Digital Marketing Strategy For Bakeries

This blog explains how to create brand awareness to attract more customers and increase sales for bakeries through digital marketing.

Let’s start from the beginning.

You opened your bakery.

The smell of bread baking in the oven draws customers in from the street.

French chansons in the background, a cozy atmosphere, a fresh ambiance.

You thought of every detail to satisfy your clients.

But something misses if you don’t really exist in the digital world.

Your rivals get extra orders from the Internet. They receive a huge interest on their social media accounts. There is always a queue when they promote a sale.

How do they succeed? Where should you start to create your existence or make it more noticeable? What should be your strategy in this digital world?

Here are the ingredients for your digital marketing strategy.

The Importance Of Strategic Planning:

Before baking you need a recipe. Before you start a business you need a plan.

Strategic planning is the managerial process of establishing the organization’s objectives and then determining how to achieve them. 

If the organization can anticipate future events by analyzing the internal and external conditions, this leads to long-run profitability and growth. It can also protect the resources and helps to be ready for the coming threats.

The digital world is different from the physical one but the strategies are similar.

Real World vs. Digital World

When you open your store, you prepare the displays to show your products and signs for your store. You can exist in the digital world by opening a Google My Business account and locating your store in their maps.

In the real world, you open new branches if you decide to reach more customers while in the digital world you can increase the number of channels and your digital existence in social media to reach different users to promote your shop.

You use budget tools to analyze your sales to define your financial strength and to plan your future. In the digital world, you use analytics and software to analyze the success and effectiveness of your actions.

While you decorate your physical store with more lights and attractive furniture to attract customers while in the digital world, you use visuals and videos to attract followers.

All of these actions should be planned in the beginning and conducted in a proper strategy to achieve success.

How To Create A Digital Marketing Plan?

Every company has its own characteristics so its strategic plan is shaped due to its organization and goals.

But every plan should contain some elements.

First of all, the organization should decide its goals. 

Define Your Goals!

For bakery shops, it ranges from creating brand awareness to attracting more customers and increasing its sales. 

If you know your goals, you can decide the right path you will follow for your digital existence and trace its limits.

For example, you can create a corporate website to maintain the brand awareness of your bakery where your customers can learn about your store and see the visuals of bread or other pastry, but also you can develop it into an e-commerce website where you can sell products online.

Find Your Target Audience!

It’s also important to decide your target audience and find ways to reach them.

Who are your customers? Where do they live? What is the frequency of their purchase? 

Normally it takes time to get all this information, it comes with an experience and history of sales. But in the digital world, it’s easier to reach this information instantly with certain digital tools such as Google Analytics that help to learn how visitors engage with the websites.

Advertising Is Important!

Finally, you can develop advertising campaigns for your business to increase profitability. You can optimize your website for search engines or use Google Ads to attract more visitors.

With the aid of digital tools, you can identify the trends to attract and hold your customers’ attention. This will help you also to analyze and improve your performance in the future.

Now, let’s give more details.

Setting Your Digital Marketing Goals

There is a famous acronym for defining your goals, it’s called S.M.A.R.T.

It defines the nature of every goal and what aspects we should consider while defining our goals.

Our goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound.

We will give some examples of each kind of goal to understand better how we develop step by step our S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Steps for a S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

• Example of a specific goal for digital marketing strategy:

Increase the daily number of visitors of our website while enriching the content and promoting it on our social media accounts.

• Example of a measurable goal for digital marketing strategy:

Increase the number of visitors of our website by 1000 users per day, by enriching the content with three blog articles per week and promoting it on our Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin accounts.

• Example of an achievable goal for digital marketing strategy:

Increase the number of visitors of our website by 1000 users per week, by enriching the content with one blog article about bakery per week and promoting it on our Instagram and Facebook accounts.

• Example of a relevant goal for digital marketing strategy:

Increase the number of visitors of our website by 1000 users per week, by enriching the content with one blog article about bakery per week and promoting it on our Instagram and Facebook accounts with bread visuals to attain a brand awareness about our shop and products and attract new customers to increase our sales.

• Example of a time-bound goal for digital marketing strategy:

Increase the number of visitors of our website by 1000 users per week for the last quarter of 2021, by enriching the content with one blog article about bakery per week until 2022 and promoting it on our Instagram and Facebook accounts with bread visuals starting from October 2021, to attain a brand awareness about our shop and products and attract new customers to increase our sales.

As you define your goals clearly, it will be easier to measure and achieve them.

Using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

There are many tools to measure the success or profitability of your plan.

These indicators and metrics will help you to increase the performance of your digital existence by analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and optimizing your channels of communication.

What are key performance indicators?

If you opened a website for your bakery, you would like to learn how many visitors have seen your website, if they read the whole content, if they looked at your visuals or products lists, if they entered the purchase process, and so on.

Today we have several tools implementing the performance of websites or applications. Many templates come with analytics plug-ins and you just need to open dashboards and analyze what you need.

With the aid of these tools, you can find the number of visitors coming first to your website (unique visitors), how many of them have engaged with your content or purchased your products (new leads or qualified leads) or the return of your investment (ROI) so they are not only a follow-up tool for the performance of your strategy but also your supporters to understand and define your audience.

How To Promote Your Bakery In a Digital World?

If you define your goals clearly, implement your ideas with a digital existence using your website or social media accounts and get help from analytics tools to measure performance or get the information needed for forecasting, then it’s time to defeat your weaknesses and optimize your communication channels.

You have two options, you can use your internal resources or use external tools.

Internal Resources

The first option is to develop your owned and earned media.

You can enrich your content, increase the number of visuals or elements, publish weekly informative articles about the benefits of sourdough or gluten-free diets, transform your website in a friendly user way or optimize it for mobile phones.

You can publish daily content on your social media accounts such as reel videos or display advertisements. You can also organize baking workshops or giveaways and promote them on these accounts to engage your followers with comments, likes, or shares.

Finally, you can optimize the performance of your content with SEO tools to display them efficiently in search engines.

External Resources

Another option is to use paid media.

You can get help from Google Ads to promote in users’ search results or publish social media advertisements on Instagram or Facebook.

Radio advertisement is also beneficial for small businesses like bakeries since they are cheaper compared to TV commercials. Also, you can invite social media influencers to your store or work with them to share your promotion packs on their accounts.

To Learn More:

Well, this is our short recipe for digital marketing strategy of your bakery.

To learn more about digital marketing or work with professionals for your business plans, you can visit the IIDM website.

If you need an in to the big and famous of the world wide web and how to utilize it for fresh marketing, IIDM is for you.