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.

When people think of online marketing, they usually think one of three things: e-commerce, B2B lead generation or flashy ads from Fortune 500 companies. But, if you sell a consumer packaged good (CPG) at retail stores – the bricks and mortar kind – online marketing could be your secret weapon to grow your sales and distribution.

You’ve probably heard of email marketing, SEO and social. But simply engaging in these tactics will not necessarily deliver results. The key to success is having a strategy that can engage and activate your customer base – both existing and potential customers.

The Internet has been called the great equalizer between businesses small and large. And while it has become increasingly easy to buy online advertising from large publishers such as Google, the real power of online marketing is the ability for companies to communicate directly with customers without the need to buy advertising.

In times past, the only way to reach a large audience was to buy an advertisement or rent a mailing list. If you were lucky, you might have customer data from a survey or in-store presentation. All options forced CPG companies to be dependent on others for reaching their customers, or to invest significant budget into building their own customer database.

Today, CPG companies do not need to be so reliant on publishers to reach their audience every time they want to say something to them. The costs associated with building a customer database and messaging to them directly are a fraction of what they were even 10 years ago. Between email, social media and one’s own website, a CPG company has endless opportunities to reach and engage their customers, build their brand and influence purchases. Most importantly, the opportunity the Internet provides to communicate directly to consumers allows CPG companies to activate their customer-base at will.

Here is a notable example: President Obama’s electronic mailing list was generated almost entirely through his website. Through the course of his presidential campaign, the mailing list reached 1 Million subscribers. With a mailing list so large, he was able to engage and activate a passionate audience who then spread the word and pushed out the message. More importantly, it enabled him to step outside the box of the 30-second ad or 10 second sound bite to have a meaningful conversation with his audience. The engagement is priceless when compared with the cost of 30-second TV ads or prominent ads on the web.

That success formula is something that every CPG company should be striving to create today – build a customer database, engage the customers and activate them to build sales and broaden distribution.

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

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!

As discussed in our previous post, the key to efficiently spending your marketing budget is to engage and activate your customers, and communicate with them directly through cost-effective means, while avoiding an over-reliance on advertising (at least the paid kind).

The strategy you can employ to do this is through collecting data from your customers online, and communicating with them through email and social marketing. When you have a dedicated base of customers, you can communicate with them at will. This provides you a critical, and cost-effective, opportunity to test, learn and understand how your products can be successful, how you can drive more sales, and how you can increase your distribution.

Implementing such an approach ties directly into the core activities needed to build awareness, sales and distribution of a food and beverage product. A recent study published from Emarketer sheds light on the testing strategies that you can employ to test marketing concepts via email and social, by outlining the top activities people are likely to do after receiving marketing messages directly from consumer package good (CPG) companies:

• Download and print coupons (offers, upsells)
• Purchase products online and offline (sales, distribution)
• Try a new product for the first time (awareness, cross-sells)
• Order a product sample (trial)
• Research more about the product and company (awareness)

According to the same study, 74% of people who receive opt-in messages from CPG companies, “have a more positive impression of the company,” and 70% are “more willing to engage with [the] company.” Best of all, collecting customer data on your website and building email and social marketing programs is cost-effective, turn-key and provides a plethora of data that you can use to analyze and plan your next move.

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.