Meeting parents’ expectations
Five easy steps for making your marketing efforts hit home
According to a new study from the International Food Information Council (IFIC), parents are turning to their health professionals for advice. In fact, children’s parents and caregivers trust their health professionals five times more than the next considered sources, their own parents and in-laws.
You may be experiencing this yourself. For a full year now, parents and caregivers have worked especially hard to keep their children’s growth from backsliding: scholastic stimulation, physical exercise, mental health and acuity, and a healthy, balanced diet were priorities for parents and caregivers. More recently, with the ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, parents have added their children’s immune systems, ability to readjust, hygiene, personal safety and social distancing to the list of concerns.
If you are promoting a healthy brand geared toward children, this should be ringing some bells for you because their parents—a special and large group of consumers—are looking for foods to help meet those goals.
We have put together a few tips for you, to help ensure that your marketing plan reaches them efficiently and strategically:
Identify the best messengers to reach your target consumers. Who has their ear, whom do they trust? Again, the IFIC report points you in a clear direction: health and wellness professionals are the most trusted source of nutritional information to parents as consumers.
Make clear the value of your brands’ nutritional benefits. How can you distinguish that your brand best addresses the unique needs of your consumer’s family? Go beyond keyword nutrition to truly support consumers’ efforts to eat healthier with relevant information.
Help them envision using the product in their daily life. Do your materials emphasize the health benefits? It’s crucial that you get consumers to envision using your brand or product in their day-to-day lives.
Incorporate evaluative feedback as you advance your plan. Are you including both qualitative and qualitative? Feedback comments and analytics should be incorporated immediately to keep your program fresh and connecting to your audience.
Work with a reputable partner to reach your special audience. Does your marketing team have the connections you need? Seek a partner with strong ties to the health and wellness community and a good reputation in the field that will help you drive trial.
Andrea Farmer, Forbes Councils Member, advises, “Brands must be more agile in their marketing decision-making, employing real-time measurements and evidence-based outcomes, rather than past behavior to hypothesize, test and continuously optimize their strategy.” In other words, to deliver impact for healthy brands requires making a “kind of material behavioral change, be it early-stage consideration, deeper understanding, or, ideally, real action.”
So, while parents are working on the logistics and emotions about what the next chapter of the pandemic holds for their children, this is a great opportunity for you to help alleviate their worries about finding healthy foods for their children.