March 31, 2020

How to Market FMCG Brands Digitally and Track Success

Marketing within the FMCG space comes with its own set of unique challenges. Although the FMCG marketplace isn’t as saturated as other highly competitive markets, like travel, it can still be difficult to find a suitable digital strategy for your brand and hard to understand what success actually looks like.

8 Million Stories have been fortunate enough to gain a number of excellent clients based within the FMCG market, ultimately giving them some great insights into different techniques to create an effective digital marketing strategy within this marketplace.

Here are their five easy tips to get started with:

1. Set targets

Like any digital marketing campaign, it’s essential to understand exactly what you want to achieve and what you are getting from your marketing efforts. One mistake often seen in marketing is where brands waste budget on campaigns before understanding what success looks like or what they will get for their budget. With many FMCG products, it’s often impossible to measure a direct ROI as products aren’t sold directly on their site. Unfortunately, this issue often leads to lazy strategies that have limited performance measurements.

We highly recommend FMCG brands to set up targets around a variety of indicators such as traffic increases, time on site, bounce rate, social engagement, organic ranking improvements, and Google Analytics.

2. Research your audience

Researching and understanding who your audience are is key in any form of marketing. However, from a digital perspective this is even more important in order to develop an effective content strategy. A common mistake we see is that brands adopt a “one-size-fits-all” approach to content marketing – creating one piece of content that they hope will engage their entire audience.

At 8 Million Stories we work with brands to create multiple audience profiles, dividing audiences into different target segments. From here we can build a better understanding of the following factors:

  • What types of content do audience segments typically engage with,
  • What topics are of interest,
  • What keywords are they searching for,
  • What social platforms do they use,
  • When are they online?

This type of information can be gathered for different audience segments through analytical data and also various industry tools like YouGov. Utilising this data will allow brands to create targeted strategies whilst ensuring budgets aren’t wasted.

3. Own your brand space

Once you have an understanding of who your audience is and have set clear targets, the next step is to ensure you own your brand space. This is more than just buying the relevant URL, setting up relevant social media accounts, and trusting in your development agency to “take care of SEO”. Owning your brand space from an SEO perspective will take some work from an organic perspective. As well as this, thinking about the paid realm of digital, if you have a competitor bidding on your brand terms this can be very damaging.

Your brand should seamlessly link your content strategy and SEO to ensure you consistently own that real-estate and reach your customers with relevant and engaging messaging.

4. Don’t waste money on poorly targeted paid media campaigns

If you were spending money on a television advert, would you want it to run on a channel that didn’t match your target demographic? The answer might seem obvious, yet from our experience FMCG brands are amongst the worst when it comes to poorly targeted paid media campaigns.

Spending time carefully setting up targeted audience segments in Facebook ads should be a given – but try to ensure you use Google’s various bid modifiers too. If you know your core audience segment is females aged between 45-65 years old then adapt your bids to spend more on consumers who are more likely to engage with your brand, rather than spending large percentages of your budget on 18-year-old males.

5. Don’t sell your product on site? Integrate someone who does…

One reason we see digital marketing being deprioritised by FMCG brands is that they don’t sell their products directly to consumers on their site, meaning they can’t track results to a direct ROI like travel or retail brands can. However, consumers are buying FMCG products online.

According to Nielson.com, “Total global online FMCG sales are expected to reach as high as US$400 billion by 2022. Consumers’ buying habits are shifting toward online, and their changing product preferences have created the need for FMCG companies to address demand and consider FMCG eCommerce integral to their overall business strategies.”

One way brands can tackle this is by using tools such as Adimo which allow users to “Add to Basket” when viewing products on your website. Visitors to your site can thereby choose to add products directly to the basket of their preferred online retailer (e.g. Tesco, Amazon, etc) and your products will be waiting for them the next time they visit the retailer’s website.