Singaporeans are keen on conforming to the modern ways of life even though the local traditions are still present in some parts of the country. They are also fast embracing the western diet trends and this has resulted in an increase in demand for convenient and quality Organic Food Products.
Good taste, safety, cleanliness, packaging, and credible certifications are some of the factors that are put into consideration when evaluating the suitability of food products to the local market.
The increased awareness about health benefits foods has led to a high demand for organic foods.
Due to the small size of viable agricultural land (3%), most of the organic foods sold in the country are imported.
According to a recent report by Victorian Government Department of Primary Industries, Australia is the leading supplier of fresh organic food in Singapore. On the other hand, USA is the main exporter of processed organic foods into the country.
Below are expert tips on how to market organic food products in Singapore.
Focus on Quality
The government has put in place measures to monitor the quality of organic food products sold in stores across the country. If you are to succeed in selling these products in Jurong East, Bukit Batok and other cities, you have to make sure that you abide by these regulations. Customers also gravitate towards stores that sell high quality products.
One store that has managed to dominate this market by focusing on quality and providing excellent customer support is Best Organic Food Store. This store stocks more than 60 different varieties of organic fruits and vegetables that are grown abroad and locally. You can also order online and choose the free delivery option to have the foods delivered to your location.
Quality Labeling
All locally grown/manufactured and imported organic products must be properly packaged and labeled. Essential information such as ingredients, name, source, and net content should be clearly indicated in the label. Visit goo.gl/der5PT and goo.gl/f221lb for more information about food labeling and advertisement regulations.
Invest in an Online Store
The most successful organic stores in the country have online stores that help them sell and distribute their products to customers who prefer shopping online. The website must comply with all search engines SEO requirements for it to rank high and succeed in channeling customers into the business. More importantly, you need to invest in SEM (search engine marketing) to reach out to a larger audience.
Due to the complexity of SEO and SEM, it is recommended to hire a professional in this field to come up with ideal strategies for your brand. The expert will also monitor the campaign to ensure that they continue to deliver the expected results.
Branding
Branding an organic food product or company sounds like an easy thing to do until you get down to the actual business of doing it. That’s when you realise that organic food products don’t just sell themselves and that customers aren’t just going to buy them because they’re, um, organic.
First, you have to understand that you’re selling to a niche market. Of course, organic foods are always high in demand. But still, there’s never a shortage of products to meet that demand. New products are always emerging, produced by large multi-national brands with a massive shelf appeal.
These are the companies that you’re competing with, and until you do something to build a brand and elevate your position, there’s no way you’re beating them in this zero-sum game.
So, as a small company, how do you grow and compete effectively with established high profile companies in the same line of business as you?
Learn to Speak in the Simplest of Terms
It’s a common mistake among many vendors of organic food products to always maintain a stilted tone whenever they’re trying to sell their products. It doesn’t have to be that serious. It’s possible to have some fun while you’re marketing your products and still manage to draw customers to your side.
Not all customers are the same. Neither do all the customers you market to have the same level of understanding, especially when it comes to organic foods.
It’s been explained before, the customers you’re targeting come with different levels of understanding – eight different levels of understanding to be more precise.
The eight levels of consumer understanding and awareness of Organic Products
Unaware: These, know nothing about your products. They have never heard about it and are not interested in changing the status quo. They’re the hardest group of people to market to, because there’s a high possibility that they won’t even listen to you.
Aware, but don’t really care: These have heard a great deal about your organic products. They have heard of gluten-free and all the sweet terms that marketers and vendors of organic products use to lure customers into taking action. But they’re never moved an inch. And that’s because they think whatever you’re saying doesn’t apply to them.
They’re not making this conclusion from a place of being informed. They’ve never researched and will be quick to brush you off when you try to reach out to them on a personal level with the same piece of information.
Curious: These have a mild interest in what you’re offering. They’re one step up from not caring to “what did you say this product does?” Their mind is ready to open up to new possibilities. It could be that they saw someone use the products and it worked for them, or maybe you said something that caught their attention.
At this point, their curiosity might have influenced them enough to start reading testimonies and doing some little bit of research.
Trying it Out, but not invested enough to commit: This group went from being mildly curious to “how about I try it and find out myself.” They’re far from making up their minds, but they’re willing to risk it all to find out what the hype is all about.
Overzealous Newbies with a Hoopla
This person is enthusiastic. They’re sold on the idea of organic, dairy-free, or gluten-free. It’s an idea they’ve been growing over time; and at this point, they’re invested enough to want to embark on the routine or start using the natural/organic product.
While you may be quick to pass this one up as a hot lead, remember they’re not making an informed decision but acting out of emotions. Their expectations of your product might not be realistic enough and are, as such, more likely to end up with a buyer’s remorse.
Disillusioned Customers
This is where an overzealous customer is likely to end up should they discover something that contradicts their initial belief. Perhaps they found out that your product is connected to some Big Pharma or that you’ve been selling GMOs. They’ll be quick to dig on all the dirt on you and even develop some conspiracy theories that they can back up with half-baked truths.
The Sceptics
These learned the hard way. They have learned not to trust anyone, and until you’re willing to go the extra mile and prove to them that you’re different, don’t expect them to bulge or be lured by anything. In fact, they’ll be fast to discredit your products, without even listening to what you have to say. They’ll also be quick to sell what they believe to be the truth to anyone who gives them an audience.
The Healthy Sceptics
This is the healthiest of all the customers that you’re likely to have. After being failed by many companies, they finally found one that they could trust. Their understanding of your products has also evolved a great deal to be able to tell a fake organic product from a casual glance.
