Here at Brand Torrent we spend a lot of time and energy encouraging small business owners to work together to build their brands. Lest you think that co-branding is beneath your company, check out this popular Geico commercial that uses Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrup to simultaneously build both brands.

The humorous ad builds a positive association for both Geico and Mrs. Butterworth pankcake syrup. The ad’s humorous nature has also given the commercial some viral power, scoring over 18,000 views on YouTube.

Even if you don’t have a big budget for a viral video, sharing the cost to produce an entertaining viral video with another brand is a marketing option within reach for the small business owner. If TV air time is too pricey, with sites like YouTube at your fingertips you can still make use of a video marketing campaign.

We’ve recently noticed the proliferation of businesses on Brand Torrent that sell food based products so today’s post is about how to market edible items online. To begin with, you have to recognize the challenges of selling edibles online so that you can develop strategies to overcome them.

Challenge #1: Immediacy. When people get a craving for a chocolate bar they want it now, they do not want to wait a week and have it mailed to them. This means that for a lot of food items it makes more sense to market the product as a gift rather than as a food. People buy gifts online all the time so billing your gourmet tea or truffles as gifts makes it much more reasonable to wait for their arrival. This means you should go the extra mile with offering attractive packaging and even gift wrap.

Challenge #2: The lack of taste-o-vision. Food has to be experienced, it has to be sampled, there’s no way you can impress upon a website visitor how delicious your sauces, cookies or coffee is by description. Don’t get me wrong, description is extremely important, but what’s even more important is getting people to try your product so they can see for themselves that it is, in fact, delicious.

To make this happen my first suggestion is that you sell sample sized versions of your products on your website. If your product is that great your customer will be back for more. The other way to get samples out there is cross-promotion of course! Trade samples of your product with other retailers and get them to give your products to their customers. (You can do the same for them.) This is a great way to get your product into the hands and mouths of more prospective customers than you’d ever reach alone.

Challenge #3: Exciting the other senses. Ever notice how watching Food Network makes you hungry? Those bright red juicy tomatoes and the onions sizzling and turning golden in the pan. I’m starting to get a little hungry just thinking about it. To get your customer excited about your product you’re going to need killer product descriptions, descriptions that make their mouths water. You’re also going to need amazing product pictures. You’ll not only want clear, sharp, bright, well-lit pictures of your own products, you may want to stage them to make them even more appealing. If you’re selling honey apple flavored tea don’t just shoot the tea bags, create an entire still life of lush red apples and a jar of premium honey. You’ve only got words and pictures to get customers excited about your product so use them to your advantage.

My final thought on selling food online is that I strongly recommend you put an ingredients list some place easy to find it. People have all kinds of allergies and dietary restrictions so its important to know if your tea contains milk fat or if your hot sauce contains beef tallow. Personally, I enjoy buying certain types of non-perishables online but nothing sends me running faster than a site that doesn’t supply an ingredients list.

Got great tips for getting your edibles to sell online? What’s worked for you?

In my last post I talked a bit about the importance of tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. I mainly talked about how cookies can be used to help track conversions. Today I’m going to tell you about some more strategies you can employ to track the success of an individual marketing effort.

Analytics Programs: Analytics software such as Google Analytics (which is free), Web Trends or Omniture SiteCatalyst can help you figure out where your site traffic is coming from and what it’s doing once it arrives on your site. These programs are highly effective for measuring the success of an online marketing campaign. Especially savvy marketers often create individual landing pages for each marketing campaign. This means you can check the traffic on that one page and get an instant view of how much traffic your campaign generated. These landing pages also allow you to tailor copy to match your campaign.

Landing Pages: Landing pages on your website are not only helpful for tracking online marketing campaigns, they can be used to track just about any kind of campaign you run. Lets say you run a radio spot and you want to know how much traffic your radio spot generated for your site. Rather than announcing your company website during the commercial, you’d announce the landing page URL you set up for the spot. That way you’d know visitors coming to your site through this page found you from the radio ad. You could also cookie visitors coming in this way so that when they make purchases you’ll be able to track the conversions.

Dedicated Phone Lines: If you frequently deal with customers by phone, having dedicated phone lines for each of your marketing campaigns is an easy way to find out how the customer found you. You can have a special number for your ad in the local paper and another one for your radio commercial. Be sure that you’ve got a system in place to record the number of calls and sales you get from each phone line.

Coupon Codes: Coupon codes serve as double duty marketing tools. They not only give customers incentive to shop with you, they give you information about how the customer found you. Providing a special coupon code for each of your marketing campaigns means that when customers buy you’ll know how they discovered you.

If all else fails, ask. It’s low tech and not always the most automated approach but it never hurts to ask customers how they found out about you. This can be a drop down box on your website check out form or a question that’s asked when customers call or come into your store. You might also find out that word is being spread about your company from a source you didn’t even know about.

Whatever tactic you use to track your success, make sure you have plans to store and analyze this data. You’ll want to know what happened with each of your marketing campaigns so you can decide which ones to try again and which ones to ditch for the future.

If you think cross-promotion is only for small business, think again. Some of the biggest corporations out there are leveraging the power this marketing style. Case in point, the product-touting ad campaigns promoting the new Will Ferrell movie Jackie Moon. Ferrell has appeared in character promoting both Old Spice deodorant and Bud Light beer, along with his new movie.

This type of TV advertisement is becoming more common all the time. Alicia Keys appeared in commercials promoting both her own new album and mega retailer Target. Advertisers can use these commercials not only to share advertising commercials but also to establish a positive affiliation between their brands.

You need not be a multi-million dollar corporation to put this type of marketing to work for you, whether your budget is $0 or a few thousand there are lots of ways for the creative marketing to harness the power of cross-promotion to grow a brand.