Many restaurants, bakeries, boutique grocery stores, and other types of food businesses get started because the people behind them are passionate about feeding others great food. Another thing food businesses often have in common is a struggle with marketing and promotion.
Promoting your food business can be challenging for many reasons, but oftentimes, these businesses struggle because their messaging gets lost in the noise of everyone else’s promotions. In a market where there are so many options, how do you stand out?
The answer is great copywriting. A skilled copywriter can fine tune your messaging and help you create content that improves your SEO for better website traffic, informs your customers about your business and what you do, and creates positive experiences for people before they even try your food — setting them up to LOVE your food once they do.
If you’re not seeing the results you want from your marketing, consider hiring a copywriting agency to hook you up with a great writer. Let’s take a closer look at how copywriting can help your food business stand out and create positive impressions with people so they become loyal customers.
Why Your Food Business Needs Copywriting Services
Competition in the food industry is fierce. You need to put as much effort into creating your written content as you do with the food in your kitchen. Your food is unique due to your own mix of experience, dedication, and good taste — the same is true for good copywriting.
Great content can increase brand awareness while building credibility and trust with potential customers. You need fresh and tailored content that can provide answers to people’s burning questions. You need clear, concise website copy to help people learn about your business. You need engaging social media content, and a lot of it, to capture people’s attention and hold it.
A copywriter can help you on all of those fronts and hiring a copywriting agency is a great way to get set up with a team of people who know how to make content for you that works. Best of all, when you hire someone who can handle the very important task of writing amazing content for your food business, you can focus on the food — the whole reason you started your business in the first place.
Food Content Comes in Many Forms
Writing about food can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Most people probably imagine those obnoxiously long, flowery life stories at the beginning of an online recipe or a feature in a food magazine written for chefs and critics.
However, when considering the content needed to promote a food business, you may be surprised at how much of the content is concise and not even about the actual food.
Here’s an overview of the types of content you need to promote a food business successfully.
Menus
Menus are pretty obvious types of written content found in restaurants and other food-related establishments. But don’t underestimate the power of a good menu. A menu is a great place to showcase some deeply descriptive language designed to make a person swoon over your food, their mouth watering in anticipation.
Especially if your menu lacks images, use words to paint a picture and evoke an emotional response from your customers and make every item on your menu sound irresistible.
Even more difficult is making your takeout menu and online menu have the same effect. You need to ignite your customers’ taste buds while keeping your message inside the limited space available.
Website
Another great way to stand out is through website copy. You may think you don’t need a website for your food business, but you should think again.
Imagine that you do a search for restaurants in your area. Some of the options have well-designed, helpful websites and others have no website at all and very little information available online. Which ones are you more likely to pick? If you’re like most people, it’ll be one of the places that had a great website.
Your website should be filled with catchy headlines, magnetic call to action buttons, easy to understand navigation menu options, and clear wording that accurately represents your business and your food.
From your website, you can also launch a blog describing your cooking process and telling the stories behind your food. Building on your blog, you can branch out to an email newsletter, dropping your content directly into your customers’ inboxes.
Websites can also be home to your team bios, business hours, location information, online ordering forms, and a digital version of your menu.
Promotional Media
Whenever customers wait in your waiting area, stand in your check-out line, or sit at your tables, give them something helpful to look at and read. Use eye-catching table tents or displays to showcase your best-selling menu items, specials, or upcoming events. Good copywriting will ensure your message is clear no matter what you’re promoting.
There really is no end to the types of promotional material you can offer your customers. The best choices for your business come down to what makes sense for your brand. For example, if you’re a taco truck, maybe you also sell hats and t-shirts or silly postcards and stickers. A fine dining restaurant might offer a menu that is also a take-home pamphlet to commemorate the evening. A company that makes artisanal cheeses could have info cards about your livestock or boards for serving cheese engraved with your company’s logo.
No matter what you choose, the words you use for your promotional material and media are just as important.
Social Media
Social media is often the best way to meet people where they are — so make sure you’re on it and regularly active in whatever channels you decide to use.
People like to interact with brands through social media, so in addition to posting regularly and consistently, you also need to be available to answer questions and respond to comments and messages.
Your voice and post format on social media needs to be consistent so you can build trust with people as they get to know your brand. You want to sound like a single entity across all your posts and messages. If you’re on multiple platforms, you need to sound like the same person on all of them.
