If your barbecue sauce draws applause at contests and friends and relatives rave about the recipe, expand your fan base for profit. Market your sauce to fans who can't get enough meat slathered in tasty sauce. You'll need to handle the business end required of all food product start-ups, but when that's done, turn your full attention toward your marketing efforts if you want to spread it on thick from coast to coast.
Instructions
1. Taste as much of your competitors' barbecue sauce as your stomach and time will allow to learn what you're up against. Examine each brand's marketing approach and figure out what each product's story is being told. It may be slow-cooked on a Louisiana plantation. The sauce recipe may have put six kids through college. Draft a compelling story on which to rest your marketing efforts and you'll be off to the right start.
2. Evaluate your audience to see if your background story will stand up to the scrutiny of specialty stores--for example the high-end or gourmet market--or whether it's a better fit for mom and pop stores. Opt for using direct-response marketing to achieve your business goal and prepare for taking orders via TV infomercials or website marketing.
3. Develop---or hire someone to develop---collateral to support your sauce, including a great package design, a catchy name and an unforgettable slogan or tag line that is capable of following your barbecue sauce from bottle to ad and from ad to infomercial. Conceive a clever news release that shouts your sauce launch to everyone from local media to trade magazines catering to the condiments industry.
4. Contact local cable companies to acquire rate cards if you intend to buy commercial time. Hire a professional copywriter to draft scripts for you. Get more bang for your buck by asking the writer to draft an original, 30-minute infomercial, then request that the copy be edited down to one-minute, 30-second, 20-second and 15-second spots.
5. Produce your infomercial. Rely upon your story line to hold your commercial together. Follow producer or director suggestions for format, particularly if they recommend selling your sauce by pitching and demonstrating. You're selling features and benefits, so if your recipe tastes better than anything on the planet (feature), you'll produce even more sales results if your recipe also helps consumers lose weight (big benefit).
6. Go directly to consumers to sell your sauce using the Internet. Make certain your Web pages are clean and easy to read (no scrolling required, if possible), promote your brand's color palette and tell your story to stand the best chance of turning browsers into visitors, (recipes, contests, newsletter, promotional buttons---you name it) and visitors into barbecue zealots. Never forget to sell, sell, sell on every page of your website if you want spend the rest of your life as the success story behind the marinating brush.
Tags: your sauce, barbecue sauce, marketing efforts, rest your, sell sell