Creating Your Strategic Content Marketing Plan

09/26/22 • 31 min

Good Food Marketing with The Virginia Foodie

The last 100 days of the year can be crucial for business owners. Not only because it’s the last window for hitting your original sales goals, but also because the end of the year is the perfect time to set up growth plans for the upcoming year.

Although the end of the year is comparatively hectic for food businesses, it is important to review and revise your calendar for the coming year. If you are not sure of what’s supposed to be in your calendar or you’re not certain how to make all your plans become concrete actions, this is where my work as a food marketing consultant comes in.

People come to me for help in planning out their strategies and making sure it's achievable. It doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now. We’ll start from wherever you are now and put in place the pieces that could help you to establish your brand better, communicate your message to the right audience, and make profits. I’ll guide you through the process a step at a time, but the core of your strategy lies in understanding your promotion schedule, campaign cycle, and key brand messaging.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

You want to look at your sales goals, but also review your mission and values first. Make sure that what you set out to do and what you are planning to do are still aligned.
It is okay for an original intention to have lived its life.
Social media is really a reflection of everything else that you're doing to grow your business. They're not separate.
Your social platform should be talking about you, your brands, your community, your partners, your friends, or the cool things you've found— and all of those things should be framed with the intention of your driving a business to a particular destination.
We're going to start where you are. And we are going to grow you into a thriving marketing ecosystem where everything you're doing feeds into something else.

Key Points From This Episode:

The 100-Day Challenge can be your best way to commit yourself to your business and revisit your growth plans to set you up for 2023.
Review and revise your calendar for the coming year.
Making a plan is sometimes overwhelming. But we do not need to start from scratch. In creating a solid strategic content plan, we begin from where you are.
There are three important components of your strategic plan: Promotions, Campaigns, and Messaging. This is the foundation of the content (tactics) that you’ll use in your marketing plan.
It is essential to identify what your brand stands for we communicate the right and purposeful message with every piece of content.
Site updates, email marketing, and social media are some of the best tools to optimize to communicate your brand message.

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

You want to look at your sales goals, but also review your mission and values first. Make sure that what you set out to do and what you are planning to do are still aligned.
It is okay for an original intention to have lived its life.
Social media is really a reflection of everything else that you're doing to grow your business. They're not separate.
Your social platform should be talking about you, your brands, your community, your partners, your friends, or the cool things you've found— and all of those things should be framed with the intention of your driving a business to a particular destination.
We're going to start where you are. And we are going to grow you into a thriving marketing ecosystem where everything you're doing feeds into something else.

Key Points From This Episode:

The 100-Day Challenge can be your best way to commit yourself to your business and revisit your growth plans to set you up for 2023.
Review and revise your calendar for the coming year.
Making a plan is sometimes overwhelming. But we do not need to start from scratch. In creating a solid strategic content plan, we begin from where you are.
There are three important components of your strategic plan: Promotions, Campaigns, and Messaging. This is the foundation of the content (tactics) that you’ll use in your marketing plan.
It is essential to identify what your brand stands for we communicate the right and purposeful message with every piece of content.
Site updates, email marketing, and social media are some of the best tools to optimize to communicate your brand message.

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Previous Episode

Good Food and its Good Goal: Reversing the Climate Crisis

When I speak about good food, I don’t mean the taste. The GOOD FOOD industry revolves around a philosophy: to create food choices that have a positive impact on the environment, the economy, and our local communities.

We are in a climate crisis, and now is the time when good food companies need to step up the game if they want redefine the food market in ways that can get more food into more mouths without killing the planet.

But advocacy alone is not sustainable. Your job as a good food brand is to foster a community of transparency and clarity about what your brand is, what it stands for, and how you're making these decisions about your good food product that you are bringing into the market.

I help small brands communicate their story and their advocacy in ways that are targeted, manageable, and repeatable. When your marketing strategy, your brand, and your messaging, advocacy and philosophy are all in sync—that’s when you start to control your business. And when you’re in control, that’s when you can really make change.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

GOOD FOOD is not about flavor. The GOOD FOOD industry is about making choices that have a positive impact on the environment, on the economy, and on local communities.
If we don't change how we use our natural resources and soon, we're going to lose them. It makes me a little bit sad that we have to be this close to things being desperate for there to be real change.
We have to make change, or we're going to be losing things in a pretty dramatic hurry.
I don't think real change will take root until it makes money for someone.
For your great food idea to survive, good food cannot be a charity endeavor. It needs to be a strong and thriving business. And in order to have a strong thriving business, we need to have a strong community of people who care about good food.
So, if you built your brand platform and your messaging in your own community to where you have a strong business, it brings power to the table. You can communicate from a sense of knowing who you are and what you need for your brand to be successful.

