What the heck is F&D product marketing?

Well quite simply, F&D product marketing is the process of bringing a food and drink product to market, promoting it, and selling it to a customer. Great product marketing is about understanding your audience and using strategic positioning, messaging and design to drive demand for your food or drink brand.

By outsourcing your product marketing to a niche agency that specialises in just food and drink, you free yourself up to focus on the bigger picture, knowing that your brand is in safe hands. And remember, with any agency you’re not buying time, you’re gaining access to seasoned food and drink marketing professionals that are experts of their craft.

Here are nine ruddy good reasons why you should consider outsourcing.

1. Time

Time is money and wasted time is lost opportunities. Partnering with a F&D product marketing agency will give you your time back. Agency staff are experts of their craft and pride themselves on delivering results on time and on budget. They are well versed in time management and are self disciplined allowing you to focus on the bigger picture.

2. Cost effective

Staff are expensive! Salaries, pensions, employee benefits, training, equipment and all the other fixed costs associated with staff can swallow your marketing budget before you’ve launched a single product. Outsourcing as and when you need it to an agency outsources the financial burden of paying, nurturing and retaining top talent; freeing your budget to spend on marketing and advertising.

3. Outside perspective

When you’re deep in the day-to-day, it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees. Specialist F&D product marketing agencies will offer an unbiased outside-in perspective of your products to help you see the bigger picture, backed up by experience of helping launch hundreds of brands in the food and drink sector. It’s too easy to overlook your customers point of view and miss opportunities.

4. Increase productivity

It doesn’t matter how good you are, you will still have specialist skills and experience gaps. Delegating to a specialist food and drink product marketing agency allows you to increase output by dividing and conquering tasks to maximise your productivity. Agencies bring a wealth of cross-sector knowledge and experience to complement and turbocharge your team. Your staff are unleashed to focus on their strengths and the rest can be delegated for optimum efficiency and productivity. The best marketing teams are always a joint collaboration between internal departments and external specialists.

5. Access to specialist services

Marketing departments can lack the specialist skills required to launch products and services effectively. When you partner with a specialist F&D product marketing agency you get more than just marketing expertise. You have access to a pool of seasoned creative professionals with specialist skills in different areas, technologies and sectors, all focussed on launching your products or services. If the agency doesn’t have the specific skills in-house, they will have a network of tried and tested professionals to call on.

6. Scalability

When your NPI pipeline is slow, supporting the costs of a marketing department can be draining. By outsourcing your product marketing to an agency you can scale resources depending on workload and product introductions. This frees up your budget to support existing products and services and keeps fixed costs to a minimum.

7. Ready to go

Staff training is both time consuming and expensive and staff have a habit of leaving at a moment's notice. By contrast, agency staff assigned to your account will be fully trained and ready-to-go. They are required to stay up-to-date with the latest technology, marketing and design trends so they can hit the ground running. And if they leave the agency’s employment, it’s the agency’s job to replace them, not yours!

8. Technology

Cutting edge technology is often hard to implement in larger organisations with exhaustive IT processes and prohibitive restrictions. In contrast, agencies by their nature are often small and nimble. They can implement and embrace technological innovation much faster and pass the benefits onto businesses like yours.

9. Marketing Trends

In today’s ever changing consumer centric world, staying up-to-date with the latest food and drink trends can be exhausting. The requirements of modern brand building, inbound marketing, social media, lead generation, search engine optimisation, etc. can be overwhelming – especially when you’re swamped in the day-to-day. Luckily, agencies have a duty to stay up-to-date so they can service their clients. Delegating some of these activities will free up your time and allow you to stay on trend and relevant.