Niche Marketing Plans
Marketing a Catering Business
Trying to market a catering business? It's a crowded marketplace, but with dedication and persistence, great marketing can help your business outperform larger competitors.
It's difficult to pinpoint a single marketing strategy that is capable of turning around a struggling business. Yet one feature seems to be part of the shared DNA of all effective marketing programs.
A robust marketing plan cements your company's relationships with customers. With that in mind, it's important to leverage marketing as a path toward better customer engagement in your catering business's planning process.
Staffing Expertise
Assigning responsibility for the execution of a marketing strategy can be more difficult than creating it. In practice, a large number of business owners simply assume the role of marketer-in-chief, squeezing even more responsibilities into their already packed schedules. To maintain marketing momentum, many catering businesses enlist the assistance of external marketing professionals. In addition to delivering a better overall outcome, marketing firms bring an objective perspective to your strategy and key messaging.
Social Media Monitoring
The use of social media as a marketing tool is the latest wave to overtake the small business community. Combined with a functional company website, social media attracts new customers and converts them to brand advocates. Social media can quickly go negative, turning brand advocacy into "badvocacy", a scenario in which consumers and users create content deriding your company and your products. Most catering businesses are especially vulnerable to negative exposure through social media. If your brand is taking a hit from negative mentions, it's important to generate enough positive content to push negative mentions down in search rankings. The more positive mentions that exist, the more difficult it is for negative comments (generated through social media) to gain traction on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Managing Negative Publicity
Not sure how to handle negative PR? You're not alone. It's a probably faced by many catering businesses. The worst way to handle negative buzz is to put off developing a response until reporters are pounding on your door, demanding a comment from a company spokesperson. The creation of a quality, crisis PR plan and the adequate preparation of key stakeholders is a requirement for any catering business interested in controlling negative messages. Mailing list providers can also provide quick access to accurate mailing lists, an important consideration if your crisis response plan contains a direct mail component.
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