Key Points From This Episode:

One-to-one sales are not enough to sustain most GOOD FOOD business. A business model that captures manufacturing customers gives a brand the opportunity to potentially provide thousands of meals.
In dealing with a climate crisis, changing how we use our natural resources is necessary.
To make an impact and positive changes on the environment, good food businesses also need to make money.
Big companies got to be big because they focused on reinvesting and growing their business based on economy of scale—and that’s the genesis of our situation now.
Business owners and brand managers need to communicate the value of good food in targeted ways that are manageable and repeatable so it can grow beyond the boundaries.
Once you have established your brand value and have become a profitable business, big corporations and distributors would come and ask you to be part of their network—and that puts you in a position of power as you can control and evaluate if what they are offering fits your business.

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

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Next Episode

A Sweet Catch-up with SugarBear Cville

Just a few months after our last conversation, Emily Harspter of SugarBear Cville is back on the podcast to give us the latest updates about the progress of her ice cream brand.

It’s truly an adventure, she says, to be a one-woman team who has now grown the brand by partnering with seven individual businesses. But it’s a rollercoaster ride worthy to be enjoyed nonetheless.

In this sweet conversation, Emily will take us on her journey of growing her good food brand, what she is currently doing, and what she is planning next. SugarBear Cville’s story is also a great testament to how significant your community is in growing your business.
Virginia Foodie Essentials:

I feel like I figured out a few systems and other things that are going to allow me to grow and aim for this next phase with a little bit more intention. - Emily Harpster
I had this idea to build out a brand that was really a platform for showing off local stuff. - Emily Harpster
[The photographs] sent me down this rabbit hole of realizing I could focus on taking pictures of strong, beautiful people, doing interesting things in and around Charlottesville, and use the tiny light I have to shine a light on their work and what they're up to. - Emily Harpster
These are just unbelievable people doing great things. And I want to celebrate that—some are more visible in the community and people know about it, while some are the kind of quiet thing that doesn't get celebrated as much but is still really incredible. And so I would love to diversify and build out that roster and make it really inclusive, interesting, and engaging. - Emily Harpster

Key Points From This Episode:

A catch-up session to update how SugarBear is doing so far from its launch in 2022 and the initial conversation with the VA Foodie in June.
SugarBear has been able to establish organic relationships to collaborate with seven individual businesses, in part thanks to Charlottesville’s tight-knit local food community.
Production as a one-woman team with seven ice cream outlets is a wild adventure, so figuring out a system that works is vital to the growth of the brand.
Charlottesville’s tight-knit community has also allowed SugarBear to easily find a supply of local ingredients even as the demand for the ice cream has increased.
After trying out 63 different flavors during her first season, SugarBear is now moving to a curated list of flavors. Having a huge variety of flavor offerings, though, has helped in the company’s market research.
SugarBear’s website is still reflecting the changes happening to this small business. The plan, however, is to update the site with beautiful marketing photos of Charlottesville’s locals in an attempt to weave SugarBear into the community and to highlight the beautiful and interesting work and life of the townsmen.
SugarBear has a growing list of wholesale partners: coffee shops, cafes, and wineries, and from here, the ice cream brand is looking for interesting partnerships that are strategically sustainable on both ends.
The next step for the business involves strategizing for these areas: Branding, packaging, marketing, social media, and partnerships.

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

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Good Food Marketing with The Virginia Foodie - Creating Your Strategic Content Marketing Plan

Transcript

Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies

[00:00:00] Georgiana Dearing: Your real community is the world that your target customer lives in, and it's not all moms who are buying groceries. That is too broad. What we wanna talk about is the community that is gonna be drawn to your product.

[00:00:18] Georgiana Dearing: Welcome to the Virginia Foodie Podcast, where we lift the lid on the craft food indu