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You might think that starting bakery business is the most difficult part. Well, yes, it requires a lot of work, and you could have a few anxious or restless nights. However, once your bakery is operational, staying ahead of the competition will become a more major concern. Additionally, you must become a destination for those looking for delectable baked products rather than just trying to stay afloat in the market.
As an entrepreneur you would want to keep up with a lot of things to run a profitable bakery business. You will need to manage your finances, reports, and inventories carefully in order to accomplish all of this. Building a solid marketing and sales plan for your bakery is very critical no matter what items your bakery specializes in, such as croissants, donuts, buns, bread, nutritious gluten-free pastries, small pastries, and so on. Otherwise, it will be difficult to attract new clients, boost bakery sales, and raise brand awareness.
Now, you must be wondering about the ways on how to grow bakery business. Worry not as we have got some effective ways of growth in this bakery business plan so that you could enjoy the bloom of your bakery without a lot of planning. Here’s a checklist that can help you in running a successful bakery business:
One way to keep your ovens hot and your cash registers full is to have suitable bakers insurance. The bakeries that plan for emergencies and prepare for them are the ones who are able to expand in the long run. As a result, plan your bakery operations' budget carefully. Keep a thorough record of your monthly expenditure on maintenance, purchasing raw materials, and paying your employees. When you know how much money you spend each month overall, you can figure out your profit margin and decide how much extra money to put back into your bakery business. Investing in your passion i.e your bakery would surely yield desirable results in future. You mustn’t let a potential financial issue ruin your plans of running a bakery that is profitable and most-loved by the community.
Introduce new bakery items that you think would draw in customers. You can innovate your store's layout as well as its bakery items. Mobile dessert food trucks, for instance, have gained popularity in many places because of baking businesses adapting the same. Additionally, it has been observed that businesses frequently hire bakeries for catering services. Another fantastic technique to gain attention is to cater for birthdays, anniversaries, corporate events and other special occasions.
It's always a good idea to have big dreams, but only for the ones you can actually accomplish. As a result, when diversifying, it is important to consider your resources, workflow management, and the costs of growing and innovating your bakery business. A steady increase is more sustainable than a quick rise, and this steady growth would have a larger effect on the healthy development of your bakery.
Your bakery business definitely needs a website if you want to stay relevant digitally. People looking for bakery items can find your bakery more easily if your website is optimized and well-designed in line with SEO standards. Your sales will naturally increase if all of your clients can readily access your bakery business online. You must seek professional assistance because optimizing your website to make it SEO friendly is not a simple task to undertake.
Now a days, a business website is not enough. People are constantly on their mobiles looking for easy and mobile solutions. The benefits of deploying a mobile app for a successful bakery are immense. Also checkout the blog, why do you need a mobile app? You may engage more clients with loyalty programs, push notifications and subscriptions. The core benefit of mobile apps that caused them take over almost all the industries is that they offer a fast and convenient shopping experience. If you have a shopify powered website, then you may want to turn it into a mobile app. Checkout the Shop2App’s mobile app features that will help your bakery business stand out in the industry.
With a pivoting business approach, a customer-centric model of e-commerce has emerged. Now, its the customers first approach that the companies are following. Delivering your products at their doorstep is a great way to offer them the convenience and ease of ordering from you. This can be made easier by integrating with food delivery partners like ubereats, doordash, grubhub etc. You must also make sure that customers can place direct orders from your restaurant via your restaurant app and website for running a successful bakery. This will lessen the possibility of you losing potential customers. Check out this blog to gather insights on how to implement local delivery for your Shopify store.
Zapiet is great for local delivery as it smoothens out local delivery for Shopify brands by taking care of the entire store pickup and delivery. Its features for real-time tracking and unique pricing takes the hassle out of the process and are proven to work for all kinds of clients worldwide.
Store pickup is another amazing way that saves the time and offers convenience to your clients. Using the Shop2app app builder, you can simplify pickup scheduling using the time and date picker.
