An impactful calendar is a driver of relevance, consistency, and measurable results. By mapping your content with intention, you can create stronger connections with your audience and reinforce your brand’s broader strategy. Here are four proven tips to ensure your content and calendar deliver on objectives:

1. Balance Timely Topics With Evergreen Content

• Highlight industry events: Anchor your calendar around annual trade shows and conferences where your company will be exhibiting or attending. Use a pre-, during-, and post-event plan to build anticipation, amplify your presence, and extend value after the show.
• Tap into seasonal moments: Align your content with holidays, food occasions, and category-specific days to keep your brand top of mind. From National Coffee Day to grilling season or back-to-school, these moments bring relevancy and festive energy to your calendar.
• Showcase growth and innovation: Share key announcements like new product lines, flavor launches, or expanded distribution to reinforce momentum with operators, distributors, and retailers.
• Spotlight company wins: Recognize anniversaries, awards, or partnerships that highlight your company’s credibility and forward progress.
• Bring your brand to life: Use behind-the-scenes content, employee spotlights, or cultural initiatives to humanize your company and strengthen trust.
• Reinforce thought leadership: Publish evergreen insights such as white papers, webinars, Q&As, and sustainability updates to demonstrate expertise and value to your audience.

Whether you’re planning 3 months out or mapping a full year, a proactive calendar shifts your content strategy from reactive to intentional, helping you stay ahead, stay consistent, and stay top of mind with your audience.

2. Align Content With Business Goals

• Support sales cycles: Plan content for key reset periods, such as menu refreshes, retail resets, and operator planning windows. This ensures your messaging hits the right audience when they’re making critical purchasing decisions.
• Showcase product versatility: Build content themes that demonstrate how your products meet evolving customer needs throughout the year. For example:
  • Dessert manufacturers: Activate around moments like Mother’s Day brunch, Valentine’s Day dinner specials, and holiday occasions to boost seasonal engagement and provide solutions to help operators meet increased traffic demands and highlight your products’ versatility.
  • Sauce manufacturers: Tie into sporting events with crowd-pleasing snacks and appetizer recipes. Savor summer BBQ season with bold flavor solutions. And inspire menu ideation within the growing beverage category with refreshing LTO launches.
• Link marketing and sales priorities: A well-aligned calendar gives your sales team valuable, timely content they can use in conversations with operators, retailers, and distributors. This creates consistency between what customers see in market and what they hear from your team.

When content is strategically tied to business goals, it shifts from being just “nice to have” marketing to becoming a growth driver that amplifies your sales strategy.

3. Repurpose Content:

• Extend: Expand the lifecycle of one piece of content by repurposing it from one format to fit another. For example, turn an article or white paper into a short video or extract specific trends or insights to be used as a series of digestible individual social posts or infographics.
• Merge: Covert a series of images, posts, or videos into one holistic piece of material. Individual product features and benefits videos can be combined into one longer video for use at trade shows, in webinars and marketing emails, or during sales presentations.
• Recycle: Updating previously published organic blogs or articles, for example, with fresh insights or data, keeps your evergreen content relevant and extends ROI by saving time in content development while maintaining a consistent message.

Content repurposing is all about giving existing assets a second life by reshaping or reusing them in new ways. Instead of letting valuable material sit in your archives, you can extend its reach and impact.

4. Track Content Performance:

• Measure: Engagement tracking is a powerful tool for understanding user interaction with content. Metrics such as page views and new users, time spent, shares, and conversions provide invaluable data to guide future content and distribution optimizations that better align with your audience set.
• Refine: Frequently collecting and analyzing metrics provides actionable insights into patterns in user behavior and audience sentiment of what content resonates and what falls short. Identify the differences between underperforming and highly engaging content to make strategic, timely adjustments to your content calendar and materials.

Understanding content performance enables brands to reassess their content calendar and materials, making informed adjustments in real-time to enhance engagement and optimize ROI.

Building a year-round content calendar isn’t about filling space. It’s about creating a consistent messaging cadence that supports your company’s goals, resonates with your audience, and adapts to the shifts of the food industry. With the right balance of timely, seasonal, and evergreen content, your brand can stay top of mind, month after month.

Need help creating an effective content strategy, calendar, and materials? Our team of content strategists and creators loves crafting stories that resonate with today’s disparate operator customer and consumer. Let’s connect on how we can help bring your brand’s vision and business goals to life.

