Mapping the customer journey on a recipe platform

One of the most effective ways for food brands to connect with customers is through recipe marketing. By sharing recipes with branded products food brands teach consumers not only how to use their products as ingredients, but also encourage them to get connected with the brand to share its values and philosophy.

While there are several ways to engage with your consumers, creating a proprietary branded smart recipe hub allows food businesses to take it to the next level and take full control of the digital journey of customers.

Mealz White Label offers a cloud-based technology that empowers food brands with all the tools needed to create a personalised smart recipe platform in days and at a fraction of bespoke development cost. Once the platform is customised and deployed on brand’s own domain, the food business can use it to establish strong digital presence by building loyal communities of customers and partner content creators. The platform is therefore most likely to be used by three types of users:

Brands (aka your business)
Influencers (aka partner bloggers and chefs)
Consumers (aka your brand’s customers)

In this article we are mapping customer journeys of brands, influencers and consumers; and exploring what are the benefits of using the platform for each of them.

How can brand use a recipe platform to excel at recipe marketing

For brands, a smart recipe hub is an interactive platform that allows the business to build an online community, increase brand awareness and boost online sales of their ingredient products.

An introduction of the professional recipe platform is often a complex process, with many brands spending months and hundreds of thousands of dollars on just the first version. However, the new breed of recipe platform technology - such as Mealz White Label - brought the timeframe and cost down to a few days and $495 per month respectively, allowing more and more brands to leverage the power of recipe marketing.

Once the platform is customised according to brand’s preferences, the brand starts to upload content such as recipes, meal plans, articles and digital cookbooks. The more recipes there are with branded ingredient products, the more customers will cook and explore new dishes. Through sharing articles, a brand can also tell a story of the company and update its customers with the news.

Ultimately, the recipe platform becomes a centerpiece of the brands’ online presence. By hosting content within a unified digital experience, leveraging influencers to generate new recipe related content on ongoing basis, and giving consumers the tools they need to cook -- the brands are able to create engaging digital experiences for millions of people that correlate with an increase in sales.

Within just weeks of the platform's inception, food companies are now able to use recipe website to achieve their digital goals.

The behaviour of a consumer on a recipe platform

Whilst the brand is initiation the emergence of the recipe platform, it’s the end users (aka consumers) who are benefiting from the technology. And their journey almost always start from the online search.

A typical consumer would search for either a specific dish or a range of ingredients (eg. what to cook with tomatoes and chicken), and will eventually land on one of the recipe platforms, in many cases owned by a brand.

Once they land at a recipe page (hopefully the one that belongs to your brand!), the consumer is immediately exposed to the promotional content - from advertising, to branded ingredients. However, unlike on many generic website, the consumer will stay on that page for many minutes, and sometimes hours - whilst cooking the dish. As such, promotional information does not deter customers from the website, as they are seeing value in the core content.

Whilst deciding on whether a recipe, a consumer will often discover that one or more of the ingredients from the ingredient list are missing. If the recipe itself is intriguing enough, the cook will in most cases look to buy the missing ingredients; and in 87% of cases (as proven by Mealz Research), they will buy the EXACT ingredients mentioned in the recipe.

By placing a brand name in the ingredient list, or even by adding a link to the direct purchase, food brands are able to trigger the immediate purchase behaviour.

The value of recipe platforms for content creators.

The missing piece for many brands in their recipe strategy is content, – it’s hard to develop, and even harder to maintain. An ingenious solution to this massive problem is to involve content creators, making it easier for them to contribute to the brand’s content pool.

There are two main motivations for a food blogger, or influencer, to create content for a brand:

Self-promotion and generation of new followers or fans

Many bloggers are looking to increase their social media following, and generate their own community. Growing this through their own blog often proves to be difficult, hence bloggers are looking to promote their content elsewhere.

By making it easy for content creators to publish their content on brand’s website, companies are able to source a significant amount of top quality content without paying a dime, whilst bloggers are getting exposure to millions of people reading their recipes online.

Getting paid for the development of branded recipe

More established bloggers are often less interested in fame. Instead, they are putting their talents to use on a commercial basis, by selling content to food brands.

Even though such transaction does not require a recipe platform per se, an ability for a brand to easily add recipes in bulk and showcase the credibility of the authors is often something not available on many home-grown recipe platforms.

Operating an easy-to-use recipe platform created a win-win for both the brand and the bloggers, enabling creation of quality branded content.