Do you need to know how to market a bakery? You can use thousands of bakery marketing ideas to target potential customers. You could harness social media ads and loyalty programs or even create a Google My Business account.
All of these strategies can drive bakery sales and grow your baking business. It is just knowing how to pick the best strategy for your business. If you are ready to develop a winning marketing plan, you must learn the essentials. You can quickly build a marketing tool belt with all the necessary skills and information.
This guide will cover everything you need to know about bakery promotion ideas and more. The best way to succeed is through learning, and there’s tons to learn about bakery marketing. If you want to see your bakery reach new heights, now is the time to take action. Here’s the information you need to take your next - or first - steps.
Why Market Your Bakery Business
When learning how to market a bakery business, you should know why you should even bother in the first place. Marketing is a long and continuous journey, so you need a ‘why’ to keep your motivation up. By understanding the benefits of bakery marketing, you can clearly understand the importance of finding ways to market your bakery. So, with that in mind, why market your bakery?
The most important reason you should use marketing is to drive bakery sales. Whether marketing sells you an extra loaf of bread or 100 loaves of bread, you’ll be seeing increases. These increases are evidence of business growth, and if you are running your business correctly, profit increases. The primary reason for bakery marketing is this: driving sales to increase growth and profit.
However, there are further benefits of bakery marketing that are important to know. Just check out these top three:
- It helps you to connect with the right audience.
Bakery marketing helps you to connect with the audience that is right for you. This could be anything from reaching a gluten-free community to reaching families with healthy sweet treats. You should have an idea of your ideal audience. And when you use marketing, this connects you with them.
- Overcomes location-reliance
Bakeries are notoriously reliant on location. We all know the importance of location choice for restaurants, cafes, or bakeries. Location-based marketing is a cornerstone when it comes to businesses like bakeries. However, using other forms of marketing can help you break out of location restrictions and target audiences further afield.
- It provides a better guest experience.
By strengthening your ties with the community and increasing brand awareness, you provide a better guest experience. You are establishing yourself as a community figure, which has many rewards.
How To Plan a Bakery Marketing Strategy
So, you know the benefits. What about how to plan a bakery marketing strategy? How do you plan bakery promotion ideas and execute the ideal strategy? Whether you are opening a bakery or just want to boost your existing business, a strategy will help. Luckily, there are some simple steps that you can follow. Here’s what you should absolutely know.
- Re-establish your target audience.
You should always start by establishing (or re-establishing) your target audience. Your audience should be at the heart of everything you do. After all, it is your target audience you are creating your strategy to attract. So get super clear on your audience and even draft some consumer profiles.
The next step is to crunch your budget. Your budget will dictate which bakery marketing ideas you can use, so you must establish it early. Payable social media ads cost around $3-4 a day. Hiring a marketer or working with a freelancer will cost even more. Set aside $ 3,000 to work with a freelancer ad hoc and $40,000 plus for a full-time marketer.
Of course, you can also market your business through social media marketing, SMS, email, and WiFi marketing. Either way, figure out a budget so you can move forward accordingly.
- Brainstorm marketing ideas:
Next up is the creative stage. Get brainstorming - search for marketing inspiration and ideas online (hold fire for the next section) and ask friends. The only rule is that you’ve got to write down every thought. Don’t judge bad ideas, as they can lead you to great ones.
Lastly, launch and review your winning ideas. There’s always room for improvement. Conduct analysis and measure your results to tweak your strategy over time.
Top 10 Bakery Marketing Ideas: How to Market a Bakery
Are you ready to get practical while learning how to market a bakery business? Nothing quite beats raw inspiration; sometimes, the best way forward is in others’ footsteps. You can scan through strategies that work for other bakeries and adopt or adjust them as necessary. It is the perfect solution for moving forward in your brainstorming stage.
These are the best ways to market your bakery - all of which have successfully boosted other businesses. Scan through and see if any catch your eye.
1. Run a Giveaway
First off, you could run a giveaway. Everyone loves prizes, and the vast majority of people love competitions. If you can, time this with seasonal marketing or festivities. You could run a Halloween treat giveaway. Or even run a free breakfast item giveaway on certain days of the week - like free croissants on Thursdays. Giveaways are fantastic as they give people a reason to cross your threshold - an interaction you can utilize further.
2. Hold an Event
Similarly, you can also hold events to give people a reason to visit for the first time—for instance, celebrations, parties, and launch events. For bakeries, you could also invite health and food expert speakers. Or run gluten-free bread-tasting events and baking experiences.
The opportunities are endless. And this suits all budget types. You can run an event for free if you run the event and just open outside of usual hours. For instance, you are teaching people how to make a specific bread type. Or you could invest and pay a speaker for a big talk.
3. Set Up Google My Business
Google My Business is fantastic. This platform allows your business to appear on Google Maps - meaning potential customers can search your location. This also means that you pop up organically with location-based searches for relevant keywords. And people can also start leaving you online reviews. This is an excellent strategy if you want to build brand visibility.
4. Start an Instagram Account
Instagram is brilliant for connecting with a broader audience. It helps build brand visibility, and you can also use it to boost orders. For instance, a bakery selling wedding and birthday cakes can post fancy pictures online. Potential customers then see these and can request orders in the comments or DMs. You can start an Instagram account for free and just post reels and carousel posts and interact with others.
