According to a 2023 Technavio report, the medicinal mushroom market stands at $5.3 billion with a three-year CAGR of nearly 10%. Consumers are trending towards adding functional or adaptogenic mushrooms to their diet for health benefits ranging from reducing inflammation, boosting immunity, and promoting wellness. Companies are selling adaptogenic mushrooms in different forms, ranging from pills, powders, and teas to ersatz coffee and broths.
Demand is growing at 10%, so why are Fungiculture companies struggling to scale their production? The answer lies in the strict FDA, FD&C, and DSHEA compliance guidelines and tough marketing guidelines. So, how do you craft your mycology marketing strategy to scale your business? Let us introduce you to the ten growth pillars that will drive business growth.
This article will cover the ten growth pillars that support your mycology marketing strategy.
1. Branding
Branding is the process of giving your business a unique identity. It is a set of values associated with your company and is also the perception of your business in your customer’s mind. And customer perception can make or break a brand.
4 Benefits of Branding Your Mushroom Company
Creating a strong brand around your business helps build trust and reputation with your customers, enables you to stand out from the competition, and helps drive sales growth. Here are four key benefits of branding your mycology business and how each benefit resonates in your customer’s mind.
I. Raises Brand Recall: “Oh, I know that brand!”
If you were to name three mushroom brands off the top of your head, chances are, Monterey Mushrooms and The Mushroom Company would be on that list. Brand recall is how well your existing and potential customers can recognize your brand and products. It is an indication that your customers differentiate your products from your competitors.
II. Increases Brand Loyalty: “I like what they do.”
Brand loyalty is a byproduct of the positive emotional experiences of customers with your products and services. Loyal customers spend up to 67% more on products and services than new customers, and they also view your product as superior to your competition’s.
III. Positive Word of Mouth Advertising: “You must try this brand; it’s excellent.”
When you offer high-quality products your customers have tried and liked, they are more likely to recommend your brand to their family and friends. You can turn customers into your brand ambassadors by delivering quality across your product and service. Word-of-mouth advertising also provides social proof of your brand’s credibility.
IV. Lower Price Sensitivity: “I’d rather pay a little more for better quality.”
Price sensitivity measures how much a product’s cost impacts a customer’s purchase decision. Customers who have tried your product, liked it, and view it as high quality are more likely to pay a slight premium for it. The people buying iPhones, Sunkist oranges, or Chiquita bananas believe they are buying a better product. One of the key benefits of a strong brand is the ability to price yourself a notch above the competition for a healthier bottom line.
2. Define Your Competitive Advantage
Your competitive advantage or unique selling proposition (USP) is a benefit your product offers that most competitors cannot. It gives you a competitive edge, guarantees quality, and helps attract new customers to your product. A strong USP is another lever you can pull to charge a premium price for your product.
Developing your USP is a four-step process, where the first step is to identify the criteria that drive the customer’s purchase decision. Next, rank your mycology brand and competitors on a scale of 1 to 10 on each criterion and identify where you have a competitive advantage. These criteria then become the core of your USP.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you went through the four-step process and came up with the following finding:
- Customer decision criteria: Quality, freshness, price, product range, ease of ordering, delivery time, and reliability.
- Competitive edge: Widest product range, shortest delivery times, 100% hand sorted, and recognized for product quality.
One of the USPs that could flow from the analysis is “The highest-quality and widest selection of mushrooms delivered fresh every day.” This USP can then become the tagline for your brand. The USP will become synonymous with your brand with consistent usage over time.
3. Build Your Customer Base
Business growth is often a combination of getting existing customers to buy more and adding new customers to your client base. Your mushroom marketing growth strategy needs to first align with an increase in your production capacity. When acquiring new customers, they can either come from market segments you are already servicing or from new segments. For instance, if you’re already servicing two local supermarkets, adding a third keeps you in the same segment. However, if you move from local chains to regional chains, you will move to a new segment.
The infographic below gives a snapshot view of different use cases of mushrooms:
Source: Fortune Business Insights
Mushroom consumption as a food item accounts for under 30% of total consumption. The majority of mushrooms are consumed in the dietary supplement and pharmaceutical segments.
According to a report by ResearchGate, up to 20% of a crop doesn’t make it to the shelves due to quality issues and rejections. When operating at a small scale, this rejection can be factored into your pricing; however, as you deal with larger customers, you will need to be price competitive and unable to add the rejection to your pricing. That’s when you can start monetizing the rejection by selling it to the dietary supplement and pharmaceutical industries, which do not need edible-grade mushrooms.
4. Give Your Website a Professional Makeover
The next element of your mushroom marketing strategy is to give your website a professional makeover. Purchase decisions in 2024 start with an online search, and your new customers will first discover your business through your website. Hence, it’s essential to make an impactful first impression. The user experience on your website is critical for both the new customer wanting to learn more about your business and the existing customer looking to place a hassle-free replenishment order.