Sources:
Semrush.com
Sitecore.com

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Source: Getty Images

Generating more quality leads is a priority goal for 79% of marketers worldwide and B2B companies with mature lead generation processes enjoy 133% more revenue than average companies.¹ Yet, according to CSO Insights, 63% of businesses report struggling with lead generation. If you’re a B2B company that falls within this category – struggling to generate qualified leads and then converting them into profitable customers – read further for tips and strategies that will guide you through the sales funnel and buyer’s journey.

Vetting Prospects

Companies with successful lead gen outcomes dedicate significant time to researching and targeting potential prospects. This is the opportunity to vet leads that offer no value to your business versus capturing qualified prospects interested in learning more about your products or services.

Utilizing a lead form to gather initial information can help identify if a company warrants further engagement. Start by capturing these fields: name, email, phone number, company website, industry focus, and company size/number of employees. Once you’ve collected this info on preliminary leads, you can then dive deeper into researching each one. This discovery phase includes:

1. Visiting their site to learn about their business, history, objectives, and attitudes to help you identify similarities in your companies and if your product or services align with their needs.
2. Knowing each lead’s company size helps rule out ones that are either too small or too large for your product or service to make an effective impact. It can also indicate which resources and how many you use to entice further engagement.
3. Searching their social channels and industry news outlets to provide necessary context such as upcoming events they’re participating in, new hires, plans for expansion, and so on. This intel can help when crafting targeted communications in the next phase.
4. Conducting a high-level competitive review to determine any white space or messaging voids in the potential customer’s business that you can leverage when personalizing future communication efforts.

Prioritizing prospects saves time in the long run and ensures you’re putting your strongest efforts into those most likely to become customers.

Digital Marketing & Personalization

According to Biznology, today’s sales process takes 22% longer than 5 years ago. The B2B sales cycle requires multiple communications in a consistent cadence along with a variety of tactics and touchpoints to keep your business top of mind. Now that you’ve completed the research phase and have vetted out the strongest potential customers, it’s time to engage deeper.

One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to communicate to potential customers is digital. Here are some key digital tactics for connecting with and starting to build a relationship with potential customers:

Try a mix of these effective tactics to help generate leads and nurture your prospects.

Let’s take a deeper dive with these three valuable tools:

• Email: Demand Gen indicates that 53% of marketers say email has been the most effective channel for early-stage lead generation. Email is the perfect tool for personalized messages that cater to the prospects’ own challenges or individual needs. What can your company offer your prospects? Make sure to be solution-focused yet genuine, relatable, relevant, and timely. Use an impactful subject line and clear call to action such as, “Can you connect for a 30-min call between 1:00 and 3:00 Thursday?”
• Social Media: 84% of CEOs and VPs use social media to make purchasing decisions and 66% of marketers use social media to generate leads.² Social platforms reach the masses, increase awareness and drive traffic to your company’s website and with concise calls to action, can be a great lead gen tool encouraging additional engagement. Use social channels for offers, discounts, or for leads to access further information such as e-papers, case studies, customer testimonials, or quick surveys. Make sure each call-to-action links to a specific landing page where the prospects can easily find the information they’re expecting.
• CRMs and Automation: There are a plethora of CRM platforms available, and if you’re currently not using one, you should be. CRM software allows for contact management, lead segmentation (grouping similar businesses into segments), lead qualification, and automation. Automation removes the manual aspects and repetitiveness of managing leads. It allows your sales and marketing teams the ability to handle dozens, hundreds, or even thousands more leads without maximizing capacity. This lets your business focus on growth without worrying about capacity, expansion, and expenses holding you back.”³

Reach more prospects, qualify leads, and nurture relationships with a CRM platform. Source: Getty Images

Nurturing Relationships

Nurturing leads can increase sales by 50%.⁴ And according to Marketing Sherpa, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. The number one reason is the lack of customer nurture. You’ve done your due diligence in finding leads, researching the strongest potential prospects, and making several connection touchpoints that hopefully have resulted in generating sales. Maintaining these converted leads is just as important as generating them. Invite customers to in-person and virtual events, send them industry-focused articles and share insights as thought leadership tactics, and keep them in the loop on your new products and services that will continue to support their business needs.

We’re here to help! Contact us to learn more lead generation strategies and read our blog on why Blogs Are As Important As Ever as a lead-generating tactic.

