How to win in marketing if you have no marketing budget

In a previous article, we've talked about the UK smoothie company Innocent, and described how the three founders were able to create a £ 100+ million business starting from scratch with basically no marketing budget.

We have seen how their first steps were creating top quality products, developing an outstanding brand and having a great trade marketing strategy.

Besides all this, what was the remaining ingredient that led Innocent to success?

We all know that new products need to be launched via a communication campaign.

Otherwise, there's a huge risk of consumers not buying them simply because they don't know these products exist.

Easy to say – but how to communicate to consumers if you have no money to invest in costly advertising campaigns?

Innocent found a way to do that – they developed and executed an innovative internet based communication strategy, specifically built around great content production and diffusion via social media.

Since the beginning, Innocent has had a blog used to publish articles that may be of interest to their target consumers: from suggestions on how to eat more healthily, to recipes to get kids eating more fruit and veg, and so on.

The blog's objective is not to directly advertise Innocent's products, but to propose meaningful and worthwhile information to the reader.

All this done by using a friendly, down to earth, humorous approach, far away from common corporate talk.

Content is then amplified through a sapient use of social media.

A combination of interesting content, which is often shared by readers with friends – and a great use of social media allowed Innocent to reach meaningful popularity amongst target consumers in just a few years' time.

Did all this cost much money?

Definitely not.

It took creativity, a willingness to experiment with new ways to communicate and an ability to write useful content for readers – but surely not big money.

This should not surprise us – internet made marketing much more democratic than years ago.

Someone rightly said "once, your marketing success was proportional to your wallet, nowadays it is proportional to your brain".

This line is great in describing the huge changes that marketing went through in the last years – and provides food for thought to all small companies that believe marketing is only for those who can afford to invest big budgets.

If you are interested in fresh produce marketing, download the free e-book "Introduction to marketing for fresh produce"

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Pisani Produce Marketing is a training & consulting agency for the produce world. It has been founded by Maurizio Pisani, former Chiquita and Fresh Del Monte executive.

For more info:
Maurizio Pisani
maurizio@pisaniproducemarketing.com
www.pisaniproducemarketing.com