During the pandemic, the popularity of bread baking surged. There were many recipes and photos shared but one type dominated social feeds: sourdough. Suddenly, millions of people had the time at home to wait for a starter to ferment and a good dough to rise.
When you think about it (and we’re sure you do), baking bread has some lessons for marketing. Let’s talk about a few of them:
You Need to Know Who You Are: The best bread bakers make bread that they love to eat. And this translates to marketing. You are a company that brings something unique to the market. You should not only know what that is but enjoy it and be proud of it. If it isn’t something that you naturally love to talk about when someone asks what you do, you may not have figured out your brand story just yet.
You Need a Good Foundation. When it comes to sourdough, your foundation is a good starter. You can buy a commercial starter, scoop some from a friend’s crock or put together your own from scratch. But you need something with a good ferment that’s been well-tended and was built with good ingredients.
In marketing, your brand identity is your starter. It’s the values, the reason why you exist. If it’s not there, you’re going to have a hard time getting any traction with your marketing.
You Need the Right Equipment. Bread doesn’t require much. But, at the very least, you’ll need a source of heat and a clean place to knead your dough. A rolling pin and a baking dish are also important. It’s much more about the ingredients than it is about the tools, but the tools are an important part of the process.
It’s not quite that spartan for marketing, but it can be easy to get distracted by the array of choices. With so many social media platforms, for instance, how do you keep up with all of them? You don’t, of course. You choose the places where your target audience hangs out and you focus on producing quality content to distribute there.
It Takes Time: Baking bread isn’t hard; it’s just slooooow. You’ve got to have a few hours to wait for it to rise, rise again and then bake.
And marketing? Yep, slow. Not always, but when it comes to gaining traction through social media and building trust through value-added content, patience comes in handy. One of the most common mistakes companies make is investing in marketing and then bailing before they see results. We’re talking months, not minutes.
A Little Experience Doesn’t Hurt. Anyone who has baked a lot of bread will tell you that they can feel when it’s kneaded enough, when it needs more water or when the inside is completely baked through. It’s a blend of art and science.
Art and science play well in marketing, too. There is a lot of value in relying on data to determine your target market and how to strategically connect with them. But there’s also experience that knows when a color scheme doesn’t represent your brand as well as another could or how to write an email that audiences will stop to read.
If you are interested in talking more about marketing (or bread!) we’d love to hear about your company and where you’re headed. Contact us at SJC Marketing and we’ll grab a cup of coffee and discuss how we can help your brand shine.