How to Promote Your Bakery
So, how do you promote your bakery? Sometimes, your bakery business needs a small dose of marketing to ensure that the delicious lingering smell of baked goods reaches the target customers! Like you’re creative with your baked goods, you’ll also find crafty ways to entice and retain more customers.
Your customers might be more attracted to online platforms, or they might respond well to discounts. Promotion and marketing can help ensure that the customers keep flowing in and your bakery is under the spotlight.
From offering free samples and discounts to hosting community events and engaging on social media – promotion ideas for bakeries are pretty diverse. Without wasting further time, let’s whip into the perfect promotion recipe for your bakery business!
Things to Factor in While Crafting a Bakery Promotion Plan
Don’t jump straight into the pie to devise your marketing plan. Like a baking recipe, you need to research, test, analyze, and finalize! Let’s bake and explore the four essential ingredients of every marketing plan.
In-House or Outsourced Marketing Team?
If you think that you cannot single-handedly handle all aspects of promotions and want to outsource that responsibility, you have to consider the budget for that as well. With in-house marketing, you need to oversee the plans and processes.
With an in-house marketing team, you have to spend separately on analytics, designing, and procuring other promotional tools.
But with an outsourced marketing team, you will have the benefits of their experience in the field. Moreover, they’ll take care of every promotional strategy, be it designing, researching, or launching campaigns!
Determine Your Budget
If you run a small-scale bakery business, you don’t have to separate an enormous budget for marketing and promotions. As a small bakery owner, you should identify the most critical aspects.
For instance, if you feel that your social media network is specifically untapped, you can hire a social media marketing team and some photographers to liven up your accounts.
If you get most purchases through online orders, you might allocate your marketing budget to web designers. That said, email marketing is the best approach for small businesses.
On the other hand, if you have a bakery chain or a large business, you can opt for a team of marketing experts. Large-scale operations require a mix of various marketing tools to find satisfying results.
Popular Tools and Resources by HICAPS
- mL to Grams Conversion Chart in Baking
- Tablespoon to Cup Conversion Chart
- Free Recipe Cost Calculator For Baking
What Will Be the Marketing Channels?
Lastly, you need to identify which marketing channels work best to approach your target group. You might see a rush of incoming sales when you post a mouthwatering, drooling, and appetizing video of cupcake preparation and decor.
In short, you need to spot which marketing channel can help your business gain more traction. Is it going to be emails, social media, discounts, promos, or something else?
Outlining the marketing channels will help you to tailor your promotion plans. Also, if you think that social media is the best marketing channel, you need to create a different approach for Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok.
Spot Your Audience!
Your audience and customers should be your sole target. Before you hurry up and pick a random promotion plan, it is essential to determine and define your target group. Your target group could be families, youngsters, office-goers/professionals, tourists, and others.
There are a handful of ways you can identify your target audience. For starters, you have to pay attention to the footfall of your bakery.
What type of customers purchases the most from your bakery? Next, you also need to keep an eye on who’s following your bakery’s social media handles.
Lastly, the locale and nature of your bakery business can also tell you about the target audience. For example, most of your audience will be out-of-towners if your bakery is in a touristy spot.
8 Effective Marketing Ideas on How to Promote Your Bakery
If you build your bakery into a local sweet legend spot, we have just the right marketing ideas on how to promote your bakery. You can use a mix of these promotion techniques to maximize your reach and expand your bakery business. Take a look at the top marketing ideas to help you reach the top tier.
Use Exciting and Drooling Videos
There is no denying that videos of cupcakes and baked desserts have the power to make people drool through their screens! Pictures or content about delicious baked goods can draw your potential customers.
Very few can resist the temptation of freshly baked bread and oozing chocolate cupcake pictures. Here are some video schemes for your bakery business:
- Post videos of making and preparation of baked goods from scratch
- You can also do before and after videos of products in the batter stage and finally on the plate.
- Your customers might also love the cozy ambiance of your little bakery spot, so give them a glimpse of your bakery stop!
- Entertain your followers with regular baking tips and tricks through images and video tutorials.
Start a Loyalty Program
As a business owner, you shouldn’t undermine the benefits of having a loyalty program. A loyalty program helps promote word-of-mouth marketing that can boost brand recognition. Moreover, developing and introducing a loyalty program is not very difficult.
You can begin by deciding what you’ll offer regarding the loyalty rewards. For instance, you can provide free doughnuts, a free cup of coffee, or complimentary cookies.
Next, you’ll need to determine how customers stack up to those rewards. For instance, customers can receive one loyalty point for every $1 they spend.
“Baked Product of the Day”
You can pick a baked product from your menu each day or make a holiday cake like valentine’s cake and feature it as the “Baked Product of the Day.” Any of your customers who visits your store will receive a discount on the specified “Baked Product of the Day” item. At the same time, you can offer a discount of 10% on the item or give them away for a flat reduced rate.
