!

Have a members-club: where your customers can enjoy exclusive benefits. If customers sign up for a membership, they can get specific discounts, package promotions, and many more benefits!
- Offer same-day delivery/ next-day delivery/free delivery: Would your competitors provide these options? If not, then go for it! The more convenient your business is, the more likely you will gain more customers.
- Have contests so that consumers can win free sweet treats or even discount coupons! This will allow your business to stand out and help build customer loyalty too!
- Focus on your branding: What is your packaging like? What about your logo? The design of your sweet treats? All these components are essential; they differentiate an average business from a great one. If you have aesthetic packaging, customers are more likely to come back. If you can customize your donuts for events like birthdays, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and other events, you are more likely to be remembered.

5. Research your competition

When you are starting your online business, you need to keep in mind that, most likely, a lot of people followed the same steps before you.
All these people are your competition. If they started their online business long before you and still running, they probably already improved their webpages, optimized their SEO, and built their audiences on social networks. Perhaps they even run ads you maximize their sales.
Once you have your product/service defined, you can google and search for other businesses selling the same thing.

First, check locally; Are you selling cakes in Toronto, so long-distance deliveries are not an option? If you type “buy cakes,” Google My Business will automatically show you all the businesses doing it around your location. For more detail, you can also click on the map and check exactly a specific area.

Check their reviews and what people liked and disliked about their product. See if there is something that you could implement to make your product unique compared to the others and if what people disliked is something that you could be doing and maybe didn’t realize so far.

Check the webpages of the first results on Google.

Is the webpage loading fast? A fast loading speed will rank your SEO higher. Meanwhile, a slow loading speed will make almost every possible buyer leave your webpage.

Do you find that the user experience (UX) is acceptable? To know if their (UX) is good, you need to check the webpage as if you were a regular visitor and see if it is easy to navigate. See if it’s visually appealing, and all the pictures and information on that webpage make you trust the product and want to buy it.

Check their social networks

We will talk in more detail about social networks later on but is one of the best ways to also gain trust from potential customers by bringing engaging and valuable content to the table that helps to build your organic traffic and the branding of your business.

With this said, it’s important that you check the type of content that they are creating for their social networks, so you can see what is actually more engaging for their type of audience that most likely will be similar to yours.

Check when they are posting and how many times they do, do they rely only on organic content, or they also do sponsored one?

You need to try to find out what type of people are following them and why. Research the weak and strong points of your competitors to find out business opportunities open for your business in the current market. Emulate and improve their results for your business, giving those extra unique details, that will help you beat them, or at least position yourself better as a new strong brand.

6. Content is King, invest on it

Yeah, we all heard this sentence way too often, but at the end of the day is true. When you decide to start your own small E-commerce, you need to rely on online traffic to bring sales to your precious business if you want it to be profitable, and social networks have the potential to bring millions of views to your product and to your webpage where they could eventually buy your product.

To put this into perspective, just using Facebook and Instagram, there were almost 4.000 million active users by January 2021.

How to build and increase my audience?

In the first place, you need to bring value to social network users, something that makes them want to follow, like, and share your content. You need to give first if you want to receive.

Schedule your content and be consistent on when and what you post. If you already have created the branding for your business is important to follow your own guideline and keep making posts similarly and consistently.
Be active! Keep in mind that you don’t want other media users to see you as just another brand. Reply to your comments, like and comment on other people with similar interests, and answer to every message that doesn’t look like spam.
Be creative with your content. This is related to bringing value but is the main thing you need to work on since your content is the ultimate expression of who you are and your brand towards people on social networks. Everyone makes content since almost all of those 4.000 million users we mentioned before, post something from time to time. But you, as an owner of an online business, have the duty of creating appealing, interesting, imaginative, amazing even, content that surprises people. Give them a positive emotion, a little dopamine rush, or surprise them with something they have never seen before, and they most likely will like, share and subscribe to you.

7. Social Media is your icing on top!

Creating a social media strategy is equally important as your overall strategy because social media is how your business can interact with its potential customers. Did you know that approximately 3.96 billion people use social media? Just think of all the potential customers that could find your dessert business and order sweet treats!

Here are some tips to master your social media strategy and allow your dessert business to reach new heights:

Use trending hashtags: Hashtags will help your dessert business gain more visibility. They are allowing you to share your sweet treats with everyone! To find out trendy hashtags for Instagram, check out: Influencer Marketing Hub.

