The beverage industry is extremely lucrative. It is often overlooked by entrepreneurs because they consider it to be too expensive to break into. This couldn’t be any further from the truth. Many would argue that the beverage industry is actually one of the easiest and cheapest to break into because you only need to produce as many drinks as is demanded by your customers.
The hardest part about starting a successful beverage business is achieving exposure and growing your business because the industry is dominated by a few select companies.
This post will tell you how you can overcome big industry and grow your beverage business:
Product Name
You have probably already registered your business’s name. You might have even already released your first product, in which case you need to think about naming your next beverage and continuing your brand’s product line. If you want to succeed in the beverage industry, then naming is very important. Short, snappy names are generally the most attention-grabbing. Coca-Cola, Sprite, Pepsi, Fanta, and Kool-Aid are all short and memorable product names, for example.
You need to think of a name that can stand up next to these giants. Make sure that you avoid selecting a name that bears similarity to any already established products. If you are struggling to select a name, then you can hire a professional naming agency to assist you.
Product Packaging
Your brand’s product packaging can have a lot of influence on how your products are received by consumers. Your target audience’s age and gender should all be factors in the packaging process. If your products are being marketed to teenage boys, then the packaging should be bright, vibrant, and feature things that interest them (like sports equipment or cars, for example).
On the other hand, if you are marketing your products to adult women, then minimalism is recommended. Minimalism is a popular trend at the moment. In order to achieve success with your brand’s product packaging, you need to learn about trends current at the time that you are releasing products, among your target audience.
Target Audience
If you haven’t already established who your product’s target audience is going to be, then set everything else aside and start working that out. It is very hard to market a beverage if you don’t know to who you are marketing it. Different beverages have different audiences. Lucozade is often marketed to sportspeople, whereas Coca-Cola is sold in fast-food restaurants and isn’t associated with energy gain and sports like Lucozade’s products are. It is impossible to grow your business until you are acquainted with your audience.
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Online Presence
An online presence is very important in today’s business environment. The internet affords entrepreneurs the opportunity to reach their audiences directly, through social media and email marketing (two things that will shortly be addressed).
Building your brand’s online presence is the first stage in marketing it. For your brand’s website, you should hire a professional web developer rather than use a web-building platform. This is so that your website is entirely unique and isn’t based on a template.
Two other fundamental aspects of building an online presence for your business are social media and email marketing.
Social Media
Social media marketing involves the use of social media to reach your business’s intended demographic. The primary way of marketing one’s business through social media is to carefully utilize hashtags and location tags.
Some businesses also employ the use of influencers, who are social media personalities with large followings; they ‘influence’ their audience into supporting the brands that sponsor them. Social media also allows you to build a homepage for your brand, where you can directly interact with consumers and forge relationships.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of marketing that involves sending out mass emails to consumers that have signed up for your business’s mailing list. It is bad practice to email people without their permission, so don’t think about buying a list of email addresses. In fact, unsolicited marketing emails can get you into a lot of legal trouble. You will likely need to already have a significant following before you can begin utilizing email marketing because you need to have enough people subscribed to your business’s mailing list.
Natural Flavors
Consumers no longer want to drink beverages that have been created using synthetic flavoring and harmful chemicals. Some of the beverage industry’s most indomitable brands are struggling to adapt to this because changing certain ingredients in their drinks totally transforms the flavor into something that customers aren’t familiar with.
Because your business is new, you can start from the ground up and incorporate natural, organic flavors into your products. If you really want to appeal to people, then you could consider packaging your drinks in recycled cans. Sustainability isn’t just a way of preserving the planet, it’s also a trend that can be exploited.
Low Sugar
Consumers don’t just want natural flavors; they also want less sugar. In the last decade, the beverage industry has had to significantly reduce the amount of sugar included in their drinks because of government health concerns. The amount of sugar found in most drinks still exceeds healthy limits. While you don’t necessarily need to limit the sugar in your drinks, it is a good idea if you want to appeal to a broad audience of people tired of unhealthy drinks. If you are going to substitute sugar for artificial sweeteners, then try to find ones that aren’t harmful, like aspartame and sucralose.
Brand Mascot
One last thing to think about is creating a mascot for your brand. Brand mascots aren’t as common as they used to be, but they can still be very effective. Make sure that whatever mascot you use (if you do decide to) is novel and doesn’t bear any similarity to any other brand mascot used in the past. Unintentionally using another brand’s mascot can result in lawsuits and legal action being taken. Brand mascots when implemented effectively can be a very useful way of attracting customers and achieving brand exposure.
If you are starting a business in the beverage industry, then you need to put a lot of effort into product marketing and development. The industry’s overrun with competition, so you need to set yourself apart from them. The best way to do that is to incorporate the strategies outlined and put them forward in this post.