Here are five benefits of having a professionally designed website:
- Create an impactful first impression: A visually aesthetic website coupled with a design focused on user experience delivers an impactful first impression.
- Greater visibility: Professionally designed websites are optimized for SEO and rank higher in user searches, giving your business higher visibility.
- Rich Content: A professionally designed website lets you tell your brand story and showcase your product range. Rich visual and textual content helps build viewer engagement and lets potential customers learn more about your business.
- Establishes consistent brand identity: A consistent brand identity helps establish your business’s credibility and helps build brand awareness with your audience.
- Boosts conversion rates and sales: A good user experience on your website helps drive higher engagement with the viewers, eventually leading to higher sales and conversions.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing is an essential element of the digital marketing mix, and companies that implement a well-planned and executed content strategy experience a six-fold higher conversion rate than those that don’t. High-quality content helps build trust and credibility for your business and fuels all other digital marketing strategies. Consistently distributing high-quality and engaging content across all content channels impacts your audience’s decision-making more than any other marketing technique.
These are the five ways in which content marketing can make your mushroom marketing more effective:
- Build brand awareness: High-quality content distributed across channels helps build brand awareness.
- Position your company as an authority: High-value content that informs and educates your audience helps build your online authority, and your audience will view your company as a credible source of information.
- Improve search rankings: You will rank higher in organic searches by consistently distributing content that offers value to your audience using the pillar/cluster model.
- Generate better sales leads: Content marketing can help generate leads of potential customers. Adding calls to action (CTAs) to your content can drive higher conversion of the leads.
- Build audience trust: Your audience’s engagement with your content helps build a relationship and trust that drives conversions over time.
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing is another critical element of your mushroom marketing strategy. B2B email marketing is a strategy for identifying and connecting with businesses that use your product, and a consistent outreach with emails helps build a relationship and convert them to customers. It is equally effective for converting new business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-consumer (D2C) leads.
Email marketing offers the highest returns among all marketing strategies at an ROI of $36 for every marketing dollar spent. The email marketing strategies for B2B and B2C leads are very different, and this article focuses on email marketing for a B2B audience. Here are the four steps to launch your B2B mushroom marketing email campaigns.
1. Building your Mailing List
Start by identifying the business segments that you want to target. Let’s say, as a first step, you are looking at regional supermarket chains and restaurants with over 50 covers. You’re scaling production at the back end, so you need to target customers with a higher purchase volume. Start building your list by referencing trade directories, company websites, and LinkedIn to collect contact details.
Pro Tip: When marketing your brand to a company, you are not selling to one individual. Instead, you will need to target all stakeholders who provide inputs to make the decision. Hence, at the regional supermarkets, you will need to target the purchase manager, the manager in charge of fresh produce, and the CFO.
2. Segment your mailing list
Once you’ve compiled your raw mailing list, you need to segment it into smaller and targeted groups that are homogenous in interests and needs. This will allow you to send personalized and relevant messaging to each segment. For instance, you can segment the restaurant list based on the type of cuisine served. Now, your emails to the Japanese restaurants can talk about your Shitake mushrooms, and the message to the Italian restaurants can focus on Porcini mushrooms.
3. Craft content for each funnel stage
Your B2B leads have a three-stage journey down the marketing funnel before they convert to customers, and you need to craft content relevant for each stage. The first stage is awareness; here, the content focuses on creating awareness of your brand and the range of products and services that you offer. How-to guides, trend reports, and white papers help build awareness and establish your company as a thought leader in the industry.
The second stage is consideration, where the potential customer is evaluating different suppliers for a product or service. The content at this stage should focus on the USPs that you offer, for example, the range of mushrooms you offer and your shorter delivery times. Case studies, customer testimonials, and product samples help in establishing your brand as a better alternative and move the leads toward conversion.
The third stage is conversion, where the lead is ready to make a purchase decision. The potential customer has decided to buy your product and is now evaluating criteria like budgets and pricing. The content at this stage should address remaining purchase barriers and reinforce the idea that they are making the right decision in purchasing your brand.
There are several email automation tools that eliminate the need for manual intervention and automate the process from generating leads to scheduling and sending your campaign emails.
7. Build a Visual Content Library
When you’re selling an edible product like mushrooms, a high-quality image can leave a greater impact on the viewer’s mind than a thousand words of sales copy. Invest in building a visual asset library with images of the different types of mushrooms you produce, appetizing images of dishes made with mushrooms, as well as images of your production process. These images can be shared to good effect on social media platforms, in your email campaigns, and on your website.
Since you’re selling a food item, the images need to appeal to the senses of the viewer, wherein they see the image and want to experience the product’s touch, fragrance, and taste. Hiring a professional photographer to create your visual assets library is a good investment.
Pro Tip: Stay away from stock images and images you find online because, chances are, your competition is using them. Using original images gives your brand added credibility.
