How to set your digital objectives for 2024: A guide for food & drink businesses

2024. It’s here.

The new year is often a time when food and drink businesses think they need a fresh start with their food and drink digital marketing. More often than not, their immediate thought is a revamp of content or a rehaul of the brand – but we’re here to tell you this shouldn’t be the case!

2024 should mean an improved strategy for a digital age – not just a digital marketing strategy. Food and drink businesses NEED to be putting their best foot forward – become digital-first and use the data at their fingertips.

So what does YOUR brand need to be in the digital age? Well – a food marketing agency is your top priority. Other than that, we’ve got all the tips and tricks for you to start 2024 with a BANG. KW Marketing is THE food marketing agency that makes the difference to YOUR brand.

Defining YOUR food and drink digital marketing strategy for a digital age

Are you ready to create a digital marketing strategy that will help you consistently land customers this year and beyond? This starts with defining your goals that enable you to reach your target customers and successfully move them along your marketing funnel.

Before getting started, you must determine what your focus area is for your food and drink digital marketing. This means thinking about what you would like to accomplish. Here are a few things to consider:

• Growth: Do you want to find new opportunities to grow your team, your business and your revenue?
• Retention: Do you want to maintain existing customers and have brand advocates?
• Depth: Do you want to increase brand awareness and bring new audience members into your sphere?

Your focus area is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. As a food marketing agency, we’ve put together four steps to creating a winning digital marketing strategy in 2024:

1. Discovery: Identify YOUR goals and target audience for your food and drink digital marketing plan

Data gives the stage for digital to dance on. A solid strategy starts by analysing and examining. This gives you a clear idea of your starting point and how you stack up against your competitors and a deeper understanding of your customers.

• Analyse your performance. Start by evaluating your performance over the last year. Dive into analytics to determine what worked and didn’t work and why.
• Evaluate your competitors. Spend some time looking at your competitors’ digital presence. The great thing about digital marketing is that it is easy to see what your competitors are doing because it is all public.
• Get to know your customers. Facebook Audience Insights is a free tool by Facebook that you can use to uncover details about your audience size, demographics, behaviours, and interests. Google Trends is another free tool to see topics people search for and search trends over time.

2. Choosing the right audience for your food and drink digital marketing plan

We want to be going to the audience rather than asking the audience to come to us. In food and drink digital marketing, you have the opportunity to execute campaigns with very precise targeting. Go beyond traditional demographic targeting and be as specific as possible. As a food marketing agency, we know that you need to create buyer personas for your ideal customer to really get to know who they are – and make sure that your food and drink digital marketing campaigns, content and discounts are geared toward them!

3. Map it all out: Craft compelling content and campaigns

As a food marketing agency, we know that in 2024, short-form content is going to be king. Attention spans are getting shorter so KNOW your audience, create content that suits your brand AND your audience and have fun doing it!

One of the best ways of doing this is through evergreen content. Evergreen content is SEO-optimised content that continuously stays relevant over a long period of time and gradually increases ROI. Evergreen content isn’t time-sensitive and can continue to drive traffic to your website due to its relevance. Common evergreen content formats include:

• Listicles
• Tips
• How-to guides
• Product reviews

These formats don’t automatically make your content evergreen, but they often lend themselves to more evergreen writing. Regardless of what format you use, your businesses should be intentional about creating evergreen content for more effectiveness.

Once you know the content that resonates with your audience, choose the channels that are most likely to give you the best results.

Consider all the potential food and drink digital channels, tools and tactics that you could use. Then prioritise based on the strategy you created in step two. Think about how each channel contributes to meeting your objective and goal.

4. Execute, adapt and optimise your food and drink digital marketing plan 

Often the devil is in the details. If you miss executional steps you may find that you aren’t getting the results you expect. Take some time to make sure that you are using best practices. Food and drink digital marketing changes frequently, and something that worked on last year may require tweaking to work now. Keep in mind that it is better to do a few things well than many things poorly.

One of the things that makes food and drink digital marketing so powerful is the ability to pivot and adjust. You don’t have to create a set plan and stick to it. For example, if an ad isn’t delivering results, pause it and try something new. If your website isn’t converting visitors, run an A/B comparison test with different calls to action. For example, you can test a “learn more” call to action against “sign up now” to see what performs best.

And the secret number 5! MAKE THEM FEEL SOMETHING!

Nowadays, people are turning off hard sales messages. It’s now key to access emotions through digital – access the joy. People want to feel something – not just be bombarded with sales messages. So keep this in mind – know your USP and be confident with your offering!

Nurture is our keyword for 2024 – and it should be yours as well. Everyone around you has a story to tell – and that goes for your customers as well. Every order number, every website visitor – there’s a human behind the screen. Nowadays more than ever, people want to feel connected to the shops that they buy from. They want to feel like they’re making a difference – and that you’re helping them on their journey every time they put their hand in their pockets.

How food marketing agency KW Marketing is here to help you

Your brand is on its biggest stage. What is going to be imperative is that your ecosystem is bringing people in. It’s not all about the funnel – it’s EVERYTHING.

With this in mind – what does YOUR brand need to establish itself in the digital age? That’s where we can help. Food Marketing Agency, KW Marketing, is perfectly placed to audit your current digital marketing activity with digital marketing consultant Kate at the helm.

So there you have it! Be brave, shape the future and make decisions at pace. Real change is empowering. There is a huge mass commercial potential of digital just waiting out there to be discovered! Get in contact today, to reach YOUR goals together!