4 Tips for a Strategic CPG Digital Marketing Campaign (and the Trends to Support Them)
Consumers today have many products and brands vying for their attention, which means the CPG industry is particularly competitive. And in CPG digital marketing, it’s a challenge to keep up with emerging technologies as well as growing consumer demands.
The pandemic has changed the way shoppers browse and shop, with a focus on e-commerce and online ordering. According to McKinsey, lockdowns, along with a shift in consumer priorities toward health and safety, condensed five years of e-commerce growth into three months.
These massive shifts are ones that CPG marketers should consider and leverage, above all in planning their 2022 digital strategies. Read on for insights that will help you stay on top of relevant CPG digital marketing trends. And be sure to read to the end of this blog to get your 4 tips before you go!
New Consumer Trends CPG Marketers Should Note
Since March 2020, notable consumer trends have emerged. Although these trends have been accelerated by the pandemic, they are in no way dependent on it. Even as pandemic-related restrictions begin to ease in North America, consumers are sticking to their new buying behaviors. Here are 4 key consumer trends CPG marketers should be aware of:
With the rise of e-commerce and time spent on mobile devices, m-commerce is a priority in 2021.
eMarketer Research shows that mobile commerce retail sales in the United States increased by 41.4% in 2020 and will increase by another 15.2% in 2021, reaching $359.32 billion. Annual m-commerce sales are expected to almost double between 2021 and 2025.
While many consumers continue to work from home, the homebody economy will persist well into 2022.
When polled by Deloitte, US executives (95%) nearly all see the work-from-home trend continuing and predict the top drivers of purchase will be health and safety (92%), trust ( 92%) and quality (88%). %) This year.
Consumers want brands to address sustainability and reflect other core values.
According to The Conference Board’s Global Consumer Confidence Survey, conducted in collaboration with Nielsen, 81% of respondents worldwide believe that businesses should help improve the environment, while nearly half of US consumers say would change their consumption habits to reduce their impact on the environment. environment.
In June 2020, Mindshare found that 68% of American adults believed brands should speak out against racial inequality and injustice, while Visa found that 75% of millennials would support businesses and causes in response to social justice protests. .
Consumers are testing new buying behaviors.
The pandemic has led to an acceleration in e-commerce adoption, along with shopping behaviors that make e-commerce experiences frictionless, such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) and flexible payment options. But behaviors aren’t the only new things consumers are trying, they’ve also been more open to trying new brands.
Digital Trends Shaping CPG Marketing
We have already highlighted some of the common consumer trends that have emerged since the start of the pandemic. These trends have been noted across all verticals, making them relevant to most marketers. But there are digital trends that are particularly important to CPG marketers. Below, we explore how personalization and emerging formats are two key CPG digital marketing trends that are growing in relevance.
Personalization
In an increasingly digital and uncertain world, personalization is essential to the success of CPG brands. For example, 70% of top DTC subscription brands use product surveys to help personalize the customer experience. Questionnaires and other personalization tactics help customers select the products that work best for them, increasing the likelihood of conversion and increasing the potential for long-term customer retention.
Another tactic CPG digital marketers can use to improve personalization is contextual targeting. Contextual advertising is a cookieless targeting method that leverages content rather than user data to reach the right audience at the right time. By targeting based on content, you can reach consumers who are in a receptive mindset. When your ads match the content a consumer is viewing, those ads feel more natural and personalized to the user, which they want.
Emerging formats
The pandemic has led to a massive drop in commuting time, and with working from home becoming a permanent norm, the new “homebound economy” is set to endure. And it is these consumer behaviors that have helped to increase the popularity of new and emerging formats, such as digital audio.
A major lesson of 2020 was that digital audio is resilient and adaptable. Daily commutes were once a major driver of digital audio’s popularity, but despite the loss of that commute time, active digital audio listeners spent more than 2 hours a day with these media in 2020, and more than 70 % of US adults have listened to digital audio content. at least once a month for the past year. We expect the adoption of digital audio to continue to grow in the years to come. By 2025, 67.1% of Americans (218.6 million) will listen to digital audio.
How CPG Marketers Can Drive Results in 2022
With shopping and product discovery increasingly moving online, the digital space will become more competitive. This massive shift to e-commerce has created the need for digital marketing strategies that speak to consumers on a personal level.
CPG digital marketers will need to do more to speak directly to the consumer when browsing online, and brands will need a strong online presence and a cohesive digital strategy if they want to stay competitive in a more more crowded. But moving to the web also has unique benefits. CPG brands can collect more detailed data and information about their consumers to support a more robust digital strategy.
Here are 4 tips to keep in mind when crafting your 2022 CPG digital marketing strategy:
- With consumer buying behavior changing rapidly, make sure your data strategy is fresh and nimble.
Use your transactional data to target new buyers or returning buyers, whose change in buying behavior could be explained by the pandemic. Create custom segments or try contextual advertising to target “at-home” consumers in the upper funnel, i.e. people browsing recipe blogs or interested in self-care.
- Segment your audience to enable personalization and optimization.
Divide these audience tactics into different campaigns to test performance. Then, optimize based on key performance indicators (KPIs), such as brand awareness or increased sales.
- Reach buyers at every stage of the customer journey with channels that mimic that journey.
Try to incorporate OTT and digital video into your outreach tactics, and focus on mobile throughout the funnel. Retarget video completion rates (VCR) with high-impact, interactive display units that reinforce your brand image. Test performance-based native ads to mimic the feel of blog content and target those who read blogs and product reviews.
- A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in a pandemic world – personalization is key.
Use contextual advertising to reach consumers who are in a receptive mindset. For example, if you sell cosmetics, use contextual targeting to ensure your ads appear next to content consumers interested in makeup consume, such as blogs that cover makeup trends. This way, your ads are personalized based on the users they are shown to.
