Salsa surpassed ketchup in dollar-volume sales in 1991 and was worth $931 Mil in 2008 (that’s more than 379 million jars!). Now, part of that may be because Salsa doesn’t last as long as ketchup. But hey, that’s not salsa’s problem.

Salsa first gained notoriety in the 1970s due to increased interest in Southwestern foods, healthier foods and higher tortilla chip sales (you gotta dip all those chips in something). Nowadays, you’ll find many varieties of salsas. Pace introduced 5 new varieties in 2008 alone.

If you read our recent post about BBQ sauce, you’ll remember a problem that small producers have: shelf space. The big guys run the show for salsa much in the same way they do for BBQ sauces.

So where does that leave smaller producers? Well they need to rely on the web more to generate interest, sales and trials.

• Be sure that you have a website that lets people know where they can buy your salsa.
• Share your URL on your packaging.
• Let consumers order directly from your website.
• Give your consumers some tantalizing recipes
• Tell your story (where did you get your recipe? has it been in the family for years?)
• And for heaven’s sake try to use the word “chipotle” on your website. It’s the Mexican ingredient du jour, and that term alone is searched by more than 90,000 consumers each month on Google.

Something of interest is that some of the biggest brands out there do not have a presence on the big social networks. But they do have a presence on the supermarket shelves.

So, as a small packager of salsa, what are you to do?

90% of all salsas are sold in a bottle or can. The rest is sold fresh in the produce section of the market, or at specialty locations (including restaurants).

In California, most supermarkets sell a fresh option. It is usually quite tasty. And it will usually last a a few days. It is usually made right at the supermarket.

I almost always opt to buy my chips and salsa at a local Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles called Tito’s Tacos. It is worth the drive and the wait (there’s always a line).

And that’s the thing about salsa. If you have a good salsa, people will search it out. But you need to help them find it.

That’s where your website and social presence comes in.

As mentioned above. You may have a reasonably even playing field when it comes to Facebook and Twitter. Currently, Big Salsa is not there. So if you get your brand out there, and build up a fan base now, by the time Big Salsa gets around to it, you’ll be in a good place.

But as you can see from the Facebook Fan Page of a hot sauce (the “Southern” cousin of salsa), just being there is not enough.

Dave’s Insanity Sauce has over 1,100 fans, but only one post.

Give your fans something to talk about. Start the conversation. The Superbowl is coming up. Remind them that it’s your salsa that should be sitting on the table next to the tortilla chips. And give them a reason to order it (a coupon and a place to redeem it, free shipping, a recipe, etc.)
Don’t just ask one question and expect your fans to do the rest.

As far as search engines, there’s bigger competition than Pace or Ortega. And that’s the romantic latin dance made popular by the 80s movie “Salsa” (tagline: “It’s Hot”). A search for “Salsa” comes up with more than 39,000,000 results. So what to do?

Recipes. Make sure your website has a lot of them. And be sure to use keyword-rich, tantalizing recipes (such as chipotle).

Engage fans where they are. Everyone has to start somewhere, so set up your Facebook Page and start building your fan base. Send a free order of salsa to anyone who gets 25 people to join. Become part of the party.

Remind people of reasons to enjoy salsa (i.e.: Happy Cinco de Mayo).

Lastly, if you must eat Big Salsa, may i recommend Herdez? I “discovered” it in a small Mexican market in Los Angeles years ago and have always kept it as my backup salsa (there’s always a jar or can in the cupboard). But I guess I’m not the only one who likes it because I just noticed that they are now owned by Hormel. Little salsa becomes Big Salsa.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The former can be determined pretty easily. Walk into any supermarket, convenience store or corner market and it will be what’s readily available. Sometimes it will be the only thing available. In case you need to know, it’s Kraft, closely followed by Heinz BBQ sauce. In their defense, they were also the first to market back in the late 40s and early 50s.

The latter is much more subjective. And regional for that matter. Your favorite barbecue sauce may only be available in your favorite BBQ restaurant. Or it might only be distributed within a 30-mile range of where it is made.

So how does the little guy compete against the big guys when it comes to BBQ sauces? Well, truthfully, it’s not easy. Walk the aisles of your local supermarket and you’ll see a wide variety of sauces, most of which have big marketing dollars behind them. Most small sauces don’t stand a chance in a supermarket, unless they are the local flavor, in which case, they probably aren’t going to be in the market in the next town over. And obviously, you’ll find more BBQ sauce in a supermarket in the South, than in, say, the Northeast.

Luckily, there’s the Internet. But even then, there’s a lot of competition.
A quick search for “barbecue sauce” on Google yields over 11,000,000 results.

So how do you stand out? How do people find you?

For starters you want to be sure you have a good website (unless you have an arrangement with one of the many “BBQ Sauce of the Month Club” websites, in which case, the following advice would apply to them as well.)

