5 Marketing Best Practices for Vegan Businesses

Starting a new plant-based business venture, expanding products or service offerings, or launching a new vegan product are just a few occasions when a business owner needs to consider all aspects of their marketing strategy. Compared to traditional businesses, vegan businesses have some special requirements and unique needs when working with PR strategies, content marketing, and other marketing efforts.

Harness the Power of the Vegan Community

It should go without saying that your plant-based business marketing strategies lie within the vegan community. Everywhere you go, there's an active community of vegans, either on social media channels like Facebook groups or online forums. Pinpoint the pain points, challenges, and what solutions are lacking. For example, you may find that majority of people in a local community went plant-based for athletic recovery benefits. You try tailoring your content strategy to highlight relevant products that align with their interests. For instance, if you specialize in selling athletic performance products like Vega Sport protein powder, tailor content that resonates with your community, like "best protein powder for endurance athletes."

Try Vegan Influencer Marketing

Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and independent blogs have thousands upon thousands of vegan influencers. Every single day they are trying new products, talking about them, and recommending vegan products ranging from specific foods to plant-based protein powders and everything in between. In turn, vegan businesses can use influencers who have large social media followings to help amplify their brands and drive traffic to their websites, increase their brand awareness, and generate sales.

Experiment with Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is where you pay another website, publisher, or brand to create and distribute media (e.g. a blog post) promoting your vegan business. It has been around for a long-time in print publications, but it’s becoming quite trendy for digital marketing. In addition to related brands and blogs, vegan influencers can be leveraged for sponsored content to promote brands and products. Sponsored content includes many things, such as in-depth blogs, video reviews, and photos. Take caution that sponsored content is authentic and that the publisher does not make it obvious that they are being funded to push a brand. For instance, sponsored reviews should appear honest and relatively unbiased. One brand the executes this well is Glow Bar London, a CBD store based in the UK.

Find Your Voice

One of the biggest reasons that small plant-based brands grow into popular food conglomerates is because the brand and company as a whole have a clear voice on where it stands on important societal issues. These issues, which factor into the bigger picture of operating a vegan business, including environment, social justice, health, diversity, animal welfare, etc. Your business should need to take a stand on everything, but you must stand a stand on something. Determine where you stand, and bake these morales into everything that you do. For instance, you may find you have a niche in products like vegan protein powders without stevia and can use this to promote products to those who dislike stevia.

Cultivate Vegan Company Culture

Vegan business marketing doesn’t stop with your customers. Depending on the size of your business, your staff is equally important in making sure your message is aligned and properly conveys your vegan/vegetarian offering. Educate your employees about the campaigns, goals, and objectives of the business, and make sure they're well trained to know how to answer tough questions, handle distribution, and keep the gears churning righteously.