CPG Integrated Marketing Best Practices

Consumer Goods marketers recognize that to increase brand equity, consumers must be lead along a path to purchase that results in more than just a product purchase, but also advocacy for the brand. Integrated Marketing strategy plays an important role in delivering the right brand message, to the right consumer, at the right time, via the right interaction channel, to assist in a purchase decision or build product awareness. This strategy requires evaluation and investment in multiple channels including traditional, social, mobile, web/ecommerce, and in-store.

Integrated marketing is about combining multiple marketing elements together to achieve an objective more efficiently and effectively than by implementing any one element alone. Several thoughts to consider when considering a successful integrated marketing campaign:

Clearly Define Your Target Audience: A good campaign begins with a segmented list. Those segments are defined by attributes that tie to a product or service for which the campaign is centered. Start by defining the target list, identifying channels / outlets for the campaign, specific offers / treatments for each campaign, and metrics to evaluate campaign performance. If the target audience cannot be clearly defined, it is unlikely that the campaign will be successful (begin with the end in mind).

Define Measurable Campaign Objectives: Without measurable objectives, it will be challenging to measure ROI or net benefit of a campaign on product/service sales, sentiment, or engagement. Many marketers get hung up in the content and creative of a campaign and lose site of the original campaign objectives and execution priorities. It is important to define and communicate objectives and to build insights from past campaigns into the planning process for future campaigns thereby shaping and sharpening objectives. Integrated marketing requires that CPG marketers evaluate metrics that transcend an individual campaign, namely customer metrics like engagement, value, and profitability too much focus on campaign performance is often a barrier to effective integrated marketing. From a mobile perspective, one of the main reasons that CPG marketers spend on mobile has traditionally lagged is because of the lack of measurement, but marketers are increasingly interested in mobile since it is how shoppers are managing and planning shopping trips.

Create Clear, Consistent and Compelling Content:Because it can take more than five impressions for an individual to recognize a brand or specific marketing message, follow the three Cs for marketing messages. Communications must be clear (not confusing in words / phrases), compelling (interesting and/or topical to the receiver), and consistent (regardless of channel web, phone, in-store, mobile, the messaging, offers, and content are consistent). As a starting point for your content strategy, it is important to assess how well your content aligns with the behaviors and attitudes of your target consumer. Also, it can be useful to review your competitors content strategy to determine if any gaps exist between your current content and the ideal set of content needed to become a credible brand with consumers.

Content strategy starts with knowing your consumer then knowing what they care about and what their path to making a purchase looks like. Also, define which points throughout journey you are working to influence (and thus targeting content) to drive purchase behavior or increase brand loyalty.

Drive Campaign Decisions Based on Analytics:Integrated analytics are changing the way brand marketers think about integrated marketing. As is typical in CPG, organizational silos limit coordination of brand-based integrated marketing campaigns. In fact, for many CPG organizations, individual brands have their own budgets, work with their own agencies, collect and manage their own consumer data, and drive consumer interactions solely focused on their brand proposition. Integrated analytics are changing this as the concept of integrated consumer data reduces overall organizational marketing spend for data. Also, improved insights and analysis tools provide cross-brand views of consumer behavior and activity enabling new and different, dynamic marketing decisions while establishing a consistent brand experience for the consumer.

Start With WHY When Considering A Loyalty Program: Traditionally, CPG brands have few options when it comes to impacting purchase behavior in third-party retail environments, other than relying on costly in-store displays funded by trade promotion dollars to grab a shopper's attention. They must typically buy purchase data from Nielsen or IRI to even understand whats happening in store with their products unless the retailer is able to provide it via EDI. Data latency, lack of cleanliness, and harmonization issues make it difficult for marketers to know which levers they can pull to get more of their brands into the shopping basket at checkout.

CPG brand loyalty programs can be highly effective in increasing trial, driving preference, and boosting cross-category purchase. The CPG marketer is able to impact purchasing decisions in the retail environment and gather valuable data about shopping behaviors that can be utilized to optimize marketing programs. Loyalty programs can be a competitive advantage and at the same time, many have failed. CPG marketers must start with why when considering a loyalty program why does it make sense as part of our strategy, what are the business objectives, why now, why invest, why us? Typical points-base reward programs will still have a place for some CPG manufacturers, but more prevalent will be mobile marketing programs that fall under the loyalty umbrella.

In November 2012, the Path to Purchase Institute surveyed US CPG marketing executives about what mobile marketing tactics they used specifically to target in-store shoppers. About 20% of respondents cited standalone brand apps, and another 25% mentioned offers via retailer apps. While QR codes, mobile coupons and mobile-optimized sites were more popular ways to reach out to in-store shoppers via mobile, there is no question that apps will play a greater role in the in-store experience going forward. Start with Why then move to what and how.

Source : Teradata Corp

Recommended by : Steve Rogers ( steve_rogers2014@outlook.com )