Content marketing for food supplements

Guest blog by: Yu Wang Tsang, student Small Business & Retail Management

On April 17, 2019, I was able to interview Thomas Lapperre about my graduation research on the introduction of a food supplement made from insects through content marketing. For my graduation research, it is necessary to make a financial forecast of the expected turnover. The problem is that I have never worked with content marketing and the demand for this product was very unclear to me because, to my knowledge, there is very little search for the product. Below you will find a summary of the most important elements from the interview.

Thomas started by explaining two methods to introduce the product to the market with push or pull strategies:

• At a pull strategy first look at the existing needs of a customer, through Google Analytics it can be measured how often a product is searched (Google keyword research). With this, a potential demand can in any case be measured.
• At a push strategy a need must, as it were, be created for the target group. Since a similar product is a success in America, Thomas advised me to benchmarking apply and target the same target audience by looking at the website and the way the competitor promotes itself. When the target group has been better visualized, it can be used with the help of Facebook Ads focus on the characteristics of the target group to measure the target group size and then create a need for this target group with a Facebook advertising campaign.

These two methods have made a huge contribution to estimating what the potential demand could be and have acted as a certain basis in the preparation of the financial forecast for a product (with the question unknown) is ''used to be'').

In addition, the content of the interview was about determining the right KPIs related to building up brand awareness (awareness). It soon came to the fore that it is much wiser to build a name when building up a name action KPI to link it to the public. This can be done by, among others, turning on the viewer / reader have them subscribe to a newsletter from the company.

After all, the most important lesson from the interview is that in theory the turnover can be outlined, while content marketing is in practice a continuous activity in which the turnover is highly dependent on the degree of effort involved in creating and placing content.

All in all, the interview with Thomas has resulted in a concrete substantiation in my thesis on how the above-mentioned strategies can be used to measure the potential demand that is essential for the formation of the final conclusion and financial prognosis. I certainly recommend Thomas Lapperre as a respondent for graduation studies on online content marketing, because his knowledge has been indispensable for obtaining my thesis!

Yu Wang Tsang 
Small Business & Retail Management