5. Encourage Online Reviews
Online reviews are hugely important. Online reviews not only boost brand awareness but also trustworthiness. As a consumer, you know that you make a snap decision about a business by looking at reviews. The international language for companies is that the more reviews, the more reliable the overall message. And the better the reviews, the more likely you should - and will - use its services or products. Consumers vote with their feet. We see these ‘feet patterns’ online through reviews in this modern age.
You could offer a free item in exchange for a form completion to encourage online reviews. Or a free coffee per Google review - as long as you specify, it can be good or bad. You can set up QR codes in your bakery. Or you can print them on receipts. Make sure to spotlight positive reviews on social media; if people know reviews help, they’re likely to leave them.
6. Open a Facebook Page
Facebook pages are ideal for targeting a different demographic from Instagram’s. You can also sync Facebook posts with Instagram. This way, you can post once, and it goes onto two social media platforms. Just check out Meta Business Center to sync your accounts.
Focusing specifically on Facebook marketing benefits, though, you can reach a massive audience through the platform. You can do this through reels, Facebook Lives, carousel posts, status updates, etc. You can also invest in things like Facebook ads for just a few dollars daily.
7. Run SMS and Email Marketing Campaigns
Next, you could run an SMS or an email marketing campaign. An SMS campaign works by targeting potential customers through text messages. It has one of the best open rates and involves the least writing. Think short and snappy. An email marketing campaign consists of more thought but is one of the more traditional strategies. You can use many different email templates, including newsletters, promo emails, and practical emails like order receive notifications.
You can run these campaigns quickly through automation software. Or you can outsource to a marketing freelancer to create these for you. They are great for building customer rapport, brand awareness, and driving sales.
8. Create a TikTok Account
Everyone knows how popular TikTok is. If you want to target a younger demographic, this is the ideal app. The app works on the premise of creating reels - short videos with accompanying music or voiceover storytelling. It does favor story-style content, be it small business stories or even how-to videos for baking. However, you can also release light-hearted content, like dance videos.
9. Start a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program is a superb way to invest in your business. Loyalty programs provide rewards for customer interactions, such as points per purchase. Customers can then claim rewards like free items in return for their points. Loyalty is everything when it comes to running any business. But this is especially true for bakeries, which rely on repeat orders and customers choosing them over convenient supermarkets.
You can encourage loyalty program sign-ups through a QR code, offering an immediate discount card. You can then have a digital or traditional rewards card, where members can add points to the cache.
10. Create a Website and Online Store
Finally, you can create a website and online store to grow your audience. By doing this, you take your customers from your immediate vicinity to all over the country - if not the world. Creating a website allows you to take online orders and ship products. What’s not to love?
This is your best possible strategy if you specifically focus on business growth with your marketing. The bonus is that this is a really low-cost option. You can set up a website and online store on WordPress for as little as a few hundred dollars. There’s no need to spend thousands.
In our section on preparing a marketing strategy, we briefly discussed what to budget. But let’s take a closer look. How much should you budget for bakery promotion ideas? Is there a magic number? What should you really expect if you want fire results? This is our brutally honest number breakdown.
Honestly, bakery promotion can cost zero dollars if you are willing to invest time. You can launch social media accounts for free and set up a Google My Business account free of charge. Google My Business is especially significant as it allows you to start collecting positive reviews. And we all know the power of psychology regarding online reviews.
If you have a budget of $1,000 or less a year, you can also invest in low-cost marketing. These are things like setting up loyalty programs and subscribing to WiFi marketing software to utilize captive portals. You can purchase software subscriptions to run and automate SMS and email marketing campaigns. You may also run a month or two of paid social media ads. Running these ads typically costs $3-4 a day.
With a budget of around $3,000 annually, you can use all of the above. You can also outsource some marketing to a freelancer. Freelancers typically charge anything from $50 to $200 per hour. You can also afford to run longer paid ads on social media.
Finally, with a budget of $10,000 a year, you can outsource more and arrange paid influencer deals. With anything above $30,000-40,000, you can afford a full-time marketer and outsource completely.
As you can see, there are multiple budget levels. You can just see which group you fit into.
Final Thoughts: What Difference Does Marketing Make to Small Bakeries?
It is easy to think, “Oh well, my bakery is only small,” but marketing can transform businesses of all sizes. Small bakeries benefit just as much as large bakeries. And even if you currently just rely on local foot traffic, you can still branch out.
Simple things like offering tables for a ‘dine-in’ bakery experience can put you on the map with Google My Business. This encourages people from out of your immediate area to visit - especially with novelty products like fresh sourdough breakfasts. You can also use an online store to target a wider audience.
In short, there’s always room for bakery marketing ideas. And if you’re worried that you’re too small to branch out, just think of ways to appeal to larger audiences. Tables and online stores go a long way. Marketing can attract flocks of customers and make your small bakery much more secure and profitable.
So, where does Beambox come into bakery marketing? It is simple, actually. Beambox offers an all-in-one WiFi marketing platform that ideally fits into the low-cost marketing budget category. Using Beambox, you can capitalize on providing WiFi for your guests.
The platform helps you to use a captive portal system, which collects customer contact details in exchange for WiFi access. You then funnel valuable bits of data into a secure database. From here, you can automate marketing campaigns like SMS and email strategies.
Beambox’s incredible WiFi marketing solution is a brilliant way to almost entirely passively market your bakery. It is also budget-friendly enough to be ideal for small businesses. WiFi marketing with Beambox is one of the best ways to market your bakery and take the reins. Start your Beambox free trial now. WiFi marketing comes with the territory of learning how to market a bakery.
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