What a Love of Pies can Teach us About Marketing a Business

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I have a weakness that sometimes borders on addiction. This isn’t for the delights of expensive whisky, or unusual coffee’s, but for a pastry filled with delight that can take a bad day and turn it good. For just a short time.

This week is Pie week, a time of celebration for the savoury encrusted friend. So in light of this, we wanted to find a quirky way, to use pies to help introduce you to Marketing concepts in a relatable way.

The Base is Your Website and Differentiators

The base of a pie holds everything in place, ensuring that the filling doesn’t spill out all over the place, making the pie a flop and ruining the pleasure. This is your website and differentiators.

Your website doesn’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles, but it does need to make the customers journey of discovery with your company, simple and enjoyable. It also needs to communicate who you are, what you do, why you are different, and why customers should choose you.

You need to ensure your pie base isn’t a soggy bottom and is also optimised for mobile devices. We live in a connected world, where much of the information consumed is accessed on a mobile device. If your website isn’t rendering properly or optimised for mobile, you may turn off potential customers who will purchase elsewhere.

“57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile”

A Choice of Fillings - Personas and Marketing Channels

There are so many choices when it comes to a pie filling - classic meat and potato to Balti curry. Like the choice of fillings, your route to market and getting your name and services in front of customers need to be delivered with multiple marketing channels.

Take time to understand the flavours your customers are likely to enjoy by creating personas for each of your target markets. It’s no good trying to push a Cockney Jellied Eel pie on a die hard Geordie who just eats Beef and Brown Ale.

Once you have created these ‘personas’ you will have a picture of what mix of marketing activities will work for your target customers. This may be direct mail and or email, flyers, videos, blogs etc. To be successful, we need to answer questions people will ask on their decision-making journey and create content and media to help/appeal to them at every step.

The Lid - Social Media and Other Activities

We have now created a tasty pie, it has a good base, a tasty filling but now we need to seal in all these delights with a golden top to create the pie itself. This is important as this is a reflection on how tasty the pie appears and will taste.

In the marketing world, this represents your outbound activities that get your business noticed. These include things such as; Advertising, Brand Awareness and Social Media. Connecting and engaging with new prospective customers is critical to being successful and getting yourself in front of customers is crucial.

Whether you love or hate Social Media, you need to use it, you cannot ignore the fact that the 77.5% of Generation Xers use social media, as well as nearly 50% of Baby Boomers, making this a place where your target customers are hanging out. You can readmore about the different generations in our previous blog.

Social Media Usage Statistics from 2019

The Box – Lead Generation

Aside from organically growing your following and connecting with potential customers through content and marketing activities, you may also want to reach out and grab some new business now!

Like the pie box with its appealing colours and display, all designed to have you placing it in your basket, Lead generation is about finding new opportunities to engage with right now.

A common way is outbound Telemarketing with human to human contact which is still a very effective route to market, you can also be smart and use technology to identify those target customers that match your profile and are looking for your services right now.

Whatever you offer customers, make sure these are appealing and deliver the flavours your customers are demanding, If you do you are sure to sell some pies!

I help businesses to use their budgets wisely to make the most of marketing and reach and win new customers. If you would like help for your business get in touch.