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It would probably be inappropriate to say that growing a food brand requires a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears. If you were to include that phrase in your “About Us” section on your website, you’ll leave your target market with an unappetizing image hard to forget.
That’s the thing about food marketing. It’s all about images. People eat with their eyes. Also, people are quite sensitive about the story behind their food.
As such, elements like product packaging and brand image will play a crucial role in your marketing efforts. By making authentic storytelling a key ingredient in your marketing strategy, it will be easier to whet your target market’s appetite, while leveraging influencer marketing can quell any apprehension about trying out a new flavor or product.
To help you identify all the ingredients needed for your next marketing campaign, here are 17 top food marketing agencies to try out. From designing responsive websites to organizing product launches, all these agencies offer a wide range of strategies.
Top 17 Food Marketing Agencies to Check Out:
For help specifically with marketing your food delivering service, you can check out Thrive. They have years of experience highlighting the value proposition of service-oriented businesses. This type of food business requires a proactive approach to deal with unique challenges like logistics, food quality, and volume, all of which Thrive’s team is equipped to handle. Whether you’re interested in consultation or eager to launch a campaign, they can be your partners. Evaluation also plays a key role in their approach. When working with them, you can look forward to monthly campaign progress reports and regular consultations with your project manager. You’ll also get access to video summaries and their client portal, making it even easier to measure progress. Capabilities and services include: Thrive is an online marketing agency with a passion to use the power of the Internet to grow your business.
Thrive was founded on the conviction that businesses can successfully outshine their competitors with a strong website and an effective onl... Best for: Enterprises, Large and Small brands Thrive is an online marketing agency with a passion to use the power of the Internet to grow your business.
Thrive was founded on the conviction that businesses can successfully outshine their competitors with a strong website and an effective onl... Hireinfluence is an award-winning influencer marketing agency that was founded in 2011 and currently has three offices in the US. Their team of thinkers and makers helps brands to narrate their stories and create immersive experiences which have landed them press mentions in leading publications like The New York Times. Rated as one of the top influencer marketing agencies in LA, they’ve worked with a number of leading food brands like McDonald’s, Oreo, and Diet Coke. They, for instance, collaborated with McDonald’s and Oreo on their exclusive, limited-edition Oreo Shamrock McFlurry. While they recruited only three foodie influencers, the results rocked. They managed to generate nearly 300,000 engagements. Even more impressive is the number of impressions — more than 1.5 million for this short campaign. Capabilities and services include: Founded in 2011, HireInfluence soon became the picked influencer agency for many renowned customers. Through leveraging creative strategies and carefully selecting talented individuals to work with them, they have achieved award-winning success that ... Best for: Large Companies Founded in 2011, HireInfluence soon became the picked influencer agency for many renowned customers. Through leveraging creative strategies and carefully selecting talented individuals to work with them, they have achieved award-winning success that ... For Influencers: If you are looking for agencies to represent you click here. Rated as one of the best sports marketing agencies, Crafted is also a marketing industry leader in food and beverage. Their award-winning creative studio is based in the Big Apple and their team brings more than 20 years’ experience to the (dining) table. During this time, they’ve worked with a number of global food and beverage brands such as Dannon Yogurt. They offer various services that focus on advocacy, audience engagement, and conversions. Whether you prefer targeting search engines or social media networks, they have expertise in both fields. For example, when Dannon’s Light and Fit brand wanted to refresh their look, they overhauled their entire website to create a responsive digital experience to delight both search engines and potential customers. Capabilities and services include: Aside from being one of the top education marketing agencies, TOP Worldwide is also rated as one of the leading food marketing agencies. Their team of data-driven marketers has years of experience in the food industry and has worked with names like Budweiser, Coca-Cola, and Del Monte. As food plays such a key role in our daily lives, TOP leverages storytelling to communicate the value that their customers’ products can add. More so, they dig deep into data to identify which specific values target audiences are searching for in a food brand and then create strategies to highlight those values. For example, when Del Monte needed help to stand out among all the ads during the holiday season, TOP turned to earned PR. The results — a sales increase of over 10% compared to the previous year. Capabilities and services include: For food brands that specifically need help with their website, there’s Lounge Lizard, one of the top-rated website design and development agencies based in the US. In addition to website design, they can also help with branding and marketing. As for industries, they’ve worked with a long list of sectors, including hospitality as well as food and beverage. They’ve also worked with a number of restaurants like Steak & Ale, Grey Horse Tavern, and Bonchon Chicken. For example, when Bonchon needed a new website, they turned to Lounge Lizard. In addition to getting their website up and running, they also extended their focus to marketing. Their marketing mixologists added their flair by creating brand messaging strategies that included a social media hashtag. By adding clever marketing to the design mix, they managed to attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to their new website. Capabilities and services include: Founded in the late 1960s, The Food Group is one of the oldest marketing agencies on this list. Plus, unlike many of the other agencies that serve various industries, The Food Group’s specialization is food and beverage. They’re a