Where can I find out more about Food Marketing?

Where can BTD seek partnerships in the food industry?

• Hello guys, I'm the Co-founder of http://bythedish.com, a platform to review, recommend and find the best dishes in town. We chose to do it "by the dish" because sometimes the most humble places have the best food. We also took the entire "deal of the day" model and offer it completely Free (and Premium) to Restaurateurs. Even though it's an extremely affordable service, we aren't getting many sales. Which companies do you think would be interested in partnering with us? We would be willing to give $50 commission per sign-up for a $100 service. I have tried to contact a few companies that do social marketing strictly in the food industry, but everyone has been unresponsive. Maybe my approach is wrong, what do you guys suggest? 1) How would I approach companies like GrubHub? 2) Any other recommended companies or methods to reach the masses? I really appreciate the input. I'm willing to try anything. Here's a short video that we made to explain our product to restaurant owners

• Answer:

  My meeting got cancelled so I actually have time to get into this :)   I’ve actually had some personal experiences (and some very hard lessons) in this space. Since you’ve asked some specific questions though, I’ll focus on them first but then I’ll give you my 2cents and you can stop reading whenever.   The answer to your first question (and probably to your second) is that you need to really refine your elevator pitch to Grubhub and really any distribution partner on what makes your content different + make it as accessible as possible. Do you have an API? You need to make this stuff easy to integrate or else they won’t be interested.  Second – your dishes angle is interesting but needs something more. What makes you different from Foodspotting? You need to find a good angle unless you have massive traffic.   Okay – you can stop reading now but here’s my 2 cents. ..   First of all – the first thing to remember is you’re not in the Food space. You’re in the local search space. This means you’re going up against Foursquare, Yelp, Foodspotting, Google Places, etc. etc. Yes you’ve got a specific hook which is Dishes not restaurants but trust me from a Customer perspective – the job you’re solving for them is “Where should I go eat?” and they’ll be using all those services in addition to yours to solve that job. This means you should expand your distribution partner search and not necessarily focus on food industry players.   You’re also tackling a two-headed monster. You have to get merchants to use this (and eventually pay for this) and you need to drive a lot of traffic/customers. Without one – the other will fail.   Let’s start with Merchants since they’re your revenue target base.   You’re in a challenging space. Most of your target revenue base are physical SMBs. In addition to that – not only are you targeting physical SMBs but primarily restaurants. This is an industry that operates on single digit to low teen margins.   This group is notorious for a) not wanting to do a lot of new things because they’re too busy keeping their business alive/growing b) paying for things. Unless you can unequivocally prove to them that your service or product is driving new sales through their doors.   The magic word is attribution. You need to convince these SMBs that you can attribute new sales using your system. That means Merchant X pushes a button = that person that just walked in the door because of it. Unfortunately, your current model for attributing is deals. Deals are unprofitable. As I said, when you’re operating a business at low single-teen profit margins –a 25-50% deal will sink them. Plus – these guys are a lot smarter now. The whole Groupon argument of “they’ll come back” usually results in they don’t. They’ve been burned by this.   So unless you can find another way of attributing your traffic – you’re left with convincing the SMB to use your service because of your raw traffic. That means you need scale. Big scale.   So that brings us to the customer side. How are you going to get enough traffic and usage of your service/site with customers that merchants will at least be willing to use your service.   Short answer is content is king. Your dishes angle is interesting but you definitely need pictures tagged to every one of those posts. No pictures = no engagement. Trust me on that one – I speak from painful experience. This really just gets you parity (Foodspotting). So now you need to get this content infront of a lot of people so you can go back to the merchant and convince them to use/pay for your service. Which actually comes full circle to my answer to your question.   TLDR: Find an angle on your content, build it up and create your elevator pitch. Make it accessible and bring it to partners in the local search space that could use this content. Rinse and repeat. And don’t quit knocking on their doors :)