The Keys To Effective Vegan Marketing
We’ve all been made more aware of the importance of leading greener, more environmentally-conscious lives. One only has to look at how much more the lifestyle has been able to enter the mainstream and popular culture, as well as at the work carried out by prominent environmental activists like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, to see just how much more aware we really are. When it comes to vegan marketing, however, it can be a bit of a minefield to successfully navigate. That’s why the team here at VerriBerri, a UK vegan marketing agency, wanted to outline some of the keys to getting it right.
Stay True To Your Core Values And Audience, First And Foremost
A business that forgets its core audience is a business that won’t last very long. With an increasing number of people looking to purchase vegan products (even if they themselves are not committed vegans) in can be all too easy to develop eyes bigger than your stomach, from a success perspective. If you’re not always coming back to those original lifestyle tenets that made you so appealing as, let’s say a brand, in the first place for dyed-in-the-wool vegans (or a non-animal equivalent of that phrase…) then you’ve lost that very solidity of foundation which enabled you to even think about accessing new audiences!
Then Reach New People…
That’s not to say, however, that you shouldn’t look to pursue a broader appeal with your brand, business or product. It’s just about doing it in a way which is organic, from a business sense. Vegan marketing is more visible than it’s ever been before and, taking supermarkets as an example, the fact that own-brand vegan alternatives are now a reality (for things like dairy-based milk substitutes) just goes to show how willing people are to dip their toes into the water, so to speak.
One way to reach out is to adopt something a change of tack when it comes to your brand tone of voice. A negative stereotype associated with veganism is that of the ‘militant vegan’. But by adopting a conciliatory approach, one in which you’re saying “hey we’re not saying you have to go cold turkey straight away – if you’ll pardon the pun – but why not try swapping out meat for our alternative, one day per week?” then you’ll find that people are much more receptive. In other words, work with people not against them! Which brings us onto…
Don’t Alienate!
If there’s one thing that every vegan product needs to be incredibly self-aware about is how they come across to non-vegans. Rightly or wrongly, many people pick out ‘veganism’ as one of the biggest examples of so-called virtue-signalling, of saying that they’re somehow superior as a result of their following of that lifestyle. Now, as we know, this couldn’t be further from the truth for the majority of active vegans, but you can’t (and you mustn’t) ignore the fact that this trope persists and that your brand/business needs to work constructively in dismantling it, rather than in any way adding ammunition to a side that’s picking against, in their eyes, an easy target.
‘Vegan’ Isn’t As Much Of A U.S.P. As It Perhaps Once Was
With a proliferation in the number of vegan brands and products over the past few years, simply offering something vegan isn’t enough to attract customers in the way that it might once have been. The reason? Because there’s likely another vegan products offering something similar but with another U.S.P. stacked on top, be it price, quality, or whatever it may be. So, when you’re looking to vegan marketing for your business, product or brand, yes you should of course look to focus on that – but not exclusively that.
What Marketing To Use?
Social Media
What types, then, of marketing should you look to use? Well, there are a huge number of trends within veganism as a lifestyle, and the best place for trends is unquestionably social media. Social media platforms provide vegan businesses with ready access to one of their largest demographics – millennials – and also help facilitate the dynamic and positive kind of community that veganism as a lifestyle is keen to promote and foster.
If social media doesn’t come naturally to you, then don’t worry! You can use a vegan marketing agency such as ours, and we’ll put in place a dedicated account manager for you. They will create and schedule content, work on building your brand following and finally, engage with users.
Blog Writing
Old but gold, blog writing is a great way to showcase expertise as well as helping to have a demonstrably positive impact on your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) value. SEO value is just a fancy way of describing how well your website is going to perform on search engines. So, if your website has good SEO value, it’s more likely to appear higher up on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Public Relations (PR)
We’re not going to get into the debate of whether PR counts as marketing or not, because we’d be here all afternoon. Some people think it is, some people disagree – let’s leave it at that. What can’t be disputed, however, is its benefit to businesses. It’s all very well tooting your own horn, so to speak, but it sounds much better if it’s coming from someone else. Who? Oh, I don’t know – how about a national publication with correspondingly national readership? You see our point. Our vegan marketing agency has a dedicated PR department ready to secure features in both industry-specific publications as well as broader, national-level publications.
Contact Our Vegan Marketing Agency
We can all do more, we can all educate ourselves and others, and we can all make change, be that small or large. The point, though, whatever we do, is that we do something. So, if you’d like to find out more about our vegan marketing agency, then get in touch! Contact VerriBerri today on 01376 386 850 or click here. We’d love to have a sit down (when we’re allowed to again!) and a natter about how we can help your business, moving forward.