In September, the Food Ingredient Global Summit in London drew a wide audience of leading global food ingredient manufacturers and marketers. Presented by the UBM team that produces Fi Europe, this new executive conference featured top global companies like Nestle, Unilever and General Mills, along with the latest food trends research from Mintel, Innova and Euromonitor.
I had the privilege of presenting a master class workshop during the conference on Best Practices in Food Ingredient Marketing Communications. We discussed the challenges food ingredient marketers face in getting their customers engaged with their products and reviewed a series of best practices by presenting successful strategies and tactics. The workshop also included detailed examples of programs from leading ingredient companies that incorporated best practices into their integrated marketing plans.
The attendees at the workshop included marketing professionals from Europe, the U.S., Asia and Africa. They enthusiastically discussed the different programs we reviewed and shared their own experiences and some of the tactics that they were having success with in their companies. Many said that they left the workshop with specific ideas they wanted to work with and implement in their programs when they got home.
The best practice strategy that drew the most attention and interest was the rapidly growing use of B-to-B social media by food companies in the ingredient channels. There were many examples of how B-to-B marketers were using social media as a communication tool on social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. We reviewed an integrated social media platform that achieved leading rankings in search results through proactive content management, or what we refer to as “leaving a big footprint” on the internet.
Workshop attendees went home with a planning template to use in developing their own integrated marketing communications plan using the best practice strategies and tactics. If you are interested in more information on the best practice approach to food ingredient marketing, you can see a wide range of examples on our industry resource website at www.apfoodingredients.com.
Overall, the Fi Global Summit in London was one of the best food industry executive conferences of the year. The team at UBM did a great job. The Summit should become a “must attend” event for food ingredient marketers next year and beyond.