With a massive shift to online retail in 2020, businesses now need to market and advertise in an entirely new way. But how?

The free-from food market is projected to grow by almost 10 per cent in the next five years. Since the free-from category requires both consumer and stockist research, there are great opportunities to thrive online with some savvy digital marketing ideas that won’t blow your marketing budget.

We’ve talked before about the powers of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media before but here we explain how you can embrace your niche with these tools.

SEO on the Low

One thing that the free-from category has over some other consumer goods categories is an informed consumer, both in the B2B and B2C market.

This is someone who is doing their research before buying or stocking a product that’s Free-from X, Y, or Z. This provides a massive opportunity in digital marketing and online thanks to the powers of SEO.

SEO gives search engines, like Google, a helping hand in telling them exactly what your content is about. This helps users, potential customers, find your content (and products) even easier.

You can do your own SEO work on your content for relatively little costs, you just need to know where to find the answers and insights you need to help your efforts.

Answer The Public, Mozbar, and Google Analytics/Search Console are powerful and free tools that will help you find out what people are searching for, what content works and what to talk about. This will inform you on what content to write and publish for your brand in the hopes of engaging and informing interested users. Typically, educational content is great because it’s value adding and helps build trust, another major marker for SEO.

These articles, or blogs, can work in your favour to help target ‘keywords’, the search terms people use to find things on the internet. The better targeted, the better ranked your content is—this means, your content will display hopefully first when someone searches for “dairy free chocolate bar”, for example.

This is the search engine’s way of rewarding you for helping it do its job better — but be cautious, getting a top ranking takes time and effort and is never guaranteed.

Providing good, quality, engaging content is the first step to making a casual viewer a paying customer or stockist.

To turbocharge the effectiveness of this content you’ve crafted, promote it on social media.

Spend on Social Media

Paid social posts have the potential to reach thousands of interested users outside of your existing audience or follower base.

These users are interested in products or services like yours but might not know about you just yet. The social media platforms you’re posting on already know what users are interested in so they’re very good at targeting paid posts to the right people.

A lot of people tout the benefits of ‘organic’ (read: free) social media but the true magic happens when you pay-to-play. You don’t need a massive budget either, try an initial test of promoting your existing posts with $50-100 a week to see what happens. All going well, scale up to tailored ads that you can then run as a campaign across different social platforms.

If at this point you’re worried it’s getting a bit technical, don’t stress. Each social platform has their paid or advertising guides with tips, tricks, and step-by-step instructions that you can easily follow to get up and running.

Again, social media is a great place for niche consumer segments because it’s a place for like-minded people and businesses to connect. So the Free-from category has massive opportunities to capitalize on here.

Of course, these are just two areas you can focus on to bolster your digital marketing efforts. The eCommerce and online marketing space is constantly evolving so it pays to focus on an overall strategy and work out the best tools to help you execute your strategy.

If you’re interested in more about the digital strategy side of things, we’ve posted previously about how you can focus your efforts in the B2B space.