Recap: Digital Marketing techniques for (food) entrepreneurs with Hyper Crunch
On November 28th 2018, we hosted Mehdi El Azhari, CEO of the leading digital marketing platform, HyperCrunch. Mehdi delivered a brilliant session with some gold nuggets on how to crack digital marketing including some of his best marketing techniques to effectively target and acquire new customers online. Here is a recap of the workshop in case you’ve missed it!
Before we deep dive into the content, let us tell you a bit more about our speaker first. Mehdi is a former Manager at SQLI where was leading a 20-consultants team to run strategic projects and transformation programs. He is passionate about the tech sector as well as entrepreneurship and innovation. He founded Hyper Crunch last January, and ever since then he uses all his positive energy to coach and help entrepreneurs to develop their marketing skills.
As any of our bootcamps, the content was tailored for food entrepreneurs to understand how they can get back in control of their sales channels via digital marketing.
Mehdi started the workshop by asking participants to share with him what their biggest issues were, and the kind of tools they were using when it comes to marketing their products online.
Interestingly enough we found that most of the tools that a company can use to grow are actually already there, and a good chunk of them are actually free to use! For instance, Mehdi talked about a number of platforms that classify the influencers according to their ‘relevance’ to a specific class of products and how effectively can help boost brands’ awareness! He also warned participants about getting a good return on investment with an influencer, emphasizing the need of doing your own ‘due diligence’ before sending sample products to them (as there are quite a few scammers out there).
He then posed a really interesting question to the attendees: do you think that email marketing is out-of-fashion? And what do you get out of your email marketing efforts?
I think It’d be tempting to say email marketing is not in fashion anymore but the reality is that is still a very powerful weapon to keep long-time customers engaged, be top-of-mind with existing ones and acquire new ones.
In particular, he highlighted that in conjunction with paid advertising, whether is via Google Ad or Facebook, it is important to connect with the users (AKA potential customers) that have clicked on this advert. And here is where email marketing comes in handy —
Mehdi stated that there are three different ‘types of users’:
- The curious
- The existing customer
- The prospective customer
It is really important to target the different users' clusters with consistent (but perhaps slightly different) messaging, especially when it comes to ‘convert’ the prospective customers into real ones. For instance, the content of the email should at least reflect the style and ‘look and feel’ of the advert that caught that user’s attention so that we’ll be easier for that individual to be triggered to at least open the email. All you need to do now for your emails to be powerful is to spot the right person, at the right moment, and then you will win!
We also talked about a crucial part of your marketing plan: the use of listening tools. There are a lot of those tools out there. They can vary in price (from £0 to £400 per month), and complexity of use as some of them can be pretty technical.
The easiest to use is probably Google Alerts (and it’s free!), then we have things like Hastags, Simrush, and Brand24 (the most powerful one, used also by big brands).
With regards to these tools, he particularly emphasized the importance of monitoring at least 3–4 relevant keywords for a business and creating a list of competitors to ‘listen to’.
Finally, a few questions were raised on how to directly engage with users visiting a website and the different tools that can be leveraged to do so. In particular, Mehdi talked about chatbots as multiple studies have shown that actually, most of the time, users like to interact with them. He mentioned that although Facebook Messenger might be the most popular, it doesn’t work for all the types of business and then went on to show attendees how they can target and convert their customers using chatbots.
Mehdi made this session very interactive, and each participant got the chance to share with him their issues when it came to marketing their brand over the internet and left the session with a lot of useful tips and knowledge. Be sure to join our next Tech Bootcamp and our upcoming events here
