Getting your product on the shelf is a challenge. Moving your product off is another. Once you’ve secured distribution with a retailer, you need to perform. The bottom line is the bottom line, and ultimately your buyer wants results.
To move the needle at retail, you need a strong retail marketing strategy that engages consumers at each stage along their path-to-purchase (awareness / consideration / conversion).
And while most brands do well when it comes to creating awareness, they struggle as they move further down the funnel.
In this blog, we examine the challenges and solutions to marketing a CPG brand near the point-of-purchase.
What Makes CPG Retail Marketing so Challenging?
Simply put, there’s a lot of moving parts. Most CPG brands have multiple SKUs and sell across multiple retailers. Every retailer is a little different, each with varied timelines, geographies, and scale. Add onto this an ever-growing list of shopper marketing tactics and creative demands and you can see why it gets complicated.
For brands, the complexity of today’s retail landscape makes it difficult to connect awareness level messaging with lower funnel executions. This often results in an incomplete and inconsistent marketing strategy that can leave money on the table.
How to Approach Retail Marketing?
The closer consumers are to purchase, the more complicated it is to deliver a message effectively. To overcome this hurdle, CPGs must solve the logistics of creating / delivering customized messaging at scale.
Here’s some best practices based on our 20+ years in retail:
- Organize your efforts into an account-by-account approach that supports each product / retailer on an individual basis.
- Familiarize yourself with the latest and greatest shopper marketing tactics and platforms, specific to your key accounts.
- Create detailed reference guides for all accounts / programs underway to keep things on-time and on-budget.
- Align your marketing & sales teams and develop a strong reporting cadence.
- Prioritize file and data management to facilitate creative needs and reporting.
At the end of the day, effective bottom-of-funnel CPG marketing is about organization, communication, and execution.
Here’s how we executed a bottom-of-funnel campaign for Sunkist.
Winning the Conversion Stage
With an understanding of how to approach retail marketing, there are a few key activations to keep in your arsenal to engage consumers close to purchase. The grocery space has leaned heavily into the digital world, so it’s important to utilize new digital capabilities to meet shoppers where they are and understand what traditional marketing tactics have stood the test of time.
Traditional Methods That Still Convert
- Sampling or Demos
- Engaging POP Displays
New Digital Opportunities
- Online shopping (Add-To-Cart)
- Retailer-specific audience targeting
- Brand loyalists, previous purchasers, category shoppers
- Retailer-specific geo-targeting
- Based on proximity or real-time location data
- Retailer-specific digital offers and loyalty programs
- On-site media
With any of these tactics, it is essential to carefully evaluate results and compare vendor capabilities to refine your ROI.
Partner with Cliffedge Marketing to Implement Retailer-Specific Programming at Scale.
In today’s increasingly complex and competitive retail landscape, it can be difficult to bring your brand message to store-level. Luckily you don’t have to do it alone!
The shopper marketing specialists at Cliffedge Marketing can help you:
- Navigate today’s complex retail ecosystem and identify best-fit opportunities for your brand.
- Develop go-to-marketing strategies that resonate with shoppers and curry favor from your retail partners.
- Launch omnichannel marketing programs that capture interest, grow demand and drive conversion.
- Quantify results focused on business outcomes and efficiency of your retail spend
Book a consultation with Cliffedge Marketing now to see how we’ve helped other brands transform their retail marketing and how we can do it for you too!