^{1,2, 4} Cience Blog, 20+22 Game-Changing Lead Gen Statistics for 2022
³ trueNorth Blog, Best CRM Platforms For Every Business Type, March 10, 2022

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Whether you are a DTC or B2B company, content is key, and leveraging long-form blog content can give your business a competitive edge and help garner higher search engine results pages (SERPs), thus driving more qualified traffic to your site. Here are some important considerations to note before getting started or if you are looking to generate more traffic to your existing blog:

Relatable & Relevant

People conduct at least a dozen searches a day and regularly share articles with friends and colleagues. Seventy percent of consumers would rather learn about a business from a blog than from an advertisement. Crafting relevant content that is relatable and valuable to your prospective targets enhances the chance that not only the content will be shared, but that the person viewing the content engages further with your company. We’ll dig into lead generation shortly.

A content strategy is crucial to your marketing strategy and serves as a foundational guardrail for your company’s external presence. Blogging – while often overlooked – can be an important part of your overall content strategy. Being mindful of the topics you select and when you schedule to share can make all the difference in connecting with the right customers. Over 68% of consumers say that a blog adds credibility to a website and Optinmonster cites, “businesses that blog experience twice as much traffic as businesses who don’t.” As your customers are actively searching for information, building a robust library of authentic and evergreen content that’s interesting to your audience, and posting it consistently, helps drive organic, repeat traffic to your blog and website.

Here are some thought starters as you brainstorm content ideas:

Blogging also proves a low investment opportunity. Using your company’s own subject matter experts for crafting content enhances credibility at little to no additional costs. Plus, one blog post could be dispersed across multiple channels, extending reach from one single piece of content. Sharing and linking to blog content from your social channels can increase both blog awareness and the number of subscribers. LinkedIn indicates that blogging is the top content marketing tactic. And concurrently, 67% of B2B marketers and 56% of B2C marketers use blogs on their social media, according to Optinmonster. Within your content strategy, make sure to coordinate your social posts with your scheduled blog content to help boost engagement and web traffic.

This graphic illustrates how content can be disseminated throughout multiple channels:

One piece of content can take on many different formats in many different places. Being mindful of when and where you’re distributing pieces of content reinforces the need for brand consistency and guardrails.

Lead Generation & Nurturing

As marketers, one common question our team at Omnivore receives is “how do we get more qualified leads and how do we maintain those leads?” While there is no one simple answer as individual business strategies and objectives need to be factored in, blogging has been shown to be a successful lead generation tool. In fact, strategicabm.com indicates that “81% of businesses report that their blog is important or critical in generating leads”, and Optinmonster also discovered that “57% of marketers say they’ve gained customers specifically through blogging.” Knowing your target customer and developing rich, meaningful content that delivers against what they are actively seeking can garner more suitable leads and encourage relationship building.

Once you have interested prospects, you must continue to maintain an arsenal of worthwhile content and support to keep your leads engaged as they journey down the path to purchase. Tailoring content that is specific to each lead adds value and shows you understand their needs and aspirations. Customization is key and the more customized approach you take can bring greater ROI and customer retention down the road.

Best Practices

Now that we have learned about how to generate qualified leads by sharing robust blog content that’s relevant to our audience, let’s investigate why format and frequency matter.

Your subject matter expert has written an insightful piece of content. How can you increase views of that content? By incorporating visuals, infographics, audio, and video components along with text, you can help heighten views incrementally. In fact, sources show that articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals, and 43% of consumers increasingly want video content from marketers. For example, try including product images, recipe reels, or manufacturing processes and how-to videos within your blogs to help educate your customers with fresh content they will want to return for and entice them to share with others.

Successful blogs typically contain over 1,500 words and Curata adds that long-form posts generate nine times more leads than short-form blog posts. According to HubSpot, B2C companies that blogged 11+ times per month got over four times as many leads as those that blog only 4-5 times per month. Increasing the overall word count and frequency of blog posts could result in better customer engagement and higher lead generation.

To learn more about how to build an effective content strategy and implement a lead-generating blog platform, connect with us today.

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In the years leading up to the pandemic, the role and influence of video was expanding in significance for B2B sales and marketing professionals. A vast majority of marketers, about eighty-eight percent, report that video generates positive ROI – a steep increase from the 33% who reported seeing ROI in 2015.¹ From the customer point of view, 66% of people say they prefer to watch a short explainer video when learning about a product or service.¹

Operator customers specifically mirror this sentiment by showing a preference for explainer videos. After product information, how-to videos are the most sought-after content type on foodservice manufacturer websites.² In the field, sales reps report that videos are valuable training tools that operators can reference whenever they need and share easily with their teams. A regional sales manager with a leading manufacturer of retail and foodservice products shared that “from a field sales perspective, videos are primarily used for how-tos and training. We share videos of a process that our operator customers can reference and share with their employees.”