They’ll be the biggest advocates of your product, compelled to tell their family and friends. You’d have won as a brand when the bulk of your customers fall in this category. That’s how you become a brand because you won’t have to do much convincing every time you release a new product.
So which level of Customers Should You be Targeting?
Before you launch your marketing campaign, you should first try to analyse your customers. How much awareness do they have? How sophisticated are they?
Or will you be launching different campaigns to target customers at different levels?
From experience, much of what you do to market your products must be targeted at the disillusioned and sceptical group of customers. This is where you should be channelling the bigger share of your marketing money.
This also comes as an opportunity to clear the misinformation floating about and set the record straight.
Your focus should be on winning your customers without overselling anything. The chances are most of the customers you attract will stick around, and that will be because you open their eyes to the truth that they had failed to see.
Scammers love to target the overzealous newbie. These require little to no convincing at all as their mind is already made up. It’s only after they hit the wall, and have been disappointed by the companies they trusted that they’ll learn to do their own due diligence.
That’s where they get to meet companies such as yours. But they’ve been scammed before and therefore developed strong filters that they’ll be using to vet the companies that cross their path, sometimes taking their scepticism too far.
This demands that you exercise a lot of patience while working around them. Try to understand their situation and give them enough time to heal and forget their past.
Their problem is not yet solved. So, they’ll continue looking. And when they do, they’ll be looking for brands such as yours. They’ll crave for more truth from you, which they’ll be forwarding to their disillusioned and sceptical family and friends.
The disillusioned are the most motivated and vocal of the bunch. They want to propagate the truth – and out of bitterness, save their fellow brothers and mistakes from losing their money to scam companies.
They’re nursing a bruised ego and regretting for having been so stupid not to realise the scam. If they had researched even a little, checked around for reviews, and so on, they wouldn’t have fallen victim to any of these scams. But they took their lessons and are willing to move on; just that they’ll be more careful this time and will try to help others avoid making the same mistake.
The point is to focus on keeping everything simple enough for your audience. Go slow on overselling and self-promoting and instead try explaining the finer details of your products in a way that everyone can understand.
It doesn’t matter if you’re targeting the unaware or the healthy sceptics. The point is to make sure that you’re able to speak to them in a manner that they’ll all understand.
If you keep everything simple and steer in the path of truth, everyone would eventually learn to listen to you. That means you have a better chance of connecting with all of them eventually, regardless of what level they are.
You don’t have to be lofty with words or sound philosophical and well educated to win them over. Instead, try to focus on making your message clear. Steer clear of all the industry jargon, and try breaking everything down as if you’ were doing to a five-year-old.
Be simple, clear, and concise, and you’ll be on your way to connecting with your customers on a level that they will never be tempted to look any other way.
Tell Stories
Use stories to capture your audience’s attention and paint a clear picture of your products and brand.
That’s because stories are easy to understand compared to standard messages. Rather than taking the usual route of trying to “sell,” you can use stories to personalise your brand and create enough hook points that your customers can use to connect with it.
The approach you use to market your brand or products through story-telling can vary depending on who you’re targeting, your type of organic food product, and most importantly your brand.
Brand Stories
By using stories to sell your brand, what you’re essentially doing is humanising it. You’re offering your customers and consumers an opportunity to connect with it in a way that they can all relate. Consequently, they should be drawn to your brand even more, and leave you with a better chance to work on inspiring their trust.
The best way to tell your brand story is to focus on your history. For a start, you can talk about what inspired you to venture into this line of business. Is there a problem you were trying to solve?
You can talk about your moment of realisation, when you felt like the market needed your input. How has your journey been like ever since? Did you encounter any hardship along the way? What makes you special from the rest of the companies offering the same product?
Example of a Story You can tell;
The desire to address a problem inspired our idea. People have great stories, but ours was simple and straightforward.
‘Glasses are super-expensive, for a student especially. This is something we had never realised until our friend lost his glasses during a trip. He couldn’t find them, and neither could he afford to replace them. We tried checking out with different optical centers but we couldn’t find one that was pocket-friendly enough for a student.
We were left with no option but to give up. By that, we mean, our friend was to go through the entire semesters without glasses. He kept squinting and complaining, and there was little we could do on our end to help.
We would, later on, come to learn that a few other students have been in the same situation. Replacing their glasses was beyond their means. So, after losing them, most of them had to proceed with the rest of their semester without them.
They couldn’t read what was written on the board, and that means their grades deteriorated. As we would soon come to find out, the eyewear industry was being dominated by large corporations that didn’t care a whit about the customer on the ground. Their glasses were super-expensive, and therefore not affordable for a struggling student.
These corporations keep prices insanely high, and that’s because they’re money-driven and only interested in making quick bucks from your pockets. We try to do things a little too different here.”
As you can see, this story begins by identifying the problem. They then tell their stories in a way that their audience can connect with and relate to at the same time. They don’t go into unnecessary details of explaining where they got their capital from. They’re interested in the problem, which they know also affects scores of people. These are the people they’re targeting.
User Experience Stories
You can tell your customers’ stories or let them tell it themselves. It’s, however, important that they try to make the story as natural as they can without making it appear like they’re trying to market your product.
Let them talk about the nature of their problem and how they came to find out about your product. They can mention (without necessarily mentioning the brand) if they tried other products and what they came to find out about them.
Lastly, they want to naturally talk about your brand and how it helped them with the problem, and that’s pretty much like it.
MediaOne is reputable company that helps organic food stores market their products and services online using the best SEO practices. Our team has vast hands-on experience in both areas so quality is guaranteed. Call us today at (65) 6789 9852 for more information.
