Production costs are up. Marketing budgets are down. Consumer purse strings are growing tighter by the day. One thing’s for sure – we’re entering a new age of consumer products that presents no shortage of challenges for marketers.
Today’s consumer product marketers are expected to achieve more with less. To deliver on this expectation while keeping up with continually shifting consumer behaviors and constantly increasing competition, they need to adopt strategies that are both cost-effective and impactful.
Here, we look at four ways brands can maximize their consumer product marketing budget. From acquiring valuable customer data to expert resource planning, these strategies will help make every dollar count.
- Acquire quality first- and zero-party data with compelling value exchanges
- Focus on data quality over quantity
- Use automation to achieve more with less
- Streamline marketing budget planning and management
1. Consumer product marketing and the value exchange
Consumer products businesses are acutely aware of the power their retail partners hold. It’s data. They know who the customers are, what they buy, how often they buy it – the list goes on.
They aren’t your customers – they’re your retailers’ – and you don’t actually know who those customers are.
First-party data lets you peek behind that curtain, identify customers, and get insights to create personalized marketing engagements that build brand trust and loyalty.
However, customers won’t part with their personal information without good reason. This is where value exchanges come into play.
Value exchanges take place when customers provide information, like their name and email, in exchange for something perceived to be valuable, like a free download, or a coupon. When it comes to customer data, value exchanges are the keys to the kingdom.
So, CPG marketers can use their owned channels to set up value exchanges and start gathering first- and zero-party data. Add QR codes to your packaging that drive to landing page offers, add pop-ups and in-line forms to your blog for discounts or free downloadables – the options are endless.
2. Focus on data quality over quantity
Let’s address the elephant in the data room: customer data is cheap to acquire, but often expensive to maintain.
For a DTC brand with 100,000 records, this isn’t really a problem. But a CPG company with 100,000,000 global customers? With regulatory processes, data engineers, dedicated servers, and data centers, data collection becomes a business in itself.
Maximizing profitability requires focusing on the best data instead of amassing a huge amount.
Look into how quickly data ages and becomes irrelevant, and regularly cleanse it to remove old records. Additionally, take a step back and assess your needs. Which data points will you use in your marketing campaigns? What can you do without? Work this out on a campaign-by-campaign basis and only collect data that you’ll actively use and can afford to maintain.
3. Use automation to do more with less
At face value, being expected to achieve more with fewer resources might seem like an impossible task that inevitably sees costs passed onto the end consumer. Leading brands, however, are turning to marketing automation for consumer products for help in stretching their dollars.
With the right marketing automation platform, consumer products businesses can activate their first- and zero-party data, unify it under a single platform, and use it to create personalized marketing automations that drive latent revenue and help acquire new customers.
With this data in hand, brands can use marketing automation to dynamically segment customers by lifecycle stage, historical data, and even real-time online behavior. From here, you can automatically create personalized marketing engagements that drive revenue, reduce churn, and boost sales.
4. Improve marketing budget planning + management
Looking to drive better return on your marketing investment? Effective budget planning and management is key. Brands need to be agile, ready to pivot quickly and reallocate resources in response to market shifts. Fortunately, there are a few steps to put this into practice:
- Conduct scenario planning for market shifts: Our economic climate is unpredictable. Prepare for a number of different possibilities and outcomes. Scenario planning helps with this. It allows anticipate and strategize around these market changes, helping keep your return on marketing investment (ROMI) on track, regardless of external factors.
- Gain campaign visibility across brands and markets: Managing multiple brands and markets? Visibility is critical. Implement a centralized marketing dashboard to get real-time performance insights that help identify synergies, avoid redundancies, and allocate resources more efficiently.
- Integrate with ERP technology: A consumer products marketing strategy needs to be agile, which means budget reallocation needs to keep pace. Integrating with an ERP system enables seamless budget transfers, real-time spend tracking, and immediate budget adjustments based on campaign performance.
Turn budget constraints into opportunities
With a shifting economy and stubborn inflation continuing to weigh on consumer spending, things won’t get any easier for consumer product marketers anytime soon.
But with the right strategies and technologies, brands can make the most out of their limited resources to surpass consumer expectations and drive growth.
Personalization: It’s not magic. It’s method. Find out who does it best HERE.