Videos also leave a lasting impression within a cluttered landscape of marketing messages and product information. A regional sales manager from a North American manufacturer of snack and dessert items said that “concise and engaging sales videos can help us capture the attention of our target audiences and help communicate our message to customers that are inundated with a great deal of information.”

As COVID-19 has halted or significantly reduced the opportunities for sales representatives to meet in person with their customers, sales teams report that video has taken on an even more prominent role in response. One regional sales manager from a prominent foodservice manufacturer agrees, saying “videos are being explored significantly more than ever due to travel restrictions and lack of in-person meetings.” Another sales rep says “the current COVID-19 situation has changed the way that we engage with distributor partners and operators. Sales videos have played a significant role in demonstrating products, recipes, and other relevant information to our customer base in a way that we traditionally would have engaged with them face-to-face.”

When asked which types of videos are the most impactful for their customers, sales reps agreed that brevity is key. One stated that “short, insightful and engaging videos seem to work best, particularly when the video incorporates a new product recipe idea or a demonstration of the product’s use.” Another says “videos have to be short and to the point to retain the attention of the viewer.” As far as the topics that capture the most interest, videos addressing demonstration videos, promotional information, new product information and recipes are all considered valuable and helpful for an operator customer.

Past and present video statistics indicate that video will continue to grow and influence foodservice operator customers. Convenient and easily shareable, videos are a corner stone within a successful and strategic digital communications plan. To work together on building a video strategy and creating videos that capture and retain customer attention, please contact us here.

¹ The State of Video Marketing in 2020, Wyzowl and HubSpot
²Omnivore Agency Operator Advisory Panel survey 2019

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As new online resources have proliferated and improved, DSRs are caught in between their role in the past and what their operator customers expect it to be in the present. There is a noticeable and notable discrepancy between what DSRs currently offer and what operators wish they offered during their visits.

Presently, operators say that DSRs spend their visits on the following items²:

• Showing new products (61%)
• Discussing promotions (57%)
• Taking orders (41%)
• Offering menu ideas (24%)

However, operators feel that DSRs should use their visits to address these topics²:

• Sharing information about the industry (62%)
• Suggesting ideas for food cost reduction (57%)
• Problem solving (52%)
• Discussing ideas for growing their business (50%)

While new product introduction or menu ideation are projected to remain key pillars of the DSR role, operators clearly indicate that these activities should take a secondary place behind business-building collaboration. Operators are nearly unanimous in stating that they need their primary DSR to bring them and their business more value-added solutions.²

To gain a better understanding of the evolving expectations of the DSR and the challenges they face, we sat down with Dave Miesse, CEO for the Association for Foodservice Distributor Representatives. One significant change for the DSR that Miesse shared was that even though DSRs might be making fewer in-person visits to the operator, “emails, texts and phone calls are ten-times more frequent than they have ever been.” Technology has made the DSR accessible to the operator at all times. And while operators can research and purchase many products online, DSRs now are managing about 50 accounts per year – up from the average 40 accounts 3 years ago, said Miesse.

When asked what manufacturers can do to support DSRs, Miesse’s answer was specific: training. Technomic’s research confirms this sentiment, stating that the key frustration communicated by DSRs is the lack of training – specifically reduced training for new sales reps and fewer manufacturer training sessions in general.² “Most DSRs know fewer than 200 products well enough not to need a sell sheet, but they are responsible for selling thousands of products,” Miesse said. In his experience, the key to success is for manufacturers to provide training materials with dependable regularity and specific focus. The majority of DSRs (82%) don’t feel adequately supported by foodservice manufacturers in identifying operator problems and aligning those to solutions in their product assortment.² When defining the focus of your training materials, educating on products within the context of current operator issues will hold the most value for DSRs.

At the end of the day, DSRs will sell the products they know will work. Implementing a regular training program for DSRs that ties specific products to operator issues is a long-term investment in product sales. Equipping DSRs with the information that operators are seeking builds positive relationships between the DSR and the operator and between the DSR and the manufacturer. Our extensive experience in the foodservice industry, has afforded us the privilege of helping some of the top manufacturers in the industry create dynamic training modules and effective selling tools to foster DSR engagement and grow sales. To discuss distributor sales rep support in more detail, please reach out to us here.

