The Power Of Foodservice Personas
December 15, 2020
A comprehensive annual foodservice marketing strategy includes myriad tools to compel operators to choose your brand over the competitive set. Use of personas is another powerful tactic in assuring both your value and values propositions are relevant, timely and meaningful to your target audience. Personas provide critical marketing insights that can prove invaluable to the efficacy of campaigns, content, customer affinity and conversion of sales leads. That said, successfully leveraging personas for foodservice requires additional steps to ensure they are accurate and useful.
Unlike many consumer marketers, foodservice marketers cannot rely solely upon demographics, firmographics and psychographics that drive individual purchase behaviors. The attributes determined by these methodologies can establish a foundation for personas, but foodservice marketers must also ensure that the inputs and insights for these personas are rooted in the complex aspects of the foodservice market. Situating individual behaviors within a professional foodservice context gives a more accurate picture of specific challenges and decision-making processes. The result is increased customer intimacy, understanding, and trust as well as increased sales.
To identify personas, we’re looking for patterns of motivation, attitude and behavior that already exist among our audiences. The goal is to identify a meaningful pattern that allows us to predict operators’ actions so that we can refine our own marketing messaging, content, propositions and campaigns. By cataloging the characteristics of different types of foodservice buyers, manufacturer marketers can focus more upon specific operator needs to predict what she or he will find most important, believable and compelling. This allows us to better inform our marketing tactics and messages.
The Omnivore team is fortunate to help our client partners establish in-depth, industry-specific foodservice personas so that they are better equipped to prioritize specific need-states — and to identify opportunities best suited to reach their desired customers. And while developing every asset according to a singular persona at a single point in their journey is unrealistic, leveraging similarities (if and when they are present) can inform assets that appeal to more than one persona or stage — and stretch your budget further. Persona development can have a very powerful impact on many aspects of planning and activation; some top-line benefits to consider include:
Accurate Customer Journey Mapping
Establishing distinct personas enables the creation of robust customer journey maps. Documenting the thoughts, feelings, needs and actions of each persona at each stage in their path to purchase guides strategic thought and unlocks more effective tactical executions.
Specific & Persuasive Key Messaging
Using personas to guide key messaging development ensures alignment between what you have to say and what your audience wants and needs to hear. While messaging must be factual and truthful, it cannot only be that. It must also show exactly why and how a brand and products answer for what is most important to your audiences. It also bridges the gap between sales and marketing by providing them with the same script.
Truly Compelling & Engaging Content
Understanding personas and their journey allows content creators to tailor materials – like the website, social media, paid media and PR – to critical points in the path to purchase. Consulting maps and messaging for shared needs and challenges amongst personas can also generate content that serves multiple purposes and allows for greater efficiency.
Efficient & Highly Effective Placements
Intimate knowledge of your foodservice personas and their paths to purchase equips your media strategists with the detail needed to build effective paid plans. They are better prepared to reach audiences on the platforms they use, from search engines to trade publications and social media channels, with placements that drive desirable results.
Highly Tailored Sales Support
Not only do documented personas create a more educated and on-message sales team, they also enable segmentation that contributes to determining the viability of prospects for account-based marketing. Then, whether by target account or broader segment, tailored sales materials and tools with the most meaningful information can be employed to drive desired outcomes.
More than ever, foodservice marketers are tasked with doing more with less. The Covid-19 pandemic has put all of us on our heels — but, with optimism and select economic markers as our guide, we believe that Q3 and Q4 2021 will be powerfully positive. In preparation, we believe that investing in building foodservice-specific personas will lead to efficiencies more easily identified across the full spectrum of sales and marketing planning. For any level of help you might seek, please reach out to us. Our communication strategists and collective industry expertise await your plans for a successful 2021 and beyond.
