Developing a CPG marketing strategy: the good, the bad, and the opportunity

The good: identifying ways to drive growth for CPG brands

Fortunately for CPG brands, there is vast availability of audience data that can be activated across digital platforms. This allows marketers to scale among niche audiences, driving new consumer behavior learnings to adjacent personas and capitalizing on custom segments unique to your brand. This data is especially rich because it combines intel from a variety of sources. These can range from offline purchase data to behavioral or interest data from third-party data providers to proprietary first-party data.

This audience data can help your CPG brand build a customized media strategy, fueled by unique consumer insights, and identify the most effective platforms, channels, and ad types to achieve key goals throughout the consumer journey. Using this consumer data and research-driven approach, brands can stand out with campaigns catering to the mindsets, motivations and preferences of consumers, and reach them when and where it matters most.

The bad: understanding what could impede performance

While there is a lot of freedom in knowing you can scale cross-platform campaigns and access millions of data points for audience targeting, it can be overwhelming to determine where to start. Getting hung up on disparate campaign elements such as selecting data partners, combing tons of creatives, and focusing on ever-changing ad spaces can lead you away from your core purpose and cost both dollars and hours. Instead, focus on building a cohesive strategy using channels that can work together rather than being siloed and inhibiting cross-platform performance comparison.

Additionally, I would be remiss to not mention the limitations marketers will face as data privacy restrictions are tightened. These changing regulations severely limit trackable online actions, making it a challenge to measure ROI and implement historical learnings based on attribution models.

The opportunity: honing in on key strengths or trends

Do not despair, marketers - not all hope is lost! Challenges make way for new opportunities to evolve and strengthen strategies. With CPG, that means steering away from oversimplified mass media buys and instead narrowing in on key brand messages that will influence your best brand advocates and influencers. To accomplish this, it’s critical to align media and creative teams, discussing ways to test creative messaging within channels and across audience segments to understand what’s creating the biggest impact and ensuring clarity on what success looks like.

And, perhaps most importantly, marketers need to ensure they are looking beyond vanity metrics and diving into business data and directional media metrics to identify trends that signal success. It's especially important to synchronize these data sets as we prepare for the deprecation of the third-party cookie and are confronted with less accurate multi-touch attribution. Instead of solely looking for 1:1 direct attribution, explore a variety of business and media metrics over time to unveil unique learnings and better understand the incremental impact of advertising on your brand.

Moving forward, CPG marketers have many ways to drive more effective media campaigns. First, know your audience. A strong audience strategy backed by a robust understanding of their behaviors, motivations, preferences, and media consumption will drive reduced media waste by ensuring that ads are being shown in the ideal places and with an effective message.

Secondly, don’t get distracted by disparate campaign elements. Instead, focus on business goals and do due diligence to ensure you are consolidating platforms to the most effective placements. That being said, don’t overlook data trends that may suggest initially successful placements are no longer driving the desired results.

Finally, drive success through personalization. This means having a customized messaging strategy that speaks to your micro-targeted consumers as well as formulating a unique measurement framework that aligns with each objective for your brand. Leverage these opportunities to grow your CPG brand and make an impact with core audiences while maintaining maximum budget efficiency.