Top-tips series: 3 ways to create buzz for your food brand

Forward Fooding has partnered with Jess Bailey from Crowdfund 360 to feature a series of ‘social media tips for busy foodpreneurs’ — where we share some tricks from real life foodie startup founders and advice on building your own brand on social media.

Brand buzz is clearly an essential part of crowdfunding, after all, as the name suggests you need a crowd to crowdfund! But sometimes it’s hard to get your crowd to engage. A social media following of 5,000 looks great at first glimpse but if none of them are liking your posts or sharing your content, they probably also aren’t going to give you their money.

So here are our top three tips for creating brand buzz:

Extra tips for creating (even) more buzz:

• Don’t focus on selling your product. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, focus instead on making the customer feel good about themselves. For this, just think and follow Innocent Smoothies. They basically covered the whole of Eurovision and mentioned smoothies only once or twice. Sometimes I see them appear on my social feeds and they tell me I’m going to need an umbrella today, low and behold I look out and it’s raining. They rarely sell me their product directly, but they humour, inform and entertain, so that they stay in my mind and take the place of the most friendly, helpful smoothie brand out there.

• Draw out the suspense and build on it. Do not give away all your cards in one go. Show teaser videos, show reactions to something, countdown until a launch date. Give the audience as many reasons as possible to think and ask “what is this? I want to be a part of it”. Take a look here at how WavyIce built up the suspense for their crowdfunding campaign.

If you want to learn more about how to turbocharge your food business with crowdfunding visit Crowdfooding or email info@forwardfooding.com to get started.

For more info about how to run a crowdfunding campaign contact Jess at info@crowdfund-360.com