There are many salad dressings on the market so you need to think of a unique selling point/proposition that makes yours different from the rest. It may not even have one, so you will have to use other methods. Create a marketing strategy as you would in any business to get your salad dressing selling. If your budget is small, start with the free or nearly free options and build up to paid marketing.
Instructions
1. Create a marketing strategy starting with the marketing mix, or the 4 Ps -- product/service, place, price and promotion. The product is your salad dressing, which you need to get into supermarkets and/or specialist stores. Pricing is vital; if the product is too cheap or too expensive, you will lose the majority of your customers. Promotion includes the labeling on the bottle, which can make or break a product, so it needs to be right. The salad dressing should comply with all health and safety regulations as well as attracting the customer.
2. Think about your product. A salad dressing might be organic, its bottle might be recyclable or it may contain ingredients from other parts of the world. These are good marketing points to push in your campaign. Decide how your product is different from the competition. Even if you are selling blue cheese salad dressing -- of which there are many brands available -- yours might contain blue cheese from Outer Mongolia, which would make it very different. People like exclusivity, so if your salad dressing has a special ingredient, use that as the unique selling point.
3. Calculate a budget and stick to it. There are lots of small ways you can start marketing that are free or cheap. Give free samples to a select audience. Send press releases to the right magazines, which may give you a good review. Allowing local restaurants to use your salad dressing for free may lead to customers asking where they can buy it. Standing in the street or a mall offering a sample for answering a survey is an inexpensive way to test the market.
4. Decide what media you are going to use once you have used the initial free and cheaper options. Television advertising is expensive, but it is the way to hit your target audience when used in the right slots. Press advertising can work. Direct mail is another useful tool. Send letters or place leaflets offering a discount on doorsteps. You can easily monitor the results of these efforts as you get people to buy your salad dressing.
5. Create an Internet site or have one created professionally. You can sell this product online as well as in the shops. However, an Internet site that does this is expensive to produce, so you might want to start with a basic one first. Check out your competitors' websites and see what they offer and how they present their products.
6. Monitor the results of your marketing carefully. Determine what is working and what isn't. Make changes as the results come in. There is no point in spending money on marketing if you don't check the results because you won't know where to spend you hard-earned dollars next time. If you have given out discount vouchers, you can see how many are returned. When people buy, ask them where they heard about your company, either in written format or verbally.
Tags: salad dressing, your salad, your salad dressing, about your, blue cheese
