Bake Up Success: How "Sarah" Used AI to Transform Her Bakery's Marketing
Throwing money at ads that don't convert?
You're not alone!
Today we explore how AI can be a game-changer, helping you craft unique ideas, great visuals, and targeted ads that can deliver results and save your sanity.
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You spend money on ads because you want more visibility for your business. At first, things are working and you’re seeing results, but then things drop off.
You throw more money at it because you're sure you’re not spending enough. Like many, you’ve fallen for the mistaken impression that you need to spend more money to make more of a return on your advertising investment.
Despite how other businesses get more traffic and seem to be everywhere, no matter how much you spend, your traffic, views, and sales diminish to a trickle.
Why isn’t this working?
No, “the algorithm” isn't out to get you. The problem is that the landscape has changed in a way that demands a higher level strategy than just putting more money in your advertising.
If you want to be less invisible, you need to stop wasting money on bad advertising and invest in the power of AI
Introducing Sarah’s Scrumptious Sweets
Business is okay, but Sarah feels that there are certain challenges that are limiting her growth. While she loves her customers, she wants to reach new people and bring more life into her business.
Sarah put money into a couple of social media ads because she saw her competitor’s ad on Facebook. Their stores always had a healthy crowd of customers.
But, she’s getting discouraged with lackluster results and wonders why social media marketing isn’t working for her business.
Looking at Sarah's current strategy, you'll see a few issues.
Generic Ads. A majority of Sarah’s time is tied up in managing the daily operations of her business. As a result, there's little time for marketing and creating more eye-catching visuals. That means she leans heavily into using regular stock photos. She needs an eye-catching design that’s uniquely her.
Inconsistent Social Media Posts. Food porn and recipe videos abound on social media. That’s why the brand awareness and customer engagement that come from consistently posting are critical for businesses like hers.
Difficulty Standing Out. Competition is stiff. Sarah needs to find a way to differentiate her brand and attract more traffic, which leads to more new customers.
Lack of New Recipes/Menu Items. Finding inspiration for new and creative baked goods can be time-consuming, and Sarah wants to streamline the recipe development process.
So how can AI be a game changer for Sarah's bakery?
Here is a five-part solution that leverages AI to maximize Sarah’s return on ad spend and increase her business visibility.
Identify Trends
Develop a unique menu item,
Target new customers with the help of her old customers.
Create appealing ad creatives, and
Track and optimize her campaigns.
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| Visit KidlyWinks |
1. Identify Trends
Google Trends is a good way for Sarah to see what’s hot in her niche.
For example, she wants to know what baking recipes are getting people’s attention
The first part of her research reveals some great ideas but the “bread recipes” caught her eye.
Now, she could go back into Google Trends and check that term, but she decided to use AnswerthePublic.com, a site that gives her deeper insight into People Also Ask trends,
Sarah sees that people are looking for monkey bread recipes.
2. New Menu Items and Images
DishGen.com uses AI to generate unique recipes based on an idea or a few ingredients in seconds. Sarah can use this site to inspire new recipes or menu ideas to try.
of all the recipes she generated, the Cinnamon Swirl Monkey Bread sounds fun:
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| credit: DishGen.com |
Sarah needs pictures and turns to a prominent AI image generator like Midjourney or Dall-E 3 to create amazing images that supplement the few photos she can take. Here’s one of the images she’ll use:
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| Prompt: “Freshly baked cinnamon swirl monkey bread glazed with dark chocolate drizzle cooling in a dish on the kitchen counter, daytime lighting” credit: ShePrompts/ Leonardo AI |
3. Creating Ad Content
She has the trend research, a new recipe, and some cool pictures.
Now she needs some ad copy. Sarah admits she’s not much of a writer and definitely needs help in that department.
Here are a couple of options.
ChatGPT and Google Gemini (formerly Bard). Conversational AI has huge benefits for businesses. With a few prompts, users ask for anything from product blurbs to optimized ad copy to full blog posts (although, you’ll want to seriously edit them first). Either of these tools will help Sarah create all the copy she needs for free.