Product Descriptions and Packaging
Similar to menu items, helpful product descriptions allow your readers to learn more about the ingredients, shelf life, and history behind the food you serve them — a necessity if your business relies on sales of prepackaged foods.
Beyond the description of what is in the food, the rest of the wording on the package is also important. You need to consider what other information you want to include about your business, any other flavors or variations you make, and anything else that might be helpful.
Another type of product-related content is a recipe card, where your customers can learn about the dishes they can create using your products. Recipes are great opportunities to provide links to other relevant products and recipes, giving your readers even more value.
How a Copywriter Can Promote Your Food Business
Hiring an experienced food copywriter will help to push your business forward and ahead of the competition. Here are just a few ways they can help.
Create Content That Sells
Writers have a natural flair for creativity, so they’re naturally good at coming up with content about food that helps people pull out their wallets. This goes beyond creating food descriptions. Writers will know what matters to your customers, so they’ll build the content around your readers and what drives them to buy.
For example, simply saying that your food is delicious won’t have much effect, but if you describe your meals as “aromatic,” “crunchy,” or “scrumptious,” it can help you sell more. Beyond describing your food, they can paint a picture for your customers to help them imagine a situation in which your food could make their life better.
Outshine the Competition
Because the food industry has such fierce competition, you need to be aware of what is working for your competitors and find a way to do it better or differently.
An experienced copywriter already has a good idea of what works and doesn’t work for your industry. They can build on that knowledge by looking at what your competition is doing and finding ways to position you as a better choice.
Copywriters can use storytelling to give you an edge and make your content and brand more memorable than your competitors — and for all the right reasons.
Tell Your Food Journey
Crafting a compelling narrative isn’t just a strategy to stand out from the crowd. When you inject emotion into your brand, you can create deeper connections with your customers. People want to give their money to other people — specifically, people they like — so tell your story and wear your heart on your sleeve. Not everyone will care, but the ones who do will care A LOT.
A skilled copywriter can help you find the right words to tell your story in a way that is relatable and authentic. Beyond simply telling your story, they can ensure that your whole brand is representative of who you are and what you stand for by carefully weaving your story into all your content.
Be Consistent Across All Platforms
Chances are, your food business is present in a handful of different places both online and in the real world. Remember that each channel will have different ways of delivering your message, so there needs to be some adjustment to your delivery according to various audiences, methods, tones, and specifications.
Good copywriters know the ins and outs of multi-channel messaging, which allows them to write for a wide range of platforms without losing your voice or creating brand confusion. So it won’t matter if someone sees a flyer downtown or an Instagram post or a take out menu — you will still sound like yourself.
Promote Your Food Business With Panda Copy
If you’re a small business that’s just getting started or a company struggling to get your name out there, consider hiring a copywriting company to help with your messaging, marketing, and promotional needs.
Be warned: going the freelancer route has risks. Freelancers are notoriously difficult to work with and if you find one you like, there’s no guarantee they’ll be available long-term. Pricing and budgeting for content can also be a challenge as some work for hourly rates while others charge per word or per project.
Join the hundreds of businesses who found a better way to get great copy and check out Panda Copy.
Since 2020, Panda Copy has been writing consistently good copy for business of all shapes, sizes, and industries. When you work with Panda Copy, you get a team of skilled writers and editors dedicated to delivering content that helps you achieve your goals.
Panda Copy can provide you with all the different kinds of copy you need, including:
- Social media posts
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Website content
- Product descriptions
- Sales copy
- Email newsletters
- Menu item descriptions
- And more
Panda Copy offers all these services and more for a monthly flat rate. You get unlimited project requests and unlimited revisions, all managed from a user-friendly dashboard. If your needs change, you can scale your plan up or down — or cancel it entirely.
Here’s a quick step-by-step on how you can sign up with Panda Copy:
- Go to www.pandacopy.com and complete the sign up for a trial week of service.
- From your dashboard, create your first batch of project requests. A project manager will be in touch if there are questions.
- The Panda Copy writers and editors start on your first project — writing, researching, editing, and proofreading. Once it’s done, they’ll send you an email notification and get started on the next project in your queue.
- Review your completed content and submit any feedback or revision requests.
That’s it!
Sign up for a trial week and see what hundreds of businesses already know: getting great content is easy with Panda Copy.
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