Add emotions to your content: When you add emotions to your content, you are adding a human element to your brand. For example, if you are selling cake pops and chocolate-covered strawberries for an anniversary, make a post with the story behind the process and add lots of colors to attract your customer!

No one ever made a decision with numbers, they made it with a story! – Dan Kahneman

This ties into the emotions in your content. Customers are more likely to buy from a desserts business that shows emotion, tells stories, and genuinely cares!

(*Tip: do not forget to add emoticons!)

For more social media strategy tips click here.

8. SEO is your best friend for gaining organic traffic

Ok, so you got your webpage running, established your social networks, and you are making good content, but metrics show that not many people are reaching your webpage from search results? That means that you need to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

When you type for example “buy desserts” there are approx 398.000.000 results, but the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years. It doesn’t mean that you need to be the first, but if you want to higher up your chances of getting clicks on your webpage, you need to aim to be one of the first results. Let’s be honest, have you ever scrolled down, let’s say 20 pages, to find a webpage with desserts?

Photo by **Leonardo Saraceni** on Pinterest

-How to improve your SEO score

Start your own blog: Having a blog is one of the most efficient ways to improve your SEO, and it’s totally free. It helps Google to see that your webpage is active, it retains people on your webpage for a longer time and if you post relevant content that follows the user intent, like for example, if you post a guide called “how to make the best cupcake ever in 20 minutes”, it will pair with the user intent of “how to make a cupcake”. Keep in mind that people use Google for pretty much everything, and that is query-based, so it’s important to pair what people search with what you want them to find!
Improve your webpage loading speed: We mentioned before that having a slow loading speed (or just not loading at all), would discourage most, if not all, of the viewers that reach your webpage, but it will also give you a pretty bad SEO score from Google since they aim for a better user experience using their search engine.
Make sure that your webpage is well optimized for mobile phone users: Around 54.46% of the users of Google search stuff through their phone
Optimize your URLs: Long links are not user-friendly. People prefer short and catchy URLs that are made up of a few easy-to-understand words. For more information on how to optimize your URL click here

Note: There are many other ways to improve your SEO and is, in fact, an ever-ending battle with Google, but is a worthy one, since is the best way you, can step by step, improve the visibility of your business through search results.

There is no better way to bring people together than Desserts – Gail Simmons

To be a bit more realistic we are going to conduct a strategic analysis for 2 dessert businesses in Canada.

Strategic Analysis

MethsLab

Goals:

Short- Term Goals:
- To have 25 orders per month.
Long-Term Goals:
- To have 5k Instagram Reel views by the end of 2021.
- To have 3,000 followers by the end of 2021.
- To be able to give back to charities and shelter homes by Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Buyer Persona:

Male and Female
18-30 years old

Strategy:

We made a To-do list with all the steps that you should follow step by step to help your business to increase its visibility, reach and sales :

1. Create a webpage

Since your business is pretty new, we would set the basis for its future success by getting a webpage that will be the center of all the online traffic we want to direct to maximize your sales. It’s pretty cheap and easy to make your webpage and have it working in no time. You can go to NameCheap or Godaddy, among others, to have your domain and hosting done.

2. Establish your branding

We need to establish what is your brand, and why is it different from others. Set a branding guideline that will establish your presence on the market in a way that, in the long run, customers will distinguish you from the competitors. When you hear from a brand that people remember or instantly recognize, that brings trust to it, and trust will increase your sales.

3. Sign in to Google My Business

This will help you to start building your digital fingerprint, the same way as the webpage does, and is another of the first steps that we should follow since is free. It will help you to reach local potential customers, and you will start getting reviews that will get you credibility and insight into what your customers think about your product. Once MethsLab creates their website, they can utilize SEO tools to help achieve their goals!

4. Start a blog linked to your webpage

A blog as we mentioned before, will help you improve the SEO of your webpage, and I think that in your type of business a lot of people would be interested in seeing how you make your desserts. Video tutorials of you dipping strawberries into chocolate, showing new yummy recipes, a way to show the quality of your products, the whole process until the final results…It’s a win-win idea that brings so much value to the table and will help you to convert viewers into customers. Also, from the COVID point of view, it is nice if you show on your videos how you follow all the safety measures, to gain some extra trust from possible customers.

