A food blog is a great way for CPG brands to generate more brand awareness and boost shopper engagement.
As experts at firing up the digital marketing tactics of CPG and Retail brands’ overall shopper marketing strategy, Cliffedge Marketing is happy to share how easy it is to kickstart a food blog and take your brand reach to the next level!
The Benefits of Blogging for CPG Brands
HubSpot found that 70% of B2C brands use blogging to increase their return on investment, promote brand awareness, and establish themselves as an authority in the industry.
While there are plenty of benefits to developing a food and beverage blog for your CPG brand, perhaps the biggest reason you should care is because it gives your customers a reason to regularly engage with your website. Consider these blogging benefits:
3 Reasons to Create a Food Blog for Your F&B Brand:
1. It Gives Customers Context and Added Value
When your customer buys your products, a food blog is a great way to give them context and demonstrate how your product can be used via creative, unique recipes. By making your brand product look appetizing, you give your target audience a reason to make a purchase.
Overall, CPG brand blogs boost shopper engagement and increase brand awareness on your social media platforms by publishing useful, shareable content. To take it one step further: We suggest connecting recipes with special promotional offers or even a sweepstakes or contest.
2. It Boosts Your Website Traffic and Audience
You want to increase visibility on search engines and increase the clickthrough rate on your email marketing campaigns – but how do you get consumers on your page? SEO-friendly recipes drive website traffic and improve time spent on your website – which will grow your audience.
In the same way, your blog helps incentivize shoppers and build brand loyalty among target consumers when they opt-in, subscribe or follow your efforts online.
Research by Express Writers found that websites with blogs have over 400% more indexed pages than a similar website that doesn’t have a blog. Likewise, the data showed that a blog allowed brands to gain up to 97% more links to your web page.
As you can see, the numbers don’t lie which means you should be working on developing quality content on a regular basis.
3. It Encourages Customers to Make a Purchase
To drive online sales, food and beverage brands connect their blog or recipes to their specific products. Now, readers associate your brand with the end result. To do this successfully, link to your products in the recipes themselves and tag products in your social media.
According to Salsify, up to 87% of consumers believe that product content is a very important aspect of deciding to complete a purchase online. The same study found that almost 98% of consumers turned away from a brand because they felt the content was incomplete or incorrect.
So, you’re ready to create a blog – what are the next steps for success?
Luckily, creating and maintaining a food blog doesn’t need to be costly to make a significant impact – it just requires time and consistency. Your consumers crave easily consumable, quality content – can you commit to that?
If the answer is yes, we recommend factoring the following elements into your overall blogging strategy and corresponding budget to ensure you build something that’s both engaging and sustainable long-term:
- Recipe and content creation
- Theme and cadence
- Backend website infrastructure
- Promotional support
Let’s break those elements down a bit further.
How to Create a Food Blog
Step One: Prep the Recipes and Creative Content
For this to work – you have to keep it authentic and utilize the right resources.
Your original content is dependent on recipes that are written well, tested and perfected with your products as the ingredients. By setting a budget and outlining your blog goals, you’ll be able to determine whether this content is coming from an in-house production team or being outsourced to professional chefs or food stylists.
Whichever avenue you take, it’s imperative you capture recipe content via high-quality imagery and, whenever possible, videos. We’re talking about food that showcases your products on your website, social channels and advertising – don’t miss a chance to make it look appetizing!
Don’t forget: When you feature your products on a food blog, be sure to display or explain how they are used in the recipes, and always tag the products on social media to link to your D2C platform. Quality is everything so make sure your in-house production team or outsourced partner is putting your product’s best face forward.
(If you’d like to learn more about partnering with a professional shopper marketing agency to keep things looking fresh, exciting, and on-brand – contact us today.)
Step Two: Select a Theme and Tone for Your Content
It’s time to decide how often you’ll need to create new recipes. You want to create original, quality content as often as possible, but determine the cadence that works for your brand and rely on a content calendar to organize what’s happening and when – and set due dates to keep your team on track.
Next, be sure to keep your food blog on-brand by creating a brand voice that is conveyed in your blog copy. It’s helpful to use your buyer personas as a guide to determine what will capture the attention of your audience. For instance, will this blog be focused on gourmet recipes? Particular types of cuisine? Easy at-home family meals?
At Cliffedge, we know that successful brands know how to make their content count and stay relevant with their audience. Simply put, it’s all about creating content that relates to the products you sell (i.e., a cream cheese product makes sense for baking recipes; barbecue sauce makes sense for grilling recipes.)
Step Three: Dig into the Backend Infrastructure
Websites aren’t just built upon html code – they’re built on user experience and search engine optimization best practices. Based on our experience, here are five of the best features to look for in a recipe plugin for your website:
- User-friendliness and clean navigation – The experience must match user behavior best practices or you risk creating friction for your visitors. When in doubt, keep it simple.
- Seamless integration with your existing website design – In the same way, you don’t want to confuse the visitor by making the blog look and feel differently than the rest of your website. Consistency is key!
- Built-in SEO tools to increase visibility – Search engine optimization (both technical SEO and on-page SEO) will play a critical role in getting you found online, especially among new audiences searching for recipes online. Target the right keywords via an organic SEO strategy.
- Calls to Action to forward the plot – Don’t forget to link to your individual products, offers or perhaps your store locator on each blog. There should be a natural, relevant next action for readers to take every time to keep them engaged.
- Responsive Design and Formatting – Make sure your blog is optimized for all devices – mobile, desktop, tablet, etc. These days, there’s no excuse for not having a seamless experience across all devices and Google expects nothing less.
Step Four: Serve and Enjoy!
Once your blog is created and published, make sure your audience finds it. There are plenty of ways to promote your blog to your existing customers via newsletters, promotions, social media, etc. At Cliffedge, we recommend promoting your new blog with a dedicated ad spend to heighten visibility and awareness – and to grow your blog subscriber list fast.
Your SEO strategy, mentioned earlier, will continue to introduce your blog to your existing audience organically, but by creating ads, you can specifically target your brand’s key markets and retailers.
In our experience, these indicators will help you understand if your food blog is successful at achieving your goals:
- An increase in new audience members/opt-ins
- An increase in online sales growth
- An increase in user sessions on your site
- An improvement in search engine rankings
Start a Food Blog with a Shopper Marketing Agency
Ready to create or optimize your CPG brand blog? Trust our shopper marketing experts to build a food and beverage blog that gets results. Cliffedge Marketing helps you understand how to build content strategies and create innovative media that will allow you to engage with your consumers and build up your brand.