Additionally, you can also try this little marketing trick for products that sell lesser than others. This marketing strategy will increase your loyal buyers’ frequency and bring in new ones.
Host Couple Baking Sessions
These days, many couples look for bonding moments over a cooking or baking session. You can offer a couple of baking sessions to bring in new customers. Devise a couple of baking sessions that provide the duos with an off-beat date experience to bake a treat together.
You can hold such couple sessions as Valentine’s Day scheme as well. These sessions will attract more people to your business, increase engagement and establish you as a pro in the baking field.
Make sure to pick simple yet tasty recipes for couples that they can easily prepare and enjoy!
Offer Discounts on Your Baked Goods
If you want to make your dream of being the top bakery “crumb” proper, discounts are a no-brainer for your promotion plan. Discounts and promos are some of the most conventional marketing techniques. Depending on your goals, there are several ways you can use discounts and promos.
You can put up weekly promotions where selective goods of your bakery are up for buy one get one free. Similarly, you can offer special discounts on specific days for school kids, college students, senior citizens, or workers.
You will also notice that many bakeries offer promotions for customers who check in to their bakeries from social media accounts. It’s best to give them an offer that they find too good to leave!
Highlight the Positive Reviews
Do you know that most customers find it easy to trust a business that has more positive reviews? So, do you plan on hiding those positive reviews in a safe box forever?
One of the best tactics to promote a bakery involves showing off those positive reviews to your potential customers. These positive reviews from loyal customers are a testament to your baked products’ exceptional and delicious taste and high quality.
Here are a few ways to collect and display your reviews online:
- Develop a Google My Business Page
- Claim your Yelp page and keep it up-to-date
- Post customer testimonials and reviews on social media platforms
Hold Community and Local Events
A local community or professional event can give you several business opportunities. These events allow you to interact and network with new customers and fellow bakery owners. You can build your brand and product awareness by sponsoring or organizing events.
You can also hold regular baking workshops. Yes, you heard it right. You can give back to the local community by helping the audience learn and adopt baking skills.
Through these events, you can strengthen relationships with your customers. What’s more, holding workshops also give the people a glimpse of how you do things around the bakery!
Entice People for On-Trend Goodies
They say cake it till you make it! What better way to entice hungry consumers than trending bakery products? Moreover, are you aware that you can use these food trends to maximize the reach of your business?
Thanks to the never-fading gluten-free fad, the market for gluten-free products has grown substantially. So, one way to hop on the bandwagon is to offer a gluten-free baked products range.
Stay in the loop with all the food-related conversations. You can spot trends on social media through Buzzsumo. You can also get inputs on the trends through conducting surveys. Find out what your target audience thinks about baked products and what they’d like the see and eat next!
FAQs
Many old-school bakeries dismiss the idea of new-generation promotion techniques such as social media and hashtags. You might not be aware, but hashtags are the cream of the crop of social media marketing for bakeries.
By incorporating the most relevant hashtags on your social media promotion plan, you can make sure your post reaches the right audience. You have to use a mix of brand, local, and trending hashtags to get spotted by your hungry target buyers.
Posts with hashtags tend to outperform the content of local competitions. So, you’re cooking up a social media promotion plan, make sure to include hashtags.
There is no denying that bakery sales are peak during the holidays. If you want to reap more financial benefits from the holiday season, you can adopt some edgy promotion tactics. Promotion during the holidays is also an excellent way to bring in more new customers to the store.
No one indeed knows your business better than you. If you run a small-scale bakery with some help, you might find it wise to do the promotion part yourself.
However, when an expansion is on the books, it is ideal to hire/outsource a marketing team. A specialized marketing team can escalate the promotion efforts of your bakery.
Moreover, they’ll also utilize the right promotion mix to get the word out about your bakery business. Hiring a marketing team indeed calls for additional costs, but the results will make it seem like a good investment.
Wrap Up
Using the proper marketing and promotion strategies for your bakery, you can leave your stinking rivals in the dust! Once you identify and finalize the promotion plans, you’ll notice that your business is the go-to bakery option for locals.
As a result of successful promotion, you’ll have a slew of loyal and new customers gushing into your bakery every day. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to keep delivering tastier treats to your hungry customers!
We can’t wait to see things getting more delicious baked goods and your bakery store selling batches after batches of it with a solid marketing plan!
About HICAPS
Over the years, HICAPS has helped bakers and businesses make delicious products by offering ingredients like ChiffonAide Cake Oil, Magic Whizk Whipping Cream, Red Velvet Flavor Emulco, and Instabake Brownie Mix.
HICAPS also provides tools and resources to valued partners such as the free “How to Increase Your Sales Amidst the Pandemic” E-book and free dealer locator that helps look for baking ingredients near you.
Want more free tips and tutorials? Follow us on Facebook at Hicaps Mktg. Corp. and on YouTube at HicapsTV.
