VMLL #11 : How To Make Marketing Really Work For Your Vegan Business

If you want marketing to work as a true contributor for your vegan business, you’ve got to think of it in a very different manner. Approaching it from a different lens will open up avenues you never would have explored under marketing before.

AMA defines marketing as “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Nowhere is the business itself mentioned as a direct stakeholder of marketing.

Ask any other team within any business about marketing and they will refer to it as a Cost Center. On the other hand, ask the marketing team and they insist it is an irrefutable investment and not a cost. Either ways, marketing is considered an outflow, right?

How about changing that narrative?

Try this approach if you want to make marketing really work for your vegan business

Instead of marketing being only an investment or a cost, what could you do to make it a revenue center generating inflows?

The minute you start working on this question, true marketing and business innovation happens.

Let’s take an example.

You are in the business of selling vegan skin care and make-up range. Your current marketing activities include:

• Market research – outflow
• Advertising and promotion – outflow
• Sampling – outflow
• SEM and SEO – outflow
• Social media and Influencer marketing – outflow
• Retail slotting fees or Amazon commissions – outflow
• Content creation – outflow
• Graphic and packaging design – outflow
• Marketing asset creation (website, infographics, newsletters, etc) – outflow

Now, suppose you start with the question, how can we use marketing to also generate revenues for the business, along with outflows? Your creative thinking spurred, you might easily come up with the following ideas:

• Launch a paid make-up masterclass because make-up tutorials are a rage
• Launch a paid skin-care tutorial series teaching not only how to get the best out of your products but also sharing other skin-care expert tips and diet advice
• Launch a referral or affiliate program as alternate sales avenues
• Launch a make-up reality series similar to Netflix’s Glow Up that will earn you sponsorships/ revenue along with exposure and an in-house roster of participants as influencers
• Collaborate with photographers and launch a “make-up for best photographs” paid course
• Earn ad revenue from fashion brands to get spotted on your models in your makeup videos

The door of possibilities is pushed wide open, ain’t it, with just this one tweak in thinking? 🙂

Now, marketing is no longer just a cost or an investment but an alternate revenue stream for the business. And which vegan business would not like additional revenue streams?

That’s it for now. 

Until next time…

Question to think about : 💡 

What if you split the overarching question of ‘marketing as a revenue center’ into smaller components: E.g. content as revenue stream (Youtube revenue sharing or Netflix series), digital products (paid masterclasses, downloadable checklists/cheat sheets/filters), merchandising (from shows and participants) etc? 

Should you want to talk, I am just an email away. You know that, right?