Social media is the most effective approach to draw in and keep the huge audience that is circling all these social media platforms. As a result, be sure to set your business pages on social media and regularly update and optimise them. Post consistent images and videos that capture the activities at your bakery. From these social pages, you can even get reviews and comments that can help you improve the way your bakery business is run.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank in the local search results. The obvious answer to why you need to do that is because people look for businesses near them. For example, if you search bakery near me, Google will show you all the bakeries near your location. The whole motto of Google here is to get closer to a user’s practical, real-life search patterns. For this, it continuously observes and learns its users’ behaviors. This list includes opting for the nearest locations because that’s, well, more convincing. Know more about local SEO in this blog and know how to run a successful bakery.
Google Merchant Center is a centralized dashboard with which online retailers may manage their visibility across all Google e-commerce products and update their web listings.
The Google Merchant Center's major objective is to give businesses the ability to post and update product information, including images and prices, so that it will appear in relevant Google shopping searches. This must be done in the initial phase while starting a bakery. In order to provide effective monitoring and management over Google-based marketing and e-commerce, the Google Merchant Center also interfaces with other Google services, such as Google My Business.
As a bakery business, your customers must be well aware of what ingredients you put into your products, the shelf life and other product information. Putting appealing and tempting pictures is also a great way for attracting audience to buy from you. High quality pictures of your product would appeal more than unclear and blurry pictures.
Also provide useful ingredient and process-related information to your customers so that the transparency and trust remains intact in your customer relationships while running a bakery.
Collaborations between your bakery business and nearby local business could turn out to be fruitful and increase your sales. For instance, you must have seen that on birthdays, people frequently surprise their loved ones who live outside of their city with cake and flowers. So why not team up with a nearby florist to make it easier for clients to order flowers and cakes and have them delivered in a package to the specified location? This will turn you into a successful bakery and a one-stop store for anyone looking to treat a special someone with a little more luxury.
When a retailer bundles complementary products into a group of items that may be purchased together, then that practice is known as product bundling. Product bundling is another technique for running a successful bakery. Products are often bundled together as an upsell or a cross-sell. Shop2app assists you in easy upselling and cross-selling by integrating with a 3rd party platform - Rebuy.
Upsell: The goal of an upsell is to convince the customer to upgrade. Introducing a better, more expensive version of a pastry that a consumer is considering to purchase from your bakery business is an example of upselling.
Cross-sell: Promoting related goods other than goods from the same category is known as cross-selling. When running a bakery, you could, for example, bundle a cookie with coffee. This is comparable to the idea of cross-merchandising in the world of physical retail.
Retailers often wrap or gift-box a product bundle in a specific manner to make it more appealing. During the holidays, product bundles become more popular and the merchants can use this tactic all year round to increase the average order value and run a successful bakery.
Give out free samples of your bakery items to visitors and walk-in customers. If the products are delicious, tempting, and readily available for purchase, customers might be eager to buy whatever you are offering for sampling. As a result, always remember to leave some cookies or pastries out on the counter for the customers for running a successful bakery. It is an effective way to get the taste of your baked products out there and give your potential clients a chance to try out your products.
Loyalty/Rewards: Smile/Loyalty Lion
Local Delivery: Zapiet (for web plugin), Route (for Last mile delivery)
SEO: SEO Booster
SMS Campaigns:Attentive, Emotive
Push Notifications: Mobile (Shop2app), Web(Pushowl)
Email Marketing: Klaviyo, Omnisend
Mobile app: Shop2app
UGC/Reviews: Loox, Judgeme, Okendo
Building Community: Facebook, Instagram (Specially, Facebook Groups)
Gift Cards: Govalo
Personalization (Shop Quiz): Octane.ai
Customer Support: Reamaze, Gorgias
Partnering with other brands (eg. giveaway) : co-op
Upsells/Bundles: Rebuy, Oneclick upsell
Subscriptions: Recharge Subscriptions
Building website: Shopify
That’s all for now. You must have gained 12 valuable insights on how to run a successful bakery through the article. It’s time to plan and prepare strategies for your own bakery and implement them. Make sure you dream big and plan big but big enough that you set SMART goals only. SMART goals are those which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. These five criteria help you in setting up relevant goals while running a bakery.
So, roll up your sleeves, put on your baking gloves and start executing these tips. Don’t forget to make tweaks to these as per the goals and the size of your bakery business.
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