Inbound Marketing for Commercial Foodservice: What Your Website Needs

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When was the last time you saw your inside sales manager give a high-five to your marketing manager?

Never? Then perhaps all the content your marketing team is generating doesn’t actually serve the right type of audience. OK, I just have a couple other quick questions.

Is your company’s website making it easy for your inside sales team to quickly qualify prospects?

Does it have enough useful content to enable your visitors to understand whether your company is able to be a viable solution partner?

This brief article, which should only take about five minutes to read, will shed some light on how to improve your website’s inbound marketing capabilities so that it begins to consistently generate quality leads, while also serving your ideal prospects in a more meaningful way. It features expert sources from the hospitality and commercial foodservice markets.

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PWMG recently had an article published in Foodservice Consultantmagazine on this topic. You may view the article by clicking on the image to your right or the highlighted phrase above, or you can view some of the highlights from this article below.

Step 1:

Planning Your Content

One of the experts we spoke with, Paul Molinari of Boston-based CrunchTime! Information Systems, Inc., advocates highly targeted website content that focuses on solutions to specific problems your ideal customers are dealing with on a regular basis.

Step 2: Sharing Your Content

Another expert featured in this article, Aurora, IL-based web solutions consultant Curt Vance, said that some of his favorite tools for generating quality website traffic are applications that sit outside your website, but can be tethered to your website: including social media, email and search advertising.

All PWMG clients leverage regular email marketing, which allows them to start a conversation and invite interaction. And more and more, this is happening via mobile interactions. Yesmail analyzed billions of emails sent in the first quarter of 2015, and found that mobile clicks now account for 45 percent of all email clicks, up 10 percent from the previous quarter.

Step 3: Speaking of Mobile Marketing…

Is your website responsive? Responsive design means your website will easily translate to any platform, from desktop to tablet to smart phone, thereby making it easier for your prospects to easily and conveniently digest information from it, no matter where they are or how they are accessing the site.

Did you know that cell phones drove 18 percent of all e-commerce orders in Q1 2015? This was nearly a 60 percent increase from 2014.

Step 4: Analyze Your Data

Web analytics collect a lot of different data about incoming traffic from different search engines that allow you to see how well your website, your social media, your email blasts and your pay-per-click ad campaigns are performing. There are a number of free analytics tools available, too.

Vance says it isn’t enough to just be monitoring visitor traffic each month.

“You also need to see what your customers do when they visit,” said Vance. “Your analytics data allows you to make targeted adjustments to your site, and when used with your company’s other digital marketing activities, they allow you to measure the strengths or weaknesses of your marketing campaigns.”

Molinari said CrunchTime! analyzes traffic growth and its relationship to lead quality from all the channels that are driving this traffic.

Step 5: Marketing Automation Brings It All Together

A marketing solution like HubSpot is designed to help companies manage digital marketing efforts through a single platform, including integration with your sales database.

So how do you identify best practices for your own website?

You can start by asking some of the following questions:

  • Do our sales representatives have the marketing and sales content they need?
  • Is the website content up to date and current with our latest marketing campaigns?
  • Does our website engage our commercial foodservice industry customers?

Do you see a pattern developing? Yes, the strategic content you use in your website, on your blog and through your social connections is truly the key driver of your website traffic. It is also the place where a business owner gets to inject his/her passion and secret sauce. It helps a business stand out.