What a great way to spend a lunchtime! Today I was on the expert panel for a live Q&A aimed at food start ups hosted by the Guardian Small Business Network along with Miranda Ballard of Muddy Boots Foods and Monique Borst among others. Questions ranged from how to find a business angel; the best ways to promote a food start up on and off line; health claims for food products; video for foodies (seem my previous guest blog by Foodie-Me for some ideas); supper clubs and social media for food start ups.
In answer to a question asking for PR advice, I said:
“The first steps are to make sure that you have a domain name which is unique to you for a hosted website which you can customise yourself and that your website is set up to either sell online or act as a brochure (or both).
Invest in some good branding and use this across the board on and off line so that your customers can start to recognise your products and company. As a rule of thumb, you have less than 2 seconds to impress a visitor so commission strong professional images and post great content.
Content is king so write, or get written for you, copy about your story, your ethos, your location and your market sector as people want to know about you and the authenticity of your products.
Don’t forget to make it easy for stockists, wholesalers and consumers to find product information.
Drive traffic to your site by regularly updating your site with seasonal and limited edition products, newsletters, competitions, recipes and testimonials etc.
Link all your promotion together on the social media channels you use and push customers towards your website. Set up Google Analytics so that you can see what works and what doesn’t. A good, free site to check the effectiveness of your website is marketing.grader.com.
Offline, think about taking information and images from your website and using them in leaflets at markets, on pop up banners at events, and as press releases for journalists.”
With over 230 comments, this was a really popular Q&A session – check out the comments on the Guardian Small Business Network web pages to see if your question was answered. If not, please get in contact and I’ll do my best to help: @GrandUnionPR.