Heads up, as HubSpot affiliates, we receive a small commission if you purchase through links on this page.
As a food and drink supplier, marketing to your target audience of restaurants, cafés, hospitality, breweries, bakeries and more can be really quite frustrating.
Competition is often fierce, with customer preferences evolving rapidly. Your digital marketing needs to be incredibly slick if you want to stand out in a saturated market; fragmented marketing, poor customer engagement and a lack of visibility across your digital marketing ROI won’t cut it anymore.
Fortunately, there is an answer: HubSpot’s Marketing Hub – the all-in-one solution that many of our food & beverage clients swear by.
So, what can Marketing Hub do for you, and why are other organisations in your industry so keen on the platform? In this blog, we’ll run through everything you need to know about Marketing Hub for food and drink suppliers, as well as some examples of how our clients use Marketing Hub in their day-to-day business.
Here are the frustrations our food and drink clients are telling us about
So, before we get into the details about HubSpot, it’s important that we address some of the predominant concerns that our clients bring to our team at Catalyst CRM, many of which you’re likely dealing with yourself.
Marketing across multiple channels is difficult
Between emails, social media, paid ads and other marketing efforts, there’s a LOT that you need to keep up with if you’re looking to attract food & drinks businesses. It’s one of the most varied industries in the world, meaning that your approach needs to vary depending on who you’re talking to.
Manual processes slow down business growth
Many of our clients come to us because they simply don’t have time to keep up with growing marketing demands. Time-consuming marketing tasks reduce efficiency and limit scalability. Chances are you’ve seen some good growth, hiring an internal marketing team is too expensive, which is why you’re considering HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to help you handle things. Sound about right?
We have a serious lack of insights and reporting
Without a platform like HubSpot, it can be INCREDIBLY hard to properly track your marketing successes. Many of our existing customers talked about how they really didn’t know what was going on with their marketing, which, again, is why they were considering Marketing Hub.
Here’s why HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is the perfect ingredient for growth
While there are many more reasons why food and drink suppliers choose Marketing Hub, the three above are the most common ones that we see.
Now it’s time to make something tasty – here’s why Marketing Hub brings all the right ingredients for growth (see what we did there?).
Automate your marketing and customer service
As a supplier, you’re busy enough with your day job. HubSpot Marketing Hub’s automation capabilities are seriously impressive, allowing you to:
- Use email automation to promote your products, deals and seasonal offers.
- Set up automated workflows to nurture the businesses you want to work with.
- Segment your customer lists to tailor messages based on their needs (this can be anything, from seasonal demand through to restocking notifications).
Improve your social media and content marketing strategies
Content is king. Always has been, always will be.
And if you’re looking to improve your content marketing, then HubSpot Marketing Hub’s got you covered.
- Schedule and automate social media posts across platforms like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Monitor engagement and respond quickly using HubSpot’s social media tools.
- Create and manage blog content to attract new customers and boost SEO rankings.
Track and optimise your paid advertising
Paid ads are the fastest way for you to get the attention of your preferred partners. Sure, you can keep throwing money at it and hope that things work out, but we think you know that this won’t work.
Paid advertising only works if you are making data-backed decisions. You have two choices: keep guessing at what paid ad content works, or use HubSpot’s paid ads tools to SERIOUSLY optimise your work:
- Sync Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads directly with HubSpot.
- Use AI-powered audience targeting to improve ad performance and ROI.
- Track conversions and attribution to see which campaigns drive the most sales.
Get deeper customer insights with reporting and analytics
Once your automation, content marketing and paid ads are all running, it’d be really nice to have somewhere you can see reports and analytics, right?
Luckily, for you, HubSpot Marketing Hub’s got you covered:
- HubSpot’s custom dashboards allow food businesses to track marketing performance in real-time.
- Use lead scoring and predictive analytics to identify high-value customers.
- Monitor email open rates, social engagement and revenue attribution in one place.
Meet our real-life food and drink clients, and how they use HubSpot
Sure, we could talk all day about HubSpot and why it’s great, but you don’t really care about that – you want to see real results that you can resonate with. Don’t worry, we’ve got you; here are two clients that supply the food and drink industry, and how they use HubSpot in their day-to-day business:
App4
App4 are a SaaS provider. They partner with restaurants, cafés and food & drink chains to deliver mobile and online ordering systems that take zero commissions. The team required a new marketing strategy that centred around HubSpot. Their goal was to create a system that balanced personal conversations with automation that recaptured any prospect drop off.
“Our sales process was very manual. We needed a CRM that helped us follow up on leads more efficiently.”
- Ian Chambers, Founder, App4
App4 use both HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hubs in tandem, using automation and engagement tools to dramatically improve prospect engagement across their sales funnel (this includes call tracking, meeting links, email logs and tracking).
Their goal was simple: to track every activity point with a prospect and ensure their sales team had everything they needed to close the deal. For App4, in just three months, HubSpot helped them to close 118 deals, at a roughly 10% conversion rate.
Premier Labels
Premier Labels supply labels to a wide variety of businesses, however their predominant focus is in the premium food and drink industry.
Over years, the team had built a solid reputation among their clientele. This resulted in a growth strategy that relied heavily on outbound sales and referrals, and a website that hadn’t been touched for years. Unfortunately, this was no longer functional, and they needed a CRM that would accelerate their growth. That’s why they chose HubSpot.
HubSpot, coupled with a new website, delivered some serious results:
- 747% increase in overall website traffic
- 2450% increase in monthly form fills
- 112% increase in website conversion rate
- 26% increase in PPC conversion rate
HubSpot allowed the Premier Labels team to better manage the deluge of new leads they were getting through the door. Their growth, over the last 6 years that we’ve been partnered with them, has been exponential.
Ready to grow? Let’s talk
At Catalyst CRM, we’re proud advocates for HubSpot, however, we also recognise that it’s not for everyone. We help businesses in the food and drink industries to identify which CRM is right for them, delivering in-depth onboarding, migration and ongoing support services as and when required.
Considering HubSpot or another CRM? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our specialist CRM division. We’re here to answer any questions you might have, or to support you in meeting your ongoing growth goals.
