The present Covid situation has reinforced us in adopting a healthier lifestyle option. Believe it or not. The food that we cook using organic groceries gives an extra edge of deliciousness to our palate and has numerous benefits to your health. With the rising demand for organic food, many small entrepreneurs are plunging into the organic grocery business. Having this in mind, if you are among the one who is constantly striving to implement digital marketing strategies for your organic grocery store, then certainly the digital marketing proposal and plan would be essential for your organic grocery store.
Structure of Digital marketing plan
1. Keep an eye on your current brand positioning
Analysing and measuring the business’s current success/failure rate is highly crucial as it highlights your brand positioning. Be it a newbie in the organic grocery or already running your show in the market for a few years, it is always good to perform a SWOT analysis on your organic grocery store business. It provides the whole picture of the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats involved in your organic business.
2. Analysis of your competitors
Conducting a competitor analysis is equally important to keep the focus on your competitor’s business tactics and current digital marketing strategies employed for organic groceries. Thanks to the current technology. Analyzing your competition is made much easier by a few business intelligence tools available in market.
3. Your Target audience
Performing an in-depth analysis of who your consumers are going to be is extremely crucial to achieve successful digital marketing strategies. Bear in mind to broaden your digital marketing scope to varied consumer segments too.
Demographic: Home-cooked consumers, Fitness consumers, Consumers leading sustainable life, Parents providing healthy food to children, GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) -Free Consumers
Age group: 18 years and above
Income group: Mid to High-Level Income
Gender: All types of Gender
Socio-economic group: Multicultural, Educated people (more aware of health benefits of organic groceries)
4. Consumer Purchasing cycle
In order to evaluate the purchasing behaviour of organic consumers, one must understand the following
- Why do consumers purchase organic groceries?
Consumers mainly purchase organic groceries for the following reasons
- To reap the health benefits.
- Eat organic produce with fewer pesticides.
- They are more nutritious and tasty.
- Helps in the formation of stronger future generations as per a study done by Environmental Working Group.
- Purchase as consumers concern about Environment.
- How do customers purchase organic groceries?
- When do consumers buy the products?
- Where do the consumers buy them?
5. Set Realistic goals and objectives
Based on the benchmark set by your competitors, your business’s SWOT analysis, target audience, and buying persona, you can set a few realistic short and long-term goals and deadlines to achieve your digital marketing objectives. Example :
Short-term goal: Gaining 1000 subscribers for your youtube channel within 6 months.
Long-term goal: Increase your ROI by 20% by the year-end.
6. Unique Selling Proposition
Unique Selling Proposition is generally why people are particularly buying from you. Here are a few tips on defining your USPs
- Organic, sustainability, and certified organic labels are the key USPs when it comes to marketing your niche business. For instance, devising USPs on “Eat Healthy organic foods that have no toxic impact to the environment “. This creates a powerful impact on the health and environmental-conscious propositions among your audience.
- The USPs can be set on by analyzing your consumer’s pain points and their valuable feedback and reviews. To address price as one of the concerning pain points, you can incorporate discount coupons, bundled offers for the groceries, or bulk purchasing at cheaper rates or offering free shipping options.
- Watch out for the unique customer needs that have not been addressed by your competitors. Example: Showcasing your transparency level in your organic certified labels, sourcing stages and packaging does matter for environmentally conscious consumers.
7. Digital Marketing Channels and Strategies
1. Content Marketing
Website, Blogs
Firstly, setting up and optimising your website plays a prime role in bringing organic traffic to your grocery business. For an instance, why not create a CO2 neutral website to create brand loyalty and improve the search rankings?
Focus on creating compelling and unique storytelling content and videos around the idea of how your organic groceries are beneficial to the consumers. You can exhibit your landing web pages directing to the local farmers who were responsible for the organic produce, thus increasing your brand loyalty. Creating blogs on topics and videos centralizing on organic foods, not only builds brand awareness but can convert the leads into customers.
Having your business registered in Google My Business increases the chance of brand visibility and expansion of the customer base. The free-of-charge service serves as a great platform for connecting with your customers and gaining valuable insights about your customer profile information.
