Section 1: Understanding your customer and the market
01 – Introduction
10 Sections | 1 Quiz 03 – Being remarkable
10 Sections 04 – Researching your customer
9 Sections 05 – Understanding why vegans buy
9 Sections Section 2: Your vegan marketing toolbox
06 – Your vegan marketing toolbox
5 Sections 07 – Creating your vegan brand
9 Sections 08 – Your website
8 Sections 09 – Google
9 Sections 10 – Email marketing
7 Sections 11 – Creating and using ‘content’
7 Sections 12 – Social media: paid
9 Sections 13 – Social media: free
10 Sections 14 – LinkedIn
8 Sections 15 – Networking, events and fairs
10 Sections 16 – Offline marketing
9 Sections 18 – PR and getting your business in the news
12 Sections 19 – Working with influencers
7 Sections Section 3: Creating and carrying out your marketing plan
20 – Creating your marketing plan
7 Sections 21 – Creating your marketing funnel
11 Sections 22 – Creating your marketing mix
7 Sections 23 – Setting your timeline and tasks
6 Sections 
Recap, resources and support
Hi! Thanks for the content so far.
Social media & getting followers organically has been a big part of my companies success as I’ve allocated so much time and effort to this.
Up until about a year ago It was just me, but now there are 4 of us so I needed to change up my posts to reflect this as part of our appeal is the personal service/connection.
So for example on Instagram it had always been my face as the logo so I changed this to our company logo which I was worried about doing as I am really seen as the ”face” of the company.
I post a lot of photos/videos with me in them but now am wanting to do the same with my employees & for them this side of things doesn’t come as naturally so I’m currently coaxing photos out of them & want to work up to videos.
(I no longer want to be the face either based on my long term goals)
I guess my question would be do you have any advice for encouraging employees to be more excited about this & pro-active in assisting with this side of things? I have some ideas but would love any input.
Thank you, Hayley.
Hey Hayley, and great to see how you’re progressing through the course!
I’ve actually been in a similar place to this. In a past business, I employed about 15 people and getting them to be as excited as I was about promoting the business, being visible and getting involved in sales and marketing was something we struggled with for a long time.
The thing that changed this was when I invited them ‘in’ to the business. We started sharing our monthly sales data, how much each client was spending with us, what our prospect funnel looked like and then set targets and rewards for increasing that. Everyone became invested in the future of the business, for example we said if we could hit a new base-line of minimum sales figures for a constant 6 months then everyone’s wage would go up, and it did. We held weekly meetings to get ideas for how we could find new customers and feed back to the team updated stats, funnels and figures. Actually, one of our graphic design team was so invested in getting that pay-rise that he became responsible for one of our biggest sales that year!
So it might be that they don’t have the same investment in the company as you do in order to understand the importance of creating that visibility. So how can you invite YOUR team ‘in’ to the company?
David 🌱
Hello! So, I decided to look at Plant Based News as one of my entities to ‘research’. They had me stumped in terms of their agenda, as there doesn’t seem to be very much promotional material that I could see on their social media at all (and those I did see had very little engagement, we’re talking 2 shares and 5 likes, compared with hundreds of likes and tens of shares on all other posts). Perhaps they just do it well, and it’s very subtle, but I honestly didn’t see very much in the way of paid content.
I wasn’t sure whether to speculate about them in public on here but I just couldn’t decide what their revenue streams are. Might there be benefactors involved that mean they don’t have to look for advertising? Or am I being totally naïve and is it just a case that many of their posts are the result of PR? Thoughts?
This exercise in particular was really useful though – for something so seemingly straight forward, I was shocked that I hadn’t done this before really. I think I assumed that because I’ve seen thousands of other brands’ social media accounts that I would have absorbed these details but it’s surprising what others have made work for them, and interestingly how different their approaches were too.
Hey Pete. I believe that PBN is part-backed by Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed’s investment company in order to increase the coverage of vegan-positive news stories – or at least they were at some point. Part of what happens when you get influential people on your mission!
https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/news/vegan-saudi-prince-partners-uk-vegan-media-startup/
However, they have multiple revenue streams based on the size of their coverage. A quick snapshot: 18 million monthly Facebook impressions, 8M search impressions (a bit of a woolly metric there!!), 55k on their mailing list, 26M on Instagram, 18M on YouTube.
When you have that kind of coverage, you can create a decent revenue by partnering with companies on both display adverts but also working with them to promote their products by featuring stories. A lot of the product-based stories you see on PBN are paid-for placements.
So, they build the audience then sell that audience reach to companies who want to get their produces and stories in front of them.
You can see more about what products they offer here: https://brands.plantbasednews.org/
I know we have a couple of members who freelance for PBN if you wanted to dig deeper. Just let me know!
Hi! I’m analysing Miyoko’s IG posts, and I notice that the videos tend to get many times more views than the photos get ‘likes’. Are views and likes comparable? i.e. are the videos actually that much more engaging, or is it something else, e.g. the videos autoplay?
Hey Alice, and you’re right. Pretty much all the social platforms count a video ‘view’ as meaning the video has played for at least 3 seconds. So if the videos auto-play as you are scrolling by, then if that video stays on screen for three seconds then the platform counts it as a view.
It’s a little bit disingenuous in my opinion, but helps inflate your ego!
You shouldn’t discount views completely though, if one video has 10 times as many views as all the others on that account then that’s obviously one to take notice of. So compare videos to each other. Looking at Miyoko’s grid, for example, I can see that her ‘cheese’ videos seem to get more views (18k / 20k views compared to her normal 5k). So what are the commonalities between those videos that get 20k views and those that get 4k. Is it the subject matter, is it the thumbnail, is it the presentation style (eg ‘how to’ videos compared to interviews etc) is it the indulgent foods that get more than the healthy foods?
David ?