Your natural food brand needs more eyes on it. It needs more shares. More likes.
We can all agree on that, because that's part of marketing now.
But it's in your hands to begin marketing your products and get the chain reaction started. It won't happen without you, young business owner. If you're not a marketer in the food industry, it can be hard to do (much less make time to do it!).
You're not alone in this struggle. Most people that start food brands are not marketers-- they're entreprenuers!
For those of you that need a boost expanding the reach of your brand, here's a list of my favorite marketing tools for growing food brands that are selling directly to consumers.
Enjoy, and tell us your favorite in the comments below!
Latergramme
Instagram is currently the only social media channel that you can’t schedule posts in advance for. Latergramme is a program that allows you to create images and prepare them in a queue. It won’t post the images for you, but they are pushed to your phone where you can be reminded to post them with just a swipe.
BuzzSumo
This tool allows you to analyze what content performs best, how many total shares it’s had and on which platforms. It also allows you to find the key influencers in your industry. This helps you plan for the future if you’re a content creator — you can adjust the content and topics that you cover and focus on sharing on only the platforms that really work.
Hootsite
Hootsuite is a social media tool which allows you to view, post and schedule your social messages for all networks, all at once, allowing you to focus on other things throughout your day. Analytics tools are integrated, and free and premium versions are available.
Canva
Canva is one of the most popular design tools out there right now. It allows you to upload your own photos, has many shapes, styles, fully-designed templates, and allows you to play with different design ideas. If you’re not a designer, this is the design tool for you. You can also purchase stock photos for $1 for use in your image.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is a mid-level tool — not too basic, not too complex — that allows you to design and and modify your own photos. You can filter images, apply text and change the size of your images. If you don’t have photoshop to make simple image changes, this tool is a must.
Over
An app used to add text to artwork and photos. Want to make Pinterest worthy photos or sharable images? This is a great app for it.
Notegraphy
Notegraphy is an app that allows you to style and publish your writing. Type in a quote or something else you want to say, style it using their templates and design tools and publish it.
Quozio
An online tool for making quotes look pretty. Add the quote, who said it, and choose a pretty picture for the background. Presto!
Chisel
Write thoughts on photos. Want to make a photo pretty with text? Or make a quote pretty with photos? Enter chisel.
Asana
Asana is my personal favorite project manager. It allows you to create departments to be shared with multiple users, projects within each department and tasks for each project that can be assigned to specific users. You can even assign dates that the tasks are due, write subtasks or descriptions and make comments. This tool is a great way to organize long term tasks and your daily running to-do list.
Another alternative: Trello
HipChat
Whether you have a remote team or you’re all just busy, HipChat is a great way for an internal team to keep in touch at all times. You can chat, file share and even search through past convos. Plus, it’s affordable — there’s a free version similar to Google Chat, or there’s a premium version that allows you to screenshare, file share and video chat for $2 per month per user.
Evernote
Evernote is a really comprehensive note taking tool. You can bookmark websites and articles, take notes and a whole host of other tools. If you’re in a meeting, it’s faster and easier to take notes on Evernote than copy them down later. You can ever search through the things you’ve saved (and it searches the text in images).
Eventbrite
A perfect tool for anyone who puts on community or networking events. This tool allows you to share your event, gives tickets for RSVPing, and is the main coordination and communication channel for any event.
WiFi Finder
This app helps you find WiFi when you need it.
We all work on the go. If you don’t have a hotspot on your phone, you’ll need to find out where nearby WiFi is. It also can help you track down the good coffee shops to work in nearby.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wi-fi-finder/id300708497?mt=8
Momentum
Momentum is a Google Chrome app that shows a beautiful image along with the time and your name in the browser window each time you open a new tab. You can even write in your main focus for the day to help you stay on track.
For me, it helps me feel calm and happy looking at a beautiful image every time I pull up the internet.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfknpbbblfpciffpaejjkokdgca?hl=en
Coffivity
Need some background noise to focus? Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better.
Egg Timer
This is as simple as the name. This is a simple countdown clock that beeps when it hits zero. It can be set for however many minutes or hours or days you want — pick a number, any number and enter it into the url. This tool is really helpful if you want to limit yourself to write an article in 30 minute, for example.
http://e.ggtimer.com/30minutes
Three Cents Surveys
Three Cents is a free and easy mobile survey app. Need input from your team? Want to do a market survey? Need to ask a few simple questions to your blog subscribers on what they’re interested in? This survey is easy to create and can be shared with a small group of people or be public.
Feedly
Feedly is an app for subscribing to RSS feeds and discovering new content related to your industry. It’s helpful if you explore a set of websites every morning to find new stories— this app brings all the articles together to one place so that you can share and write accordingly.
feedly.com
ZenPen
If you need to focus and minimize your distractions when you’re writing, try using ZenPen. It’s a browser where you can type in your ideas and avoid all other distractions along the way.
CrazyEgg
This is a tool that functions as a heat map for website pages. You can see where people are clicking— this will help you lay out the website in a functional way, optimize call to action buttons and find any issues that show your content and layout flow is not clear enough.
Dropbox
Share files online that are too big to email. If you are a designer or work with any large graphics files, this sharing tool is a must. You can integrate your dropbox into your Finder if you have a Mac so that it’s easily accessible.
Which marketing tool is your favorite? Tell us in the comments below.
Topics: Food Manufacturing, Industry Trends