premier, full-service marketing agency that can help you to strategize, create, innovate, and, ultimately, sell more. Not only do they help create sustainable businesses, but they also help their clients to make their practices more sustainable. They do this by, for example, identifying better packaging solutions and advocating for sustainable aquaculture. As you would expect, if you’ve been in business for over half a century, you have the client list to show for that. Included in The Food Group’s previous clients are household names like TABASCO®. For over two decades they’ve partnered with this ever-popular pepper sauce. From trade shows to consumer-facing creative, they’ve used various angles to help TABASCO® stay one of the hottest hot sauces in one of the fieriest markets. Capabilities and services include: The Foodie Tribe describes themselves as “one part influencer agency, one part creative agency”. They’re basically just a group of foodies that are great at marketing. That’s their simple recipe to success. After all, when it comes to food, keeping it simple is in many instances the best recipe. Similarly to The Food Group, their sole focus area is the food and beverage industry, but they’re much newer to the scene. Their story started only in 2016 when a community of food influencers got together. Fast-forward seven years and they’ve grown their foodie tribe to over 3,000 influencers. Using influencer marketing and social media management, they help their customers to get their products in front of diverse audiences. Some of the clients that they’ve helped include Del Monte, Florida Milk, and McDonald’s. For example, when they partnered with McDonald’s to help launch their new bacon items, one of their influencers did an Instagram takeover that generated nearly 7,500 impressions. Capabilities and services include: Food brands interested in working with a boutique agency can check out Red Candy Marketing Agency. Based in Brisbane, Australia, they’re a small, creative and communication agency that pride themselves in their flexibility and responsiveness. Just like they choose to focus only on food and drink marketing, they also keep things local and work only with clients in Australia. While their scope might be small, they offer a long list of services. From recipe development to packaging design, and basically everything in between, their team of senior professionals are ready and available. They’ve taken on serious tasks like introducing more consumers to veal, but also know how to keep things lighthearted and have created branded animated GIFs for a baking ingredients brand. Capabilities and services include: Based in the UK, Jellybean is an award-winning, specialist integrated food and drink marketing agency that’s been in business for more than three decades. Their client roster is equally impressive and features names like Ritter Sport, Maldon, and Philadelphia Professional. From packaging to promotions to social media to shopper marketing, they offer a broad range of services that you can combine in whichever way you see fit. Aside from their long list of marketing-related services, they’re also available to provide consulting. They’re very flexible in their approach and can offer a one-off workshop or partner with your marketing team on a more permanent basis. Whether you need help launching a new flavor (like Ritter Sport) or creating brand awareness (like Maldon), they won’t take your brief with a pinch of salt. For example, for Maldon’s campaign, their seasoned team generated thousands of monthly views on Instagram and media coverage in leading publications like Country Living. Capabilities and services include: Marlo Marketing is a full-service, integrated marketing and creative agency that works with lifestyle brands, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and the hospitality industry. They’ll take care of everything involved in brand strategy. You can even entrust the all-important task of deciding on a name to them. Located in Boston and New York City, they’ve worked with everyone from startups to Fortune 500 clients. For example, when Royal Food, an importer and distributor of canned foods, needed help with their brand identity, they turned to Marlo Marketing. Their team overhauled their approach completely to create a more professional look. Capabilities and services include: Meyocks is a full-service branding and marketing agency. Their mission is to help brands mean more. As they’re driven to make a meaningful difference in consumers’ lives, they limit their focus to industries that share this value, namely food, health, and agriculture. They pay the same level of attention that consumers do when it comes to picking food. Each client is assigned a handpicked team of professionals. Some of the brands that they’ve worked with include the Foodbank of Iowa, Foundry Distilling Co., and Hy-Vee. Capabilities and services include: Based in Ohio, Belle Communication is an award-winning digital PR company. Aside from public relations, they can help with creative strategy, influencer relationships, and social media. In the past year alone, they’ve created billions of impressions. With regards to sectors that they work with, they limit their expertise to a handful of industries, including the food and beverage, restaurant, and CPG fields. They’ve worked with dozens of brands including distilleries and pizza brands. For example, when the global pizza brand Sbarro embarked on a mission to rebrand hundreds of franchises while at the same time launching free-standing eateries, Belle Communication helped them to land media coverage. They used a combination of print and social media (which included social media giveaways) to create dozens of media coverage opportunities in publications like Business Insider, Forbes, and Bloomberg. The result — millions of media impressions. Capabilities and services include: Food brands that are driven by purpose instead of purely profit can check out ChuckJoe. Headquartered in Los Angeles, they help their clients to create a conscious business model. While corporate greed isn’t on the menu that they’re serving up, they use various strategies to get your target audience greedy for your offering. Included in their list of services are email marketing, social media management, and media buying to mention only a few. Then, after they’ve implemented a campaign, they’ll make sure to analyze the data and adjust their strategy to improve it continuously while at the same time reducing long-term costs. Capabilities and services include: For something a bit different and more interactive, there’s Wild & Root. Based in Germany, they’re a creative food agency that creates interactive campaigns and organizes events for