Here’s an example of a base prompt she could use:
I have a new recipe for [INSERT RECIPE]. Provide two or three optimized, compelling titles, descriptions, and comma-separated hashtag clouds for Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest posts. (optional addition) Also include optimized descriptions of 35 characters or less for corresponding Facebook ads.
Blaze.ai is an all-in-one generative AI tool. This is a good solution for micro and small businesses that don’t have the budget or staff to constantly generate content. With some input, Blaze can create several pieces of content at once. For Sarah’s monkey bread ad, Blaze can provide corresponding tweets, pins, IG and Facebook posts, a YouTube script, and blog posts. It’s a handy tool for increasing productivity for business owners with limited time and budget.
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| Blaze.ai can generate 40+ types of content! |
4. Social Media and Ads
Sarah has at least a dozen fun, trendy recipes and lots of eye-catching pictures along with optimized copy for her social media platforms. The first thing she wants to do is post these on several platforms.
There are some great social media management platforms out there but Hootsuite is one of the best fits for one reason: Canva
Canva is a popular graphic design platform that helps users design website graphics, social media posts, invitations and so much more. All designs are sized to fit most platforms and purposes, so there’s no guesswork.
Sarah can use their templates or create her own and generate numerous social media posts with one click.
When she uses Canva within Hootsuite, she can also schedule her posts weeks ahead.
This way, she doesn't have to stress about finding content daily or weekly. She can schedule content and interact with her audience.
Canva within Hootsuite streamlines the social media management process for small business owners of any size.
After scheduling her posts, she turns her attention to her cinnamon swirl monkey bread post. Sarah’s decided that she wants to offer a limited sample tasting to customers and decides to boost that post. To avoid wasting her marketing budget on blind Facebook ads, she utilizes Facebook’s Custom Audience feature. She loads up a formatted spreadsheet with her customer data and Facebook’s AI will create an identical clone audience that's similar to her customers and is more likely to engage with her ad.
This could increase engagement and expand her customer base.
5 Test and Optimize
Sarah was smart enough to generate a few different variations of her
Monkey Bread post that she can test to see which gets better engagement.
While Facebook provides some analytics, Sarah can connect her Facebook and Instagram accounts to Hootsuite to see how her posts are doing overall.
If she sees one of her posts is doing well organically, she may decide to boost it.
Small business owners like Sarah don't have to throw good money after bad, hoping their ads perform or struggling to find content. They have access to many AI-powered tools that can help them design, ideate, schedule and optimize their marketing efforts for less than it would cost for them to hire someone to do that.
Sarah’s AI-powered Marketing Solution
So let's go over the AI-powered solution that Sarah would use to better manage her social media and ads.
Google Trends
Easy, free, and is available and is used with Google Trends is easy and free available to everyone. All you do is put in a term, search for the topic, and compare terms over any time period, whether it's two months or five years, whatever you'd like.
Top-quality AI Images
Sarah can create her own photos or create top-quality AI images with top AI image platforms, such as Leonardo AI, MidJourney, and Dall-E 3. Leonardo AI is one of the few free platforms where businesses can start generating great images they can use commercially and without watermarking. Here’s an example of what Leonardo can do:
DishGen
For somebody in the food creation space, DishGen.com will help you get recipe ideas for your content, all you do is put in a particular term and it comes out with a recipe or something new and innovative that you can edit for your purposes.
Generative AI Productivity Tools
ChatGPT and Gemini are two prominent platforms for ideation and creating content that you can copy and paste into your document. What makes Blaze.ai worth checking out is that you can generate multiple pieces of content for a variety of platforms in one place.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s partnership with Canva elevates it to a top social media management suite. Not only can Sarah design, create and schedule her posts weeks ahead, but Hootsuite’s analytics show her what’s working and what to tweak.
Facebook Custom Audience
A valuable tool to help her leverage her audience data to find more who are likely to engage with her business.
Generative AI tools like these can empower businesses that thought they needed to have in-house staff to make their business work. Integrating some of these tools into your workflow makes it easier for you to manage the promotion part of your business more efficiently.
Any other tools Sarah could use? Let me know in the comments.
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