Whether you’re a BBQ Sauce Maker and Seller or just a Seller, here are some things to keep in mind:

Put your URL on the label or cap and give people a reason to visit your website: discounts on future bottles, interesting emails (recipes, stories from the grill, etc.), demonstration videos.

Make sure you have a Facebook Fan Page and/or Twitter page, and that you actively encourage people to join it. Maybe you even put your Facebook and Twitter info on the label, or in your restaurant. At the very least, put it on your site.

Offer up a lot of recipes. Mouth watering, keyword-rich recipes. The more ways people can find you, the better.

Make sure your site is ready for any new traffic. We’ve all heard about the site, that got mentioned on a TV show or a popular email newsletter, only to break down with the desired onslaught of traffic that came its way. That’s no way to succeed.

Tell your story on your website: BBQ Sauce aficionados don’t just want to know where their sauce came from, they want to know who it came from. Did you quit your white collar job to follow your passion? Were you a cook in the army? Had you never tried BBQ until your first trip to the South and that was the day everything changed? Did you drive across country “researching” BBQ? (Full disclosure: I drove across the country “researching” BBQ sauces and blogged about it back in 2002.)

People want to feel that by buying a particular BBQ sauce, they’re making a statement. They want to live the dream you had the courage to pursue, if only through their taste buds.

So, as you can see, there’s a lot that can be done to help improve the visibility of your BBQ sauce.

Obviously, if you can get on a nationally syndicated cooking show, you’ll have plenty of interest in your product. But even then, you’ll want to be sure that your site is ready to do the heavy lifting.
There are multiple kinds of sauce but tomato-based sauces are the most popular brands nationally.  Regional styles include:

BBQ Sauce by Region:
Carolinas: Thin viscosity and vinegary are the unifying characterizations of barbecue sauces from this area. In eastern North Carolina, the sauce is seasoned with black pepper, cayenne and other spices while in western North Carolina, small amounts of molasses or ketchup are added. Yellow-mustard shows up in barbecue sauces from the Columbia area of South Carolina. Further south in Georgia, the sauces are notably sweeter with brown sugar and ketchup.

Memphis: Thicker sauces with more of a ketchup/mustard blend. Dry rubs sans sauce are common on grilled products.

Kansas City: Tomato-based, sweet with some heat at times, medium to thick viscosity. This style was the basis of the first commercial barbecue sauce from Kraft Foods.

Texas: Thick with molasses, Worcestershire sauce, chili peppers and powders used, as well as ingredients such as coffee.

Innovations in BBQ:
Spray-BQ from William and Williams Gourmet Foods in Port Washington, WI is a spray-bottle of sauce that is sprayed onto meat while it cooks.  It comes in six flavors and is marketed regionally.

Chef Hymie Grande’ BBQ sauce has no high fructose corn syrup and is the first BBQ sauce to meet the American Diabetes Assoc. requirements.  The sauce is made in Bridgeton, NJ.

FunniBonzLLC: Owner Jim Barbour was laid off in 2006 and was looking for his passion and cooking at home — he made a sauce he liked.  Took it to his local grocery (in Pennington NJ) and did in-store demos, selling $10,000 in his first week.  He has kept expanding, is now in Whole Foods stores, and has 3 varieties.  Just broke even in Aug. 2009.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

In 2004, wine connoisseur, Neil Monnens, noticed a funny thing about wine – there was no consistency in price across wines with the same ratings. In late 2004, he started publishing WineBlueBook each month to provide a simple wine buying guide that offers an at-a-glance breakdown of how one wine compares to another in terms of quality and price.  WineBlueBook’s goal is to make wine drinking and wine buying more accessible to everyone by helping consumers find quality wines at every price point.

Client Challenge

WineBlueBook’s goal is to signup website visitors to a free trial of its monthly publication. The goal is to show visitors the value of the product and then subsequently sign them up to a paid subscription.

WineBlueBook’s site had undergone extensive search engine optimization (SEO) efforts which were yielding significant levels of highly targeted organic search traffic each month. However, while the organic traffic levels continued to grow, the program was generating very few trials.

In addition to SEO, WineBlueBook launched a paid search campaign on Google to drive traffic but the campaign also yielded very few trials.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint conducted an extensive analysis of WineBlueBook’s website usability, organic traffic and keywords to determine where the conversion funnel was breaking. Thrivepoint quickly discovered that the primary cause of poor performance was rooted in the fact that 9 out of 10 visitors were leaving the site less than 30 seconds after arriving.

To engage consumers with WineBlueBook, Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – a solution to improve the messaging and layout of the web pages in order to capture more trial signups. Optimization was focused on three pages as a proof of concept.

