Millet Brand Building: The Key to Success in Today’s Health-conscious Market

Millet Brand Building-Introduction

Brand building is a process to boost brand awareness, promote a specific product, establish connections, and provide value to the target audience through campaigns. In the Millet industry, it is very much essential to make awareness among the consumers using proper promoting techniques and campaigns so that it can create a better image in the marketplace.

The largest consumer survey ever undertaken was conducted by ICRISAT about the consumer insights on millet, interviewing 15,522 people from 7 major cities in 7 states of South, West, North, and Eastern India: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Mumbai. When people were asked about their main source of health and food information, about 85% of people listed Social Media(51%) and Friends/Family(34%). Social media was the largest source of information and that shows social media is indispensable to the efforts to reach consumers.

The main motive for bringing this blog to you is to understand the concepts of millet brand building, the methods, the tools for brand building, and an overview of the analytics in millets. The brand can be built through a website, online advertising, content publishing, sales, and customer service. But it is important to determine your brand’s purpose and how you differentiate from others, what problems you can solve and why should people care about your brand.

Concepts of Millet Brand Building and Methods:

You should always focus on the goal that differentiates from the competition and persuades a consumer to buy from you over them. It can be done by properly analyzing your competitors. So, competitor analysis should be done by collecting all the information on the competitors’ products and services, going through the reviews on social media, and their presence in online and offline markets.

The best tool that you can use to know about the millet products available in India and the International market is ‘’Millet Finder’’. It is an interactive map that allows you to look for companies that produce millet and sorghum products.

”Millet Finder” was launched at the Food Tech Expo on 25th, November 2020 by the International Crops Research Institute of the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and ICAR-Indian Institute of Millets Research, Hyderabad. It helps users find 500 millet products across 30 countries. Millet products are categorized based on Country, Crops, and Type ( Baby Food, Baking, Beverages, Flakes, Flour, Grains, Multi grains, Pasta, Ready to Eat, and Ready to Cook).

Millet Finder gives an idea about the millet products available in a particular country. It helps users to know about the consumers’ tastes, target the untapped millet markets, and to know the nutritional value of the millet products. It also helps in knowing the consumer demand in a particular place, it brings awareness about millet products for a consumer and finally helps new millet entrepreneurs to reach customers. 

Before building a brand you must work on your target audience more precisely and your key message for them. For example, to promote millet-weaning food for babies, your target consumers are moms, who decide to select the baby food. You can say that the right food without preservatives with a richness of nutrients.

After targeting the audience, it’s time to understand the consumer persona like age, gender, place, income, and education level. This will help you in properly placing your ads and reaching the right consumers.

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Related Post: 10 Innovative Millet Business Plan – A Profitable Agribusiness Idea for Startups in India

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Marketing Tools for Millet Brand Building:

Selecting the right kind of marketing tools for brand building is very important to promote your products and services to the clients. There are many tools in the market, but we will discuss the major right tools.

• Website
• SEO and content promotion
• Social Media Promotion
• Email Promotion
• Paid Advertising
• Analytics

Website:

A website is an important promotion tool for business growth and brand building. This is the place where you can make your users connect with you in the long run by giving them a better experience. 

But before building and launching your website, you must have all the correct information and your complete story to tell to your customers. There are 5 questions to be asked before launching the website and making it available for the users.

• Value – Will your content/products/services make their valuable time spent on your website worthwhile?
• Usefulness – Does your website satisfy users’ requirements?
• Findable – Is your website easily navigable?
• Usability – Is your website easy to use and mobile-friendly?
• Credibility – Does your brand, identity, content, services, and products build trust and belief in the user?

I think when all the answers to the above questions satisfy you, then it’s the right time to launch your website.

SEO and Content Promotion:

Right content and doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) properly will generate relevant organic traffic to your website and thus improve the brand image and create more awareness. As you know, valuable content is the most effective way to build organic traffic and that will satisfy the visitor’s intent. So, a well-defined content-promoting strategy can help you connect with the right audience and support them through their consumer journey, building trust to ultimately lead to conversions. And conversions over time build enough knowledge to create a community around it.

It is very important to start publishing content on Millet, generating traffic, and building a community as early as possible. Most millet startups wait for the product to be ready before they think of creating a buzz in the market. Content is the most cost-effective as you are targeting the perfect consumers.

For building the right content you need to focus on the following points:

• Maintaining a diary and writing which content can resonate with your target audience?
• Frequency and the time of publishing your content.
• Arranging the content properly.
• How can the content be found in the organic search results and that too on the first page of the Google search.

Social Media Promotion for Millet Brand:

As per the large-scale survey report on ‘‘‘’ Accessing Millets and Sorghum Consumption Behavior in Urban India’’’’, it has been found that the source of information on health and foods is Social media which is the most influential, about 50.7% of the respondents reported Social Media is the main source.

So, Social Media is one of the best platforms to educate, communicate, and interact with consumers. To make social media more engaging you need to publish original and relevant content and build community.