sustainable brands. They describe themselves as a “collective of creative storytellers”. And, the stories that they tell are unique and mesmerizing. To give you an idea, they, for example, organized a night in a bakery to spark conversation around food waste. By creating courses using rescued bread, they created awareness for the value of bread. They’ve created similar interactive campaigns to introduce local products to communities by organizing events like a family breakfast. If these ideas are too wild for you, they can also help with strategy and offer creative consulting. Taking on a consulting role, they can help brands to unify their branding and/or strategically plan a roadmap. Then, to help you translate this new brand strategy into your business practices, you can entrust campaign conception to them too. Capabilities and services include: ROOT is an award-winning marketing agency that describes themselves as “the good food agency”. As they like to put it, since 2001, they’ve been supporting food passionately. They’re strategically located in Boulder, Colorado, one of the foodiest destinations in America, and help food brands to drive brand awareness, loyalty, and, more importantly, revenue. From research to rebranding, they can help with various aspects involved in food marketing. By combining an in-person event with influencer marketing, they, for instance, created a sweet story for Chocolate Lab to help them launch their unique brand. If you need something a bit meatier, some of their other success stories include creating a solid sales and marketing strategy to help River Bear American Meats enter the CPG space. Capabilities and services include: Founded in the late 1980s, Marriner Marketing is a full-service ad agency that creates and implements marketing strategies for leading food brands and associations like Dannon. They consist of multidisciplinary teams that can help with strategic planning, brand development, and advertising. Clarity is at the core of everything that they do. They make it their mission to identify and reveal your brand truth. If you need help developing that brand, they can help with all the various key aspects like logo design, visual identity, and packaging. Once you’ve developed a cohesive brand identity, they can help get the word out via various channels and methods. This includes TV, radio, new media, social media, and print. They can also help you to maximize your owned channels and include website design and development as well as search engine optimization in their services. Using their Clarity Capture process, they’ve helped brands like Dannon to grow by 5% in their first year of working together. Now, they’re equipped to adopt a more purpose-based approach to share their more cohesive positioning. Capabilities and services include: Food and beverage businesses looking to enter and grow their presence in Asia can check out Food News. Based in Singapore, they’re an award-winning, creative marketing agency that transforms food and beverage companies into brands that cause a stir. Their multi-disciplinary team is always hungry and feeds on the success of their clients which include coffee brands, meat suppliers, and restaurants. Creativity is a key ingredient in all their content and campaigns. Combine that with their trusted network and they’re well-equipped to help build your business into a reputable and sustainable brand. Capabilities and services include:
1. Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
2. HireInfluence
HireInfluence
HireInfluence
3. Crafted
4. TOP
5. Lounge Lizard
6. The Food Group
7. Foodie Tribe
8. Red Candy Marketing Agency
9. Jellybean
10. Marlo Marketing
11. Meyocks
12. Belle Communication
13. ChuckJoe Agency
14. Wild & Root
15. ROOT Marketing & PR
16. Marriner Marketing Communications
17. Food News
Wrapping Things Up
The food industry is a hot contested field. Aside from the fact that many innovative products have entered the market in response to new dietary preferences, consumers have also started to take a more active approach to their food choices.
Nowadays, people actually read the packaging. They want to know what goes into what they consume and how it has been made.
For food brands, it means that they have to adjust their marketing. Marketing campaigns can no longer solely focus on clearly airbrushed photos. Combine that with the introduction of many more marketing channels and working with a digital marketing agency that specializes in food products is the recipe for success.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can eCommerce food brands get more sales?
There are many effective marketing tips that food brands can implement to drive more sales. Some of the easiest tips to implement include:
- Taking advantage of reviews by actively asking customers to share an online review
- Where possible, improving the speed of shipping and/or offering more flexible options
- Prioritizing sustainability by, for example, using recyclable packaging or reducing food waste
- Automating email marketing campaigns
- Launching a video marketing campaign
Which food blogs are good sources?
Whether you’re searching for exposure or new food product ideas, there are many great food blogs that you can check out. Some of the best ones are:
- Love and Lemons by Jeanine Donofrio and Jack Mathews
- Cookie and Kate by Kathryne Taylor
- Minimalist Baker by Dana Shultz
- Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman
- 101 Cookbooks by Heidi Swanson
What should a food brand include on their website?
Aside from all the key information, food brands should also incorporate the following key elements in their website design:
- A search bar to make it easy for website visitors to find their way around the site
- High-quality photos and videos of the product range
- Clear calls to action
- Social proof like product reviews and customer testimonials
How do you write good food product descriptions?
To write great product descriptions for your food products, keep the following guidelines in mind:
- Apply the same format for your different products in your range consistently
- Using authentic storytelling that highlights product benefits and incorporates sensory words
- Avoid using generic words and superlatives like “nice”, “best”, etc.
- Ensure that you include relevant keywords to help with SEO and make your product more discoverable
How can food brands use social media for marketing?
Posting recipes and preparation videos on social media is one of the most popular social media marketing strategies used by food brands. To maximize your content, remember to include a number of relevant keywords like #foodporn, #food, #instadaily, #instagood, #vegan, #innovation, #sustainability, etc.
