Your business is specialty food. Mine is words. Together, we can tell great stories to grow your business! Here’s how…

Stories Taste Good

Successful marketing recipes for specialty food makers

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How to use stories to replace the hard-sell in your food marketing!

If you don’t like hard-hitting sales pitching in your marketing, I’m with you. That’s why I’m a firm believer in stories as a powerful way to engage readers, connect with them, and bring them to your brand.

Sharing stories is a more natural approach to building a relationship with your customers. In a restaurant, for example, your marketing is a direct outgrowth of the warmth and hospitality you extend to your customers on-site.

But what I hear from clients is that they don’t know what stories to tell. They feel like they don’t have any interesting stories, or that they’ll run out of stories after a week or so.

And that’s when I share my “secret” for food businesses who want to use story marketing.

Well, actually, I have more than one “secret,” but this is the most important one:

It’s not about you. You need to shift your perspective to approaching story marketing from your customer’s point-of-view. Sometimes we’re all too close to our own products to really know what makes them great. This is the time to step back and look through your customer’s eyes.

What might they be interested in? Think about what they don’t know about your restaurant, your food product, your farm, your partners and purveyors, even your cattle and pigs (if appropriate).

How is a product prepared? How are the ingredients sourced? Where did the idea come from for this new dish?

Your stories don’t have to be dramatic or life-altering. A simple human interest story works just as well.

And for social media, you get a nice feedback loop built in; as you share different types of stories, you can quickly see which ones get shared more often, which ones garner comments, and then tailor new stories based on this info.

Honestly, for foodies, I don’t think you can run out of stories to tell that they’re not interested in!

Here’s another idea: “borrow” stories from your suppliers, customers, employees. If you’re sourcing local produce from a farmer, their stories are also your stories. What crops do they grow? What challenges do they face?

Finally, keep your marketing hat on at all times. Once you are in-the-groove to focus on looking for stories in your business, they will appear everywhere. And with just a little bit of thought, you’ll start to see where these stories should go in the social realm – “oh, perfect for Instagram,” “great Snapchat story,” “let’s tweet these daily specials.”

Stories have always been a powerful way to grab someone’s attention. Social media and the reach of the Internet means that stories are now being told – and shared – globally. At the same time, the intimacy of storytelling means that they are great for bringing together local communities around shared values or ideas.

If you want help with finding your stories, or more information on how to tell them, here are some ways I can help.

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Micro content: Can you tell a good marketing story in just a few words?

I’ve been reading lately that the 1,000+ word blog post is returning as a marketing tool, and I have to confess that as a writer, I welcome that trend, but am a bit skeptical. Most of my clients are trying to squeeze big stories into small bites of content – and that’s not always easy.

Here are some suggestions to help create effective marketing with limited words.

I always start by writing out everything I know about the product or service or idea I’m marketing. It’s a brain dump of everything I know or have researched, combined with info from the client. This free-flowing writing covers who the target audience is, the goal for the copy, the features (and those all-important benefits), what makes the product/service unique in the marketplace – in other words, all the traditional tools of Marketing 101!

In addition, I like to do some competitive research to see how others are describing a similar product or service in the marketplace, just to get a feel for what else is out there.

The next step is to think in terms of the context of where the content is to be used. Does it need to grab attention on a grocery shelf? Stand out amidst a thousand tweets? Work with images in a video?

The “venue” for the content can affect your choice for word placement as well as length. You may be restricted just by where the content is placed – Twitter or AdWords, for example – or you may be constrained by the real estate of a physical package, flyer, or brochure.

Something else to consider: Is the copy supporting other content that is nearby? So for example, if you’re writing product copy for the front of a package, is there a back panel that you can use to expand the main idea? A website you’re sending folks to that can tell the story more fully?

After I get everything I can think of on the page, I’ll go through and look for common themes to determine what the most important points are.

I always look for the one main idea in the content, which is usually the biggest problem we’re solving for our audience. Especially in short content, it’s important to keep your eye on this prize – the power of one main idea.

From there, I’ll start writing much shorter variations, probably two to three paragraphs each; I’m starting to distill the information into more manageable chunks with fewer distractions from my main idea.

As I edit and edit and edit, I ask myself if the words that I’m choosing are essential, if they’re communicating the message, and if they’re encouraging action. (Bonus points if call-to-action is stated in the tone or style of the piece or includes keywords!)

