Looking to move more of your products from shelves into carts?
Once you acquire a distribution agreement for a food and beverage product, the hard part is now getting your product off the shelves.
It’s crucial for CPG brands to improve sales velocity as its foundational to long-term success. Category Managers want products that are fast movers, not stagnant and collecting dust on the shelf.
So, how do you set your product up for optimal selling conditions?
The 2 Keys to Improving Grocery Sales
On the most basic level, improving sales velocity is the result of 2 connected processes: creating demand and driving conversion.
Creating Demand:
Let’s say you’re launching a new product in a handful of target markets / retailers. The first challenge you need to overcome is a lack of consumer familiarity. As the product is new to the marketplace, you need to focus on top-of-funnel brand building and awareness.
From a tactical standpoint, you might consider running a mix of paid social ads – recipes, influencer content, product attributes, etc. Whatever the approach, the goal here is 3-fold:
- Create relevance with your target audience.
- Distribute your message across as many tough points as possible.
- Re-enforce your message through repetition.
Ultimately, you want consumers to remember your product once they reach store level. If you can make enough noise before they enter the store, you’ll improve your odds of conversion.
Here’s a helpful resource for planning paid media campaigns.
Driving Conversion:
Eventually your target audience will enter the conversion stage – meaning they will be at or near a point of purchase.
Since you already primed your audience for purchase in the demand creation phase, your goal now is to give shoppers one last nudge while they’re in buying mode.
In the conversion stage it’s best to prioritize bottom-of-funnel tactics like price promotions / coupons, POP displays, retail media programming, sampling, etc. The goal is to re-enforce your brand message as close to purchase as possible, while incentivizing trial.
The challenge here is that each retailer / account is a little different – each with varied timelines, geographies, and scale. Thus, the key to driving more conversions is localizing your brand message for each retailer with an account-by-account approach.
A Full-Funnel Approach
On average, people go to the grocery store 8 times per month (Drive Research). As a CPG brand, this means your target audience is quickly moving through the sales funnel on a regular basis.
If you want to improve sales, it’s critical to employ both top-of-funnel (demand creation) and bottom-of-funnel (conversion) tactics simultaneously. This ensures you cast as wide a net as possible to capture and convert shoppers.
Next Steps for Improving Sales Velocity for your Brand
The first step to improving sales velocity is creating a solid shopper marketing strategy that maps out where you’re going and how you’ll get there.
If you need support, turn to the shopper marketing specialists at Cliffedge Marketing. We can help you win the retail marketing game with proven strategies to overcome even today’s toughest challenges.
