The COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely hard on restaurants and confectionery businesses, especially upcoming bakeries and patisseries. As customers cannot even head out of their homes during the lockdown, how do bakery businesses facilitate sales? How do you invite back your trusted customers?
In such a situation running a bakery business from home where you deliver goodies to your customers is the only way ahead. This involves finding online avenues for sales and branding. Thereby, new enterprises can offer amazing items using unique recipes through virtual platforms or applications. Hence, people should also consider starting an online bakery. Thus, you must create an online presence for your bakery business if you want to sustain and expand it in the post-COVID world.
How do you successfully build an online bakery brand that becomes the primary choice of customers’? Given below are some pointers that will help you consolidate your online bakery business.
1. Have a clear theme/vision for your online bakery
Any marketing expert will tell you for any hopes of carving out a customer base, you have got to be unique. To stand out, at the outset you must conceive of a theme, perhaps link the food to your concept. The trick is to merge the concept with the food so that the former enhances the experience of the latter!
After you have decided on a theme, market your brand on your online webpage, social media pages, and delivery applications. Thus, you can maximize demand and gauge the customer behavior and buyer trends around your online bakery. You can adapt to customer preferences and behavior and offer your products accordingly.
In case your online bakery business is ready to grow, makes changes to your online menus and personalize them as per customer demands. Your menu can not only be vast and offer options for customized orders but also sell assorted confectioneries with swift packaging.
2. Organize your budget use
Is your online confectionery sustainable in the post-corona market? Are you able to pay for the right ingredients, train the best cooks, and deliver delicious food to your customers hassle-free? Have you invested in the right technology? Are you delivering orders on time? For a budding online confectionery, thinking about these questions is crucial as they inform every business decision you make. Add to that the quality of your raw material as well as of your finished food products.
To create a smooth supply chain, you must resort to bulk purchases of raw ingredients from the best vendors at regular intervals. This way, you will never exhaust your inventory and run out of essentials. Safe storage of inventory is your next big responsibility, as you must ensure that perishable items do not go bad and you don’t suffer consequent losses.
Remember that you might face problems with inventory supply owing to the availability of ingredients. Some items are always going to be more difficult to procure than others. Thus, you need to make a comprehensive list of all low-supply ingredients that are essential to your online bakery products. Keep track of which items are scarce at what phases in a business year. You can modify your menus in relation to such information.
In case you decide to purchase essential equipment, you will need to account for space they will take up: from grinders/mixers to ovens to electric chimneys. Depending on your plans for expansion, your investment in equipment will fluctuate.
3. Establish an attractive virtual presence
As an online bakery, you must have a fair amount of online brand visibility and generate sales opportunities online. All your famished clients will be eager to hear about your foray into virtual business, and you must create a buzz for them. This buzz can culminate into a user-friendly webpage or a patented application.
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To this end, you can include a customer form on your website’s landing page. Any interested client will be asked to fill-up the form with their contact details and their most preferred products out of your menus. The online experience of your customers must be seamless, fast and comfortable. Create smart menus to let customers know your bestsellers, specials, and customizable orders.
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4. Official registration is necessary
Before your online confectionery embarks on its virtual journey, you must get yourself official registration by the concerned state government authority. An official license will let your customers rest assured that your food items are healthy, top-class, and follow the requisite food safety guidelines.
To ensure that no legal complications arise later, acquire all the necessary official license at the outset. After all, a stitch in time saves nine!
5. Online branding is key
As you develop a cool and sleek business webpage and social media business accounts, use them to spread the word: a new online bakery is in town, with the best cakes, pastries, cookies, and savories in town!
How do you publicize your online bakery? Apart from word-of-mouth, you can put up interesting audio-visual content and blogs that are associated with your brand and the industry to which it belongs.
You will not be successful in terms of online business if you don’t think out of the box. Instead of treading the known paths of marketing and branding, chalk out a niche avenue for your product marketing: appeal to the basic needs, desperate cravings, and informed choices of various clients.
6. Enter the realm of digital marketing
Technological advances are aiding online restaurateurs and bakeries in the fight for survival in the corona-engulfed world. Even since the pandemic, digital marketing software has become the clear choice of budding online restaurant chains. These allow your customers to view, browse, buy and send feedback on your products and brand. Therefore, make sure you create social media handles for your online bakery on these platforms.
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In summary, your bakery business must build an impeccable online reputation regarding the quality of products, the efficiency of delivery, customer care etc. The above list is not exhaustive but contains the key aspects of how to successfully build and sustain an online bakery business. All the best! 🙂