8. Social Media Marketing
Social media provides a fertile ground for ramping up your B2B marketing strategies. B2B social media marketing is a strategy to connect and build relationships with potential clients by sharing industry-relevant content and actively engaging with your audience. Social platforms are ideal for building awareness of your brand and building a loyal community by sharing content like blog posts and how-to videos. Use your social posts to build credibility and trust with your audience.
Integrating your social strategy with your overall business plan is the key to realizing the benefits of B2B social media marketing. The idea here is to align your social goals with your overall business growth goals. Automating your social media marketing campaigns enables you to schedule campaigns, track audience engagement, and facilitate real-time interaction with your audience.
To embrace a customer-centric approach on social media, your response time is critical. According to a 2023 SproutSocial report, 51% of B2B respondents felt that a brand’s most memorable action is responding to customer queries. To optimize the results of social media marketing, you need to implement a process to collect and analyze data continually to identify platforms and content that yield the highest audience engagement with likes, shares, and comments.
9. Use B2B E-commerce Platforms
B2B e-commerce is promoting and selling your products online to other businesses. Since orders are processed digitally, it drives purchase efficiency and effectiveness for B2B sellers, including producers, wholesalers, and distributors. B2B e-commerce is one of the fastest-growing sales channels and estimates peg B2B e-commerce sales at over $12 trillion.
Some key benefits of B2B e-commerce include:
- Automated and efficient sales process between buyers and sellers
- Lower infrastructure and overhead costs and, hence, higher margins
- Ability to access the mass market at scale
- Ability to build strong partnerships and relationships
As you scale your production capacity, it becomes more cost-effective to work with buyers who purchase in volume. You can use the B2B e-commerce platforms to identify and work with regional wholesalers who buy your produce in bulk and then sell it in their regions. Working with distributors is a cost-efficient way of expanding your brand’s geographic footprint.
Alternatively, you can also use the e-commerce platforms to identify regional and national distributors who can take care of tasks like marketing, packaging, and shipping and give your brand a larger footprint.
10. B2B Networking for Growth
Networking with institutional buyers and trade partners helps in scaling your business and keeping abreast of industry developments and trends. Networking enables lead generation, facilitates collaboration, and helps in building strategic relationships. Attending trade shows and conferences, joining professional organizations, and even engaging with potential customers on LinkedIn are effective ways to build your professional network.
B2B networking is also a great way to gain market intelligence and identify new trends that could give you a competitive edge. Networking also provides deeper customer insights and helps improve your reputation.
Summing Up
Upscaling your mushroom cultivation and marketing business requires a detailed and well-executed plan with many moving parts and elements. It’s essential to keep track of multiple strategies and ensure that they remain aligned with your overall business growth goals.
In-housing this process requires investing in a large and highly skilled team, and since growth always lags behind your investment, the immediate impact is felt on cash flows. Partnering with digital marketing companies with large and highly skilled teams at a fraction of the cost of onboarding talent is a cost-effective way of driving your growth.
A Few Words About Flying V Group
At Flying V Group, our mission is to build a digital presence for mycology businesses and help them drive growth using online channels. We follow a five-step process with every new client. The first step is to understand their business with a deep dive to understand how your business works, your customer’s needs and wants and your growth goals.
Armed with these details, we then develop a customized marketing plan with measurable targets across the ten growth pillars discussed above. The third and fourth steps are implementation and monitoring, and the fifth step is ongoing recalibration for optimizing the strategy results.
Our team of experts is globally dispersed to ensure that we are available 365/24×7 to service your needs. Check out some of our client testimonials and reach out to us for a free consultation.
FAQs
Q1. What are the health benefits of mushrooms?
Mushrooms are a superfood and a powerful source of nutrients. Fresh mushrooms are fat-free, low-calorie, nutrient-dense, low in sodium, and filled with natural antioxidants.
Q2. What are the main categories in edible mushroom sales?
Mushrooms are packaged and sold in three different categories: fresh, canned, and frozen. While frozen mushrooms represent the smallest segment, it has witnessed the highest growth over the last three years.
Q3. What are medicinal mushrooms?
Medicinal mushrooms are select species of mushrooms that are rich in beta-glucans and terpenoids. Beta-glucans are found in the cell walls of mushrooms, and they help in regulating the immune system. Terpenoids offer proven efficacy in the prevention and therapy of several diseases, including cancer. They also have antimicrobial, antiviral, and anti-allergic properties.
Q4. How Frequently should I take mushroom extracts?
You should take the extracts on a daily basis. People usually take multiple extracts for cognitive health, tackling stress, and maintaining energy levels.
Q5. What are the challenges in marketing Psilocybin or Magic Mushrooms?
Several studies have reported the health benefits of Psilocybin mushrooms that range from treating PTSD, chronic depression, and drug and alcohol addiction. These mushrooms have traditionally been highly restricted by law, but the restrictions are easing up in the face of scientific research.
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