I’m back in South Florida after spending a few days in Fresno, California. As much as I enjoy visiting the valley, and eating at some VERY cool restaurants, I am always excited to make that turn over the Atlantic Ocean right before touching down.
This time, “touchdown” occurred in West Palm Beach, so I was treated to a beautiful view of The Breakers Hotel and some of the Palm Beach Mansions. If you find yourself in Palm Beach, make sure you do the drive over to the island and down the coast past Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence. It’s not the biggest in town, but it is one of the nicest.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I was in California to ensure our ThirsTea® concentrate flavor profiles are consistent among the various formulas and packaging options we offer. We want to make sure that our customers get the same glass of iced tea whether they utilize our bag-in-the box concentrate, our 4x1 gallon program, or our 4oz high-yield product line.
Since taking over the company in 2009, we haven’t had the opportunity to undertake this task until now. However, I am going to recommend we do this once a year. The project allowed us to try all our products. Believe it or not, that doesn’t get to happen very often.
Don’t get me wrong, we drink lots of our iced tea, but it’s typically our 4oz high-yield line. We don’t often get the opportunity to try all our products side-by-side with each other. The experience was not just helpful, it allowed us to catch a minor discrepancy in one of our formulations and make the changes necessary to standardize all our flavor profiles.
After, as my management team was discussing the day’s events, I began thinking about how what we had just done, with tangible products, is very similar to what many of you social media marketers do on a daily basis with your intangible ideas and blogs.
You develop. You launch. You market. You monitor and evaluate. You modify and repeat.
Each step is important by itself. But to be successful, you need to incorporate ALL parts. The same is true in the Foodservice Beverage industry.
You can develop THE BEST shelf-stable orange juice concentrate. One that tastes like FRESH SQUEEZED Florida orange juice, but if you don’t launch it, or let people know it is out there and available, you won’t sell a box. (I have friends that have accomplished this feat, and it is the BEST tasting concentrate I have tried. This product will significantly change the juice portion of our industry.)
Once you’ve taken those preliminary steps of manufacturing and launching your product, if you don’t monitor the effectiveness of your launch (or marketing strategy) and evaluate what is working (or not) your product sales could stall, or worse disappear.
Those of you who have written books based off your blog postings and have tried (or are still trying) to market and sell them, probably understand this process better than anyone.
I am sure each of your marketing campaigns is tracked and regularly analyzed to determine which programs have been successful and which need improvement. Right?
When you started the process of writing, didn’t you feel like THAT was the most important task? You wanted to get those thoughts on paper (figuratively speaking), and probably spent an enormous amount of time editing and rewriting. At some point during the process I am willing to bet you thought, “If I am able to effectively get my thoughts organized and written, this book will be a powerful tool and will help a lot of people.”
I’m also pretty certain that, at least up until the book went to print, you may have thought, “This book is going to sell thousands of copies simply because of the content I am providing to people.” (C’mon, at least one of my readers is a published author…)
But then the book is printed and you get ready for the initial launch. The butterflies start fluttering and you start wondering if what you’ve written is really THAT good.
About then, your publisher starts to kick in their marketing program…and you write a blog, post to your Facebook page, tweet about the book…monitor, evaluate…and sell.
It’s the same for us in the beverage world…although sometimes our butterflies feel like eagles (subtle shout-out to my American University family).
--My title is based on the 1987 Michael J. Fox movie. For bonus points, what was "Supergirl's" character name in the movie? Anyone...anyone...?
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