A recent study found that 56% of marketing professionals stress targeting the right buyers as the most important element in a successful lead-nurturing program.
When First Bite users begin to incorporate our dataset into their overall sales strategy, they start with a process called segmenting.
Segmenting allows users to divide the total foodservice market down into smaller groups with similar attributes that they can better sell and market to. It’s a way to sell that allows us to develop a deeper understanding of specific customer groups and their unique problems and needs.
Let’s see how that works in First Bite and what its advantages are for food manufacturers selling to foodservice.
Most food manufacturers only reach a fraction of their ideal foodservice opportunities, and sometimes, they don’t even know these opportunities exist.
Segmenting helps us find our entire primary market with attributes we know to work well with our product and then broaden that scope to include a secondary market of maybe less obvious food service accounts.
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Segmenting also helps us create smaller, more targeted campaign segments with more specific shared attributes for effective and personalized outreach.
Let’s say you’re a brownie manufacturer.
It doesn’t make sense to reach out to any diner, sandwich shop, or sushi restaurant. They might not have any interest in your product.
So, your total addressable market might be any restaurant that already has dessert-related menu items, or we could even narrow that a bit more and find a segment of restaurants that already have brownies on the menu.
In First Bite, there are two ways of mapping your total addressable market: by menu and by cuisine. Let’s look at both of these more in-depth:
We have nearly a million restaurants in First Bite, so what we can do is search for relevant menu items in restaurants where we might be able to sell to narrow our scope a bit.
This might allow us to pare a million doors down to half that, for example.
Ranked by the number of menu matches, we can then start to understand the high-volume opportunities and quickly confirm that this would be a good match for our products.
Another way of doing this would be to use additional cuisine filters.
Applying cuisine filters such as baked dessert, bakery, cafe, dessert, and ice cream can help us narrow down our target audience a bit more, but these segments might still be really big.
So, we want to keep applying additional filters until we get to what we call a campaign segment.
Campaign segments are narrow cohorts (around 200 to 400 doors) with similar attributes.
Our goal in creating campaign segments is to better engage with targets in our email campaigns. We want to write personalized emails to these prospective buyers in bulk, so the more similar attributes we can get, the better.
For example, we can start by searching “brownie” or “brownies” and shrink a million doors down to 100,000. Then, we can apply additional filters to narrow our list down to a particular city or state.
Now, we have a target list of prospective buyers who have brownies on the menu and are also located in California, for example.
The goal is to find similar attributes and keep on grouping until you get to a cohort that is small enough to sell to effectively.
One big advantage of campaign segments is that they allow us to customize our messaging.
Studies show that transaction rates and revenue per email are six times higher when companies use personalization in their email campaigns.
So when we’re doing outreach and sending out these emails, we want to be able to acknowledge people: their location, what's on their menu, and why we're reaching out to elicit higher response rates.
For example:
Here, you’re calling them out by name, you’re mentioning their menu items, you’re mentioning the state where they’re located, and you’re also calling out a need they might have (cost of product).
You can see how much more effective this is than sending a generic email that doesn’t address the prospect and their attributes directly.
And you can automate this to every single restaurant in the cohort, switching out the operator and the restaurant but maintaining the same personalized greeting because they all have these same attributes. They’re all in California, and they all have brownies on the menu.
Segmenting into these smaller groups also helps us learn from these campaigns and improve our performance over time.
By understanding what works in one campaign, we can then apply that learning to other segments that we want to target.
Segmenting is a great way of parsing down the total market into addressable market and campaign cohorts that make it really easy to identify the entire white space and get really specific with attributes for very personalized outreach.
This is just one of the many features we use at First Bite to give users an advantage when selling into foodservice.
Find out more about First Bite and how our unique combination of sales tools and database software can help your food manufacturing business thrive.
Schedule a free data consultation today.