5. Do proper research of your competitors

Follow the steps mentioned before on point 5)

6. Few tips to improve your content on social media

You should post video tutorials or new recipes for your stories and general content on Instagram.

You got beautiful pictures of your products on Instagram, and all you need is more valuable content that people want to follow, like, and share. That’s why investing in more BTS, tutorials, and recipes, in general, will bring you great results.

Once you increase your followers and improve a bit your content, consider doing collaborations with other dessert-related accounts and giveaways of your product in exchange for sharing your content and asking friends to like it. we wouldn’t miss a chance to get some sweet treats, and pretty sure a lot of people think the same!

GoldenSugar.Confections

Goals:

Short-Term Goals:
- “Since we are still fairly new our short term goals mostly consist of making a profit or at least breaking even. Also to enhance our customer service and culinary skills as we continue”.
Long-Term Goals:
- “We would like to invest in more equipment and products. We plan on looking at grants and other ways to expand our inventory and materials”.

Buyer Persona:

Mostly women between 25-65

Strategy

We made a To-do list with all the steps that you should follow step by step to help your business to increase its visibility, reach and sales :

1. Create a webpage

Since your business is pretty new, I would set the basis for its future success by getting a webpage that will be the center of all the online traffic we want to direct to maximize your sales. It’s pretty cheap and easy to make your webpage and have it working in no time. You can go to NameCheap or Godaddy, among others, to have your domain and hosting done.

2. Establish your branding

3. Sign in to Google My Business

This will help you to start building your digital fingerprint, the same way as the webpage does, and is another of the first steps that we should follow since is free. will help you to reach local potential customers, and you will start getting reviews that will get you credibility and insight into what your customers think about your product.

4. Start a blog linked to your webpage

A blog as we mentioned before, will help you improve the SEO of your webpage, and I think that in your type of business a lot of people would be interested in seeing how you make your desserts. Video tutorials of you dipping strawberries into chocolate, showing new yummy recipes, a way to show the quality of your products, the whole process until the final results…It’s a win-win idea that brings so much value to the table and will help you to convert viewers into customers. Also, from the Covid point of view, it is nice if you show on your videos how you follow all the safety measures, to gain some extra trust from possible customers.

5. Do proper research of your competitors

Follow the steps mentioned before on point 5)

6. Few tips to improve your content on social media

You have “reviews” and “Behind the scenes” and that is nice, but you haven’t update them for 14 and 18 weeks. You should keep updating it and perhaps follow the idea we told you for the blog, and post video tutorials or new recipes for your stories and general content on Instagram.

Consider making your videos with sound, showcasing your product, or small captions since a lot of people don’t read the description. Similar to what you do on your stories but all the videos you post^^

Try to be more consistent with your posting Schedule

We hope that with all these steps your business will skyrocket and reach for the sky!

References

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/brand-guidelines/?&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=search1gbnbstyleguidedsa&utm_targetid=dsa-1117992151117&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3duCBhCAARIsAJeFyPUF5Jnelio2VGL-Bh1c3Jna21Eu0hrMjksQEV4xbWceHOA7TmCdJf8aAhkgEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.oberlo.com/blog/social-media-marketing-statistics

https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-best-practices/?kw=&cmp=ES_SRCH_DSA_Blog_Core_BU_EN&label=dsa_pagefeed&Network=g&Device=c&utm_content=484830586038&kwid=aud-296306606620:dsa-1057183189195&cmpid=11797550072&agpid=123169847188&BU=Core&extid=167368518357&adpos=&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3duCBhCAARIsAJeFyPWGkEkikf6d5sJsvjFJg3PF28gkI2_2nNGm3vS78PuqiAHTc1u-5RIaAkS-EALw_wcB

https://backlinko.com/social-media-users

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm

https://mktoolboxsuite.com/unique-selling-proposition-examples/

https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/social-media-marketing-tips

https://www.oncrawl.com/oncrawl-seo-thoughts/10-tips-to-optimize-your-urls/

SEO best practices for ecommerce: how to improve your website performance

Written by: Sedal Samir who is a recent Global Management graduate from Ryerson University and a Content Market Analyst at the International Institute of Digital Marketing ™

Written by: Alejandro Álvarez Silva, Digital Marketing Analyst at The Digital Marketing Institute Worlwide™.