This can be a time-consuming process but it’s so important. It’s not enough to edit for only word length, change a paragraph to a sentence, or even a semi-sentence. These few precious words must still accomplish the goals before I send draft off to client.

If not, well, I keep fiddling with the words until it’s right. Keep in mind: one main idea and clear CTA can go a long way to achieving the best outcome. Sometimes I get down to more than one “best” option and then send to the client for a final decision.

These “short” content projects sometimes feel like walking on a tightrope! My vote is to always be thankful when you have lots of words to tell your story, and be extra judicious when words are short.

 

 

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One restaurant, multiple locations, separate Facebook pages? Oh my!

How to use story marketing to manage multiple Facebook pages for one restaurant

kale salad - CopyFrom a social media perspective, a restaurant should have its own business page. But what if you have more than one location in a city? Each location needs its own business page and its own posts. Even with the same cuisine offerings at each restaurant, each location is still likely to have its own “flavor,” depending on the audience it attracts. And of course, there may be varied hours from location to location, and menu specials may change from day to day, too. But that may seem like a lot of work!

Here’s my recommendation. Create a framework of stories around the food that you offer, the ingredients featured, the preparations, the “secret” sauces, the background of your cuisine, your choices for sourcing, etc. And then I would rotate through a series of posts across each restaurant in a different week, so that no two restaurants are posting the same stories each week. Make a monthly plan – create a series of stories that will be posted in Location 1 the first week, Location 2 the second week, etc. The next set of stories will start in Location 1 during week 2, and then round-robin around to other locations.

Flying Biscuit2Finally, look for ways to tell similar stories throughout the year in different formats – and different channels. One quarter might have a blog post on a particular dish you’re known for, next quarter features the same dish in here’s-how-we-make-it video form, another quarter might offer Instagram photos from customers enjoying the dish.

As always, bottom line is there are multiple stories to be told and many formats in which to tell them. 

Just starting out? My advice is to start with a strategy – set your goals – then create a calendar that features overall themes you want to touch on in your social media. Remember that as seasons change, your offerings may change as well, so there’s another opportunity for more stories!

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Curating content – how to find stories to share

digitally generated laptop on a wooden table with Content curation graphic. Screen graphics are made up.
digitally generated laptop on a wooden table with Content curation graphic. Screen graphics are made up.

There are a hundred places to find stories within your own business. But sometimes it’s also nice to share content that you haven’t generated yourself. One way to do this is by curating content, which is basically finding information and stories published by other people that you think would be of interest to your clients, customers, followers, and friends.

So how do you find this content? Well, you could do it by sifting through hundreds of of online articles to find stories that make sense for your business or your customers. But that would take hours!

Google Alerts, for those who haven’t used them, is a simple tool that asks Google to send you daily stories and articles based on a keyword that you pick. You set a Google alert and then each day, Google will send you everything it can find on your topic. Some results are completely off base, some are spot on, and some are meh, maybe.

But here’s the thing. Sometimes even the ones that you don’t want to share with others spark a story about your own business. Here’s an example: Right now, I have a Google Alert set for “potatoes” and in my feed today are links to articles about:

  • a food truck called Spud Nation,
  • three or four recipe that use potatoes,
  • a potato shortage in Australia,
  • an overnight potato face mask,
  • how researchers are using drones to find virus-infected potatoes, and
  • how to use cauliflower as a low-carb substitute for mashed potatoes.

As you can see, a wide variety – and this is just from one day. And I mostly don’t look at the alerts daily, instead looking at a week’s worth in one focused session.

You can cancel a Google Alert if it’s not producing anything you can use.

You can also use a phrase – I have another alert set for “sustainable farm” – which in addition to the main term, also yields results for sustainable + agriculture, organic + farm, so Google Alerts – just like in a regular search – is smart enough to send me results that are “related” to the original term.

The other way to utilize content curation is to take the idea from the story and adapt it to your business. So if you’re a farmer who produces potatoes, you could share the story about an overnight potato face mask “as-is,” but then provide a favorite potato recipe of your own instead of sharing one of the stories from the alert.

Using Google Alerts to curate content is just one of many tools you can use. I am always looking at new ways to find stories and automate the process of sharing them without spending hours or costing thousands! I’ll keep you updated.