1 The Modern Operator Report, IFMA with Kinetic12 and Datassential, 2018
2 Reaching the Distributor Sales Representative, Technomic Planning Program, 2019

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The Informed Buyer

From an operator perspective, today’s consumers and patrons are more informed than ever. Menu transparency has been at the forefront of the industry for the last few years. In 2016, Technomic’s Healthy Eating Consumer Trend Report found that 86% of consumers were calling for menu transparency. Their demand to know everything about each menu option – from what’s in it, to where it came from and how it was prepared – has not waned. This has placed pressure on the operator to shop with these questions in mind and only purchase products that provide adequate answers.

When making a purchasing decision, 79% of operators rely on their own personal research.¹ In conducting this research, operators are seeking out photos, nutritionals, ingredients, sourcing/origin information, allergens, and how a product was produced. At the most recent IFMA Presidents Conference, a regional chain operator with 22 locations in the southwest shared the same sentiment regarding online product information and said, “If it doesn’t have a photo or nutritionals, I won’t order it.” Complying with GS1 standards ensures that manufacturers are easily discoverable and provide consistent information – therefore giving them an advantage over competitors who do not.

Today’s Buying Process

When operators select a partner to source their products, 94% choose to buy from broadline distributors, and broadline distributors command 72% of the share of shipments.² In this same report, operators revealed that the top reason why they choose to buy from broadline distributors is the ability to place orders online. As more and more operators place their orders online, it’s imperative for foodservice manufactures to have up-to-date GS1 data on all products.

A C&U director and head of culinary at a major university in the southeast recently told us, “GS1 data is fed from US Foods into our CBORD data management system; we know when there is missing or incorrect information. It’s no longer acceptable for the manufacturer to be so lax… and while they may have gotten away with it five years ago, we simply aren’t going to purchase from them if they can’t be disciplined.”

As more and more operators utilize their distributor online portals – from research to purchase – it’s imperative for manufacturers to create best-in-class GS1 content. It helps shape and streamline information, ensuring all parties speak a common language for stronger communication between all trading partners. While embarking on the task of creating GS1 content can often seem overwhelming, we can help. We’ve had the opportunity to help multiple client partners cut through the communication clutter with concise and purposeful content that elevates their brands and products. If you’re interested in exploring GS1 best practices and why they matter, we’d love to discuss them with you.

1 Operator Purchasing Study, FE&S, 2018
2 The Modern Operator, IFMA with Datassential and Kinetic12, 2019

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Sales & Marketing Support

Social media offers cost-effective methods for creating awareness and has potential as a significant driver of website traffic. If your brand regularly publishes content, then a social media strategy can increase its visibility. In fact, 92% of B2B content marketers are using social media to distribute their content⁵. Paired with paid media, brands can: effectively and efficiently target new audiences; retarget website visitors; and even advertise to known customers from existing customer lists. Integrating social media platforms with CRM or marketing automation tools allows businesses to turn engaged members of their audience into prospective customers they can guide towards a final sale.

Optimizing Web Presence

If you want to optimize where your brand or products rank in keyword search results, social media can be part of the solution. Having a presence on social media factors into SEO, and social signals correlate with a company’s ranking position. Google treats Facebook and Twitter pages like web pages for search. This may not boost the ranking of your website, but if these pages appear in the search results your company is still represented. Additionally, sharing links to your original content on social media increases its reach and likelihood that others will link out to your website. These backlinks benefit your search ranking.

Providing Customer Service

Visibility on social media creates even more transparency and open communication with your customers. Users can leave public reviews or send private messages, giving businesses the opportunity to leverage positive feedback and immediately address the negative. According to Podium, 93% of customers say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. Monitoring these reviews on social media gives you an opportunity to have a voice in the interaction.

Connecting with Prospective Hires

It’s a little more difficult to experience instant results here, but acquiring top talent is an objective for all successful organizations. Younger generations in particular want to know more than the basic details of your business and use social media to understand your company values and culture. Building this side of your brand on social media can help attract like minded professionals.

In foodservice, we live in a highly fragmented world that often feels like a small world. And while it’s unlikely that you’ll reach hundreds of thousands of followers, a smart social strategy will help you connect with up-and-coming decision makers where quality connections outweigh quantity.

1 PEW Research Center 2015
2 Forbes 2018
3, 5 Millennial B2B Report, 2017, Merit, Inc.
4 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America, 2018, Content Marketing Institute

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