How does digital advertising impact FMCG brands?
With the advent of the digital revolution, digital advertising has become the most dominant and impactful medium for broadcasting branding communications. Earlier, FMCG brands depended heavily on print, direct mail, phone, and outdoor advertising to reach their audiences. Advances in digital technology have reduced the dependence of marketers on traditional(offline) media and enabled advertisers to interact directly with their audiences using digital media channels. This has opened up new opportunities and avenues to explore for FMCG brