Gourmet Food Product Marketing Plans

A well-developed and implemented marketing plan is crucial to your gourmet food product business success. Marketing is necessary to find and entice customers to buy your gourmet food. Without customers, you don't have a business. To create an effective plan, you need to know your products, understand your customers and deliver marketing strategies to your market.

Step 1
Define what is unique about your gourmet food business. Marketing is about differentiating yourself from the competition. Your business can be different on a variety of factors including price, service and location. For example, your gourmet food business might cater to the frugal crowd. Or maybe you offer home delivery.

Step 2

Determine your target market. While many people may want gourmet food, you need to identify the sub-groups of people that are the most likely to buy your gourmet food. Develop a profile of your ideal customer based on gender, socio-economic status and interests. You can do this by surveying your current customers about how they found you and why they buy from you. Based on what makes your business unique, you can identify groups of people ideal for your business, as well. For example, busy people with good incomes would probably be a market for a gourmet food delivery service.

Step 3
Discover where your target market hangs out. Identify the places they go, magazines they read and websites they visit. This information can be found through the survey done to learn about your target market in Step 2.

 

Step 4

Determine what motivates your market to buy, and craft marketing messages that taps into their motivation. Focus your message on the benefits your customers receive by buying from you. For example, if your target market loves gourmet food but doesn't have time to shop for and prepare it, and you offer prepared food and delivery, your marketing messages need to talk about how your service provides gourmet food without the time or fuss.

 

Step 5

Use marketing strategies that place your marketing message where your market will read it. Use the information about where your market hangs out to decide where to place your message. If your market reads the food section of your local paper, place an ad or write an article for that section.

 

Step 6

Track your marketing results. You don't want to waste your time or money on marketing tactics that don't work. Get the most bang for your marketing buck by weeding out ineffective marketing to focus on the strategies that generate the most results.

 

Source : azcentral - by Leslie Truex, Demand Media