Ecommerce, CPG and consumer Insights for the Online Grocery Community

Growing a food startup from the ground up is tricky business. There's a whole lot of trial and error and a whole lot of options for where to spend resources. With the tight constraints on any bootstrapped startup, coming up with a marketing budget presents tough choices that keep entrepreneurs up at night. Will this risky, expensive decision pay off?

Targeting bloggers and influencers with marketing is hard. If I was working with any other market, my first instinct would be the define demographic data and characteristics about the people in that market. Then, I would hit them with ads for my product on social media or search while I brainstormed some more clever marketing tactics. 

Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Vine (R.I.P.)--there are countless social media platforms to keep up with, and, with each different platform, unique opportunities to seize. As a brand or as a blogger, it can be hard to keep up. 

At Chicory, we believe that advertising campaigns are only as good as their results. And the best way to not just get good results, but the best results, is to test. From copy, to creative, to landing pages, everything within a new advertising campaign is potentially just an element that a vendor should be plugging in or out to test performance.

We digital advertisers love our acronyms. We use them constantly, whether in emails, over the phone, or (gasp) in-person. In fact, some people have it so bad that this acronym obsession has extended beyond digital advertising to just about anything someone says (I’m totally not talking about my roommate Jon).

In the world of Silicon Valley, big brands and corporations often get a bad rap for being slow to move and averse to change. As a small company working with major CPG companies, we can definitely attest that sometimes things move a little more slowly than we’d like. 

If you're an up-and-coming food brand, you've got to wear a lot of hats. And perhaps, more than any other hat, the sales cap seems to get pulled out of the closet more often than others. Sales are crucial for growing food brands and if you ever want to make a living at this endeavor, it's time to whip your one-person sales strategy into shape. You'll need distribution within 1,000 grocery stores to start if you ever want to consider profitability.  

We're at peak Tasty video. You know what I'm talking about: those videos taking over your Facebook feed, where faceless humans put together ooey gooey treats. After the thirty seconds or so that it takes to whip up the recipe, the word "Tasty" flashes across the screen. Everyone watches them--whether they like it or not--thanks to Facebook's autoplay feature. And the videos rack up literally billions of views.

What’s the biggest thing missing in CPG marketing? Real intent. In generations passed, intent encompassed little more than identifying large swaths of qualified demographics and then targeting those, say, MidWestern moms with grocery store endcap displays. But in the digital age, as we know, intent can be identified in countless, fascinating ways. 

It feels like every other day there's a new piece of literature describing the potential for growth with online grocery. Heck, here at Chicory we're betting on this ourselves. Hearing stats like, "around the world, more than a third of online shoppers expect to buy groceries over the Internet in 2016—34% vs. 21% in 2015—according to a new AlphaWise survey from Morgan Stanley Research," we can't help but get excited.