2. Social Media Marketing
A Savvy social media marketing strategy will certainly bring your brand to new heights. The main distribution channels that can be employed as a part of your social media marketing are as follows
E-Mail Marketing
Sending out e-mail newsletters by focusing on featured produce of the week or month helps to reach your audience faster. How about emails being sent to spin a few emotional storytelling concepts that lie beyond the organic produce or maybe a recipe blog? Additionally, The e-mail strategies can also focus on the call to action, by announcing offers to the consumers.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest
These platforms work great for spreading your organic and sustainable business messages. Making announcements on your seasonal organic produce, new seasonal recipes blog release, discount coupons or giveaways can be done on Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Secondarily, building up an organic grocery community on these platforms are certainly going to grow your consumers. In addition to this, you can collect their feedback, needs and act accordingly in your business strategy. How about scheduling live webinars or virtual consultations to connect up among the farmers, consumers, and yourself to clarify the consumer’s queries regarding the produce? Sounds fine?
On the contrary, Pinterest is an excellent digital channel for pinning the images of your weekly/monthly featured organic products, and also conducting contests in such a platform helps in interacting with your potential leads.
Paid Ads Campaigns
Firstly, engaging in sponsored google ads with your captivating content can work wonders in bringing traffic to your website and landing pages. Ads containing the call to action to grab the bundled organic produce offers before the countdown goes off serve as an exemplar. It is always better to incorporate eco-friendly ads campaigns for brand outreach.
Conversely, creating Facebook ads that highlight any news/ press release related to your business/ product, key unique values/ benefits of the organic produce, and new blog posts helps in driving customer engagement. Through the Instagram ads, rich content about the role of organic grocery and its health benefits can be illustrated in videos and attractive visuals. Furthermore, why not use hashtags to make your ads and business go viral?
3. SEO Strategy
Amplify the Seo strategy strategically in your website and the contents that you create for your other digital channels. Mostly, customers reach your store through the search terms Organic grocery store near me or Best Organic Grocery store (location) eg: Best Organic Grocery Store Orchard Road. So, it is pivotal to mention your location on each and every web page. Needless to mention, include the long-tail keywords in your Title, Page URL and Meta Description. Not to forget to add alternative descriptions for your images in order to improve your ranking in google.
Lastly, Careful consideration of various factors like page speed, page load time, site design plays a major role in the mobile optimization of the website. Similarly, when it comes to writing blogs, generate high-quality content using long-tail keywords and internal and external backlinks.
8. Budget
Clearly, you must set realistic budgets based on auditing your business’s past results such as “Which channel drives more traffic?”, “How much ROI was driven from these channels?”, “Have you reached your goals and key performance indicators?” etc. If you own a small organic grocery store, then you can work on almost minimum budgets by hiring low-cost or freelance SEO specialists, tapping into the free budgeting templates, software, and social media tools. However, if you tend to allocate a larger budget for digital marketing strategies, utilize the benefits of paid software and marketing tools.
9. Measuring the key metrics
While looking into the measurement and metrics, it is highly essential in establishing the key performance indicators. The most common metrics used are Traffic, Mobile Traffic, New / Returning traffic, Traffic Sources, Bounce Rate, ROI, Goal/E-commerce conversion rate. Setting a target for each KPI helps you to measure the success rate of your digital strategies. The usage of several software and tools aids in the facilitation of measuring the KPIs.
Web Analytics- Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster
Social Media Analytics- SimplyMeasured, Facebook insights
SEO Analysis- Google Analytics, Google Search Console
Paid Ads – Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner
E-Marketing- Mailchimp
Conclusion
Lastly, Having these digital marketing tactics and plans will guide you through the journey of successfully obtaining the digital marketing strategies of your organic grocery business. But, Here’s a question for you “What happens if your short-term and long-term goals are not achieved within the deadline”. And that’s where the contingency plans come into effect. Working on revisiting your plans, and devising new channels ideas can help you climb the ladder of success.
BE NICE TO YOURSELF: EAT ORGANIC FOOD
About the Author:
I’m D.Sumithra who is a Digital Marketing Analyst at International Institute of Digital Marketing™.