Following better media strategies will help you to achieve and increase connections with your community. These all cannot happen in one or two days rather you need to post content consistently across all the social media networks that you handle.

Once your end consumers start building trust, then you can advocate your millet products. So, selecting the correct social media networks will help you in growing your millet business.

Let us see the most common social media networks that are helping in brand building and what are the regular actions to be taken.

• Facebook: Facebook is the platform where people spend time engaging with their friends and family members and sometimes while scrolling they stop on the post that catches their eye and subsequently grabs their attention. So, posting on Facebook at least once every day with photographs or graphics will generate a lot of interaction.

• LinkedIn: It has been observed that most of the users navigate to the company’s website from LinkedIn more than any other social media network. Posting at least 4-5 times per week with relevant content on millets will drive organic traffic to your website and subsequently increase the engagement of the visitors. Moreover, LinkedIn looks more professional and the chances of collaboration and connections will increase. Setting up branded company pages and publishing long-form content is a great way to reach an engaged audience and build your company’s brand. The more long-form posts you publish, the more credibility you will build and the stronger your millet brand will become. Building a brand on LinkedIn will increase the chances of being discovered and bring more opportunities as well for your company.

• Youtube: YouTube is a great platform for creating brand awareness. You may have observed that good brands are not just trying to connect with new users and make a sale the right way but they create brand awareness by showcasing what they do and what they have to offer. 

In today’s scenario, users like to watch content rather than create it and even respond to the content. If you want to engage in millet brand building, create content that your targeted audience is looking for. Let’s suppose your audience is looking for millet recipes, you can start with a keyword search and find out how many search volumes are there per month. 

You can know by using a tool like keywordtool.io. In this way, you can search for other keywords in the millet sector. After knowing the search volume, you can start making videos by offering unique content that resonates with your targeted audience. As you know stories are powerful and simply telling the story of how and why your brand was created, will enhance the engagement rate.

•  Twitter: Twitter is a great tool to build your millet brand and spread awareness about your millet business. Here are the ways to build a brand on Twitter.

• Use your brand name to build a brand on Twitter.
• Use your brand logo as your Twitter picture.
• Send tweets that provide useful information on millets to customers. You can add a link to more information on your company’s website.
• Send tweets to new blog posts or videos you have created.
• Ideally, you should tweet 10-20 times a day.
• Use one or two hashtags to broaden your targeted audience and gain additional followers.

Email Promotion for Millet Brand:

Email promotion or marketing is the best tool where you can get the highest click rate from your targeted audience. So, it is very important to build an email list for millet brand building as well as promotion of your products. Once you build the list, it becomes easy for you to broadcast your message with just a few clicks. You can build the subscribers list through opt-in forms on your website. You can customize your forms as per your needs. There are different forms to execute on your website.

• Pop-ups
• Sidebars
• Scroll mats
• Slide-ins
• Lead magnet forms
• Landing page forms

Once you have set up your forms the next important thing is to tag your subscribers as per your campaigns. You can use different kinds of email campaigns to target your audiences.

• Newsletter Subscription
• New product pre-booking
• Non-promotional blogs
• Product Offer Campaigns

Email promotion helps you to drive traffic to your website and increases conversions. Nowadays there are many email marketing tools available in the market and the best thing I prefer to do with this tool is automation. Automation saves your time and energy in managing your subscribers and delivering the right content to the right person without any errors.

Analytics:

It is very important to keep a watch on the progress of your promotion in millet brand building. Monitoring the progress weekly, monthly, and year-over-year will help you to understand which promotion activities are giving the highest output. It is seen that most small businesses don’t use analytics tools to trace their performance. If you have built up your website, then you can use Google Analytics. It can provide you with lots of information regarding real-time data, audience behavior, content reach, top referrals, top social media traffic, top keywords, traffic sources, locations, and many more.

Paid Advertising:

Building a millet brand or promoting a millet product can happen with paid advertising. With the increase of opportunities and competitive market, it becomes very difficult to solely rely on organic channels to deliver traffic. It is very important to understand how paid advertising works and how best to benefit from it to achieve your business goals. Paid advertising is an online advertising model where advertisers bid to participate to show their ads. Ads come in many formats and shapes like text, images, banners, videos, etc. 

There are many online advertising channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Quora Ads, and many more. Advertising platforms give you access to a lot of information about your audiences and this data can help you to understand your audience in a better way.

Conclusion:

Millet brand building is an integral part of millet startups’ business development. You must always keep in mind to understand the preferences and demands of your consumers. You know putting consistent effort will increase your brand presence and make your millet startup successful.

If you liked my blog today, please don’t forget to give your feedback and suggestions in the comment section below, as this will give me more motivation and inspiration to write more about Millets.

Author: Tapas Chandra Roy, A Certified Farm Advisor on Millets, ‘Promoting Millets from Farm to Plate’ and an Author of the book -” Millet Business Ideas-Empowering Millet Startups”. In a mission to take the forgotten grains- Millets to Millions. To remain updated on my blogs on Millets please subscribe to my newsletter and for any queries please feel free to write to [email protected]