The focus of optimization was on message, layout and offer testing to determine if consumers viewed WineBlueBook as a way to save money on wine or as a way to discover new wines to try. The testing of messages and layouts were implemented to determine which core theme was going to drive the highest trial rate.

Through the course of the program, Thrivepoint implemented and tested three web page layouts, two core messages and three offer treatments. Test messaging was deployed as eight executions rolled out into matched pairs to determine if “Savings” or “Discovery” messages were the primary motivators for trials. After the test yielded that consumers were more motivated by the “Savings” messages, the test was further focused on drilling down into which specific “Savings” message maximized trial rate.

Campaign Results

The program yielded an overall increase in site wide trials of 192% in two months driven by an increase in signup rate by 103% and increasing organic traffic.

For the three pages targeted specifically for optimization, the results were even better. A key finding in the initial analysis was that visitors were not engaged. Decreasing bounce rate by 6 percentage points increased conversion rate and enabled home page optimization which yielded 776% more trials than months prior to the program. The other pages targeted for optimization yielded a 950% increase in trials.

In addition, all optimizations were handled with care to ensure that no flow of organic traffic was interrupted and pages were further optimized for organic search in cases where it was warranted. The net result was a 22% increase in traffic for the targeted pages.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The potato chip market is a $15+ Billion dollar a year industry. There are a few leaders, such as Lays, Pringles, Cape Cod, Zapps and Wise, but there are also a lot of smaller companies out there that have a distribution range of a hundred miles (if that). These companies can use the Internet to increase their sales and distribution.

People who grew up in Lewistown have a fondness for Hartley’s Potato Chips. If you meet someone from there and ask them what their favorite food is, there’s a good chance they’ll say “Hartley’s”. And also take into consideration that there are potato chip aficionados (you think only cigar’s have them?) who are always looking for a new chip to try, and you can see how expanding beyond your area code can really help to spur sales.

We evaluated Hartley’s website and would like to start by saying “Nice Site”… BUT…. It could use some help with regards to driving more traffic, more sales and generating a customer base that can help them expand their distribution footprint. This exercise is not intended to critique the look and feel of a site (except with regards to how it affects the user experience). This is a good looking site. If you’ve ever seen a bag of Hartley’s, you’ll feel right at home with this site.

META TAGS
One place to start with ensuring that people “find” your potato chip company’s website (hartleyspotatochips.com) is with the meta tags. The text of the organic search listing is disorienting to people and could be improved by using a company description in the page’s meta tags. Something along the lines of “Since 1935, Hartley’s Potato Chips have been the favorite kettle cooked potato chip of Lewistown, Pennsylvania” as an example.

FLASH
The Flash intro file used to load the company logo loads slowly (it can take more than minute to load on some computers). No call to action for visitor to follow that indicates how to enter the website. These are little things. But they matter. A simple “click to enter” on the bag would help. An optimized Flash file would help speed up the load as well.

Of course, some SEO purists would insist that Flash will greatly diminish your chances of showing up on a search engine at all. We agree. But people like Flash. It’s here to stay. An HTML / Flash hybrid would have a lot more success showing up on search engines while still providing the desired user experience. So be sure that the page loads quickly and the navigation path is clear for the visitor.

WEBSITE NAVIGATION
Currently the homepage defaults to news page with small font. And the news is not up-to-date. (this is probably due to the fact that the site is all Flash and you’d need a Flash programmer to make the update.)

It is best if the homepage has a welcome message, possibly in the form of a message from the Hartley’s team. A brief message, with some keyword-rich content along with a specific next step (shop) would probably help to improve your online sales.

Hartley’s should also consider including an email subscription or Facebok link to start building a dialog with existing and potential customers who can buy online, tell others about Hartley’s and ask their local stores to start carrying Hartley’s Potato Chips. The link to buy online should be more prominent (you have to click “Products”.)

The store is a little hard to navigate. Unless you looked at the demonstration in the “Products” section, you may not know how to add products to your shopping cart. There are many “Off the shelf” shopping cart tools. It might be worth exploring.

A few final thoughts: Why not have a Facebook page? And link to it directly from your site. People (like me) would become a fan. Then my 800+ friends (many of whom have heard me rave on about Hartley’s Potato Chips) would see that I’m a fan and become fans as well. Not all. Not even most. But some. And then some of their friends will see that they became a fan and become fans. And so on. Of course, this means you’ll need to have something to say. But I’ve spent a lot of time in Lewistown, PA, and I can tell you this. Nobody is ever at a loss for words.

What does this all mean for you? Well, if you’re a potato chip company, look at what we’ve said and see where your site stands. If you’re any other kind of consumer goods company, think about how we can help. We focus on all points of entry and with turning visitors into customers. Then turning those customers into evangelists for your brand.

Read more market analysis or case studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.