How To Promote Your Healthy Snack Bar Online

The past decade or so has seen a significant change in snacking trends. Gone are the days when sodium-laced crackers and sugar or chocolate dipped snacks were the only options available in the market.

The demand for high-nutritional value snacks has seen the emergence of a new industry—one that promotes healthy snacks. From ready-to-go salads to fruit-filled yogurts to grain and nut bars, plant-forward snacks, and more, the healthy snack industry offers people on-the-go convenience without the accompanying concerns such as high-fat content, deep-fried with empty calories, etc.

The result?

The healthy snack industry currently valued at $89 bn is slated to cross $100bn within the next 2-3 years.

Such quick growth and catching trends can mean only one thing—massive competition for new entrants, especially first-time business owners with small budgets.

If you’re struggling with getting visibility for your healthy snack bar online, we’ve got just the right tips and suggestions to help you. The best part? None of these will break your budget.

Ready?

Branding Can be fun

We’re going to start you right at the beginning – branding! 

Think back to your favorite childhood snacks and what pops up? Was it Tony the Tiger (Kelloggs), Mr. Peanut with his top hat, the Honey Bee (Honey Nut Cheerios), or could it have been the Chester, the orange cheetah (Cheetos)? Perhaps it was Mr. Owl (Tootsie Pop) or Trix Rabbit (Trix Cereal).

What‘s the point here?

Snack brands that make it big have attractive packaging with fun colors and iconic branding. What do healthy snacks have?

Snackzilla has dull pastel packaging with hardly a memorable character. Perky Jerky has a leaf. Vafels has clear packaging. Lytepop has a single popcorn puff. When customers look at first-time brands with branding like this, it’s hardly memorable or tempting, isn’t it?

A pop of color, fun fonts, and fancy designs will help your brand stand out and it will give your customers an opportunity to connect.

Worried that you don’t have the artistic ability to design something fun? You don’t have to be. I’ve found it’s helpful and less time-consuming to use free restaurant flyer templates and design tools. They make branding so much fun!

Simple Messaging

Did you spend a lot of time experimenting with how to squeeze a lot of content onto your product packaging? With the tiniest font possible? Because there was so much content and no other solution?

It’s quite instinctive to feel that by promoting your healthy snack’s ingredients and benefits, you’ll attract customers. After all, the more they know about your product, the more convinced they’ll be that it’s the healthy snack for them.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Customers will spare no more than a few seconds checking out your product, which means they will not read all the information you placed on the packaging.

While educating customers is crucial, the correct way to go about it is a two-fold approach. The first is to keep the messaging on your packaging simple while the second is to provide all this information (and more) on a website. That way, your customer can explore at their convenience without being overwhelmed. 

So how do you decide what goes on the packaging and what doesn’t? It’s simple. Nutritional information, possible allergens, ingredients, and processes belong on the packaging. Consider the snack brand, That’s it. They have a simple design and regular font. Their messaging is equally simple—only two ingredients. 

Re-think your messaging and try to keep it as short as possible. Identify the key themes you absolutely must convey to potential customers and leave the rest for the website.

Leverage The Power Of Social Media

What do increasingly digitally-dependent customers and free social media platforms offer you? The perfect opportunity to promote your healthy snacks without any investment (other than your time!)

35% of customers discover new restaurants through social sites, and 77% of consumers give greater importance to peer reviews over critic reviews. What does this mean for you? Promote your healthy snack food online by creating and maintaining a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Unsure if these are the correct channels for you? Research shows that 31 million followers use Pinterest for food and related pins. The health and fitness category is ranked as the 4th most popular niche on Instagram. Healthy lifestyle products (including healthy snacks and beverages) are a top-selling category on the Facebook marketplace.

Consider Daily Harvest’s or CPK Frozen Pizza’s Instagram strategies. To help their audience understand what they could accomplish with their ready-to-eat products, Daily Harvest and CPK Frozen Pizza use compelling images, reels, even lunch ideas.

When you put together some rather professionally taken photos, stream live videos, thoughtfully written Instagram stories, and even research-based hashtags, you get greater visibility.

The possibilities are endless, and there are free tools to match. I began with a complete design overhaul with restaurant menus or flyer templates and then featured these on Instagram alongside photos and customer reviews.

Can’t see yourself spending time on social media promoting your product? You could incentivize your current customer base to post reviews and creative photos of your products on their social media. That way, new customers will find your brand through their networks.

Need some ideas for social media content? Improve your designs and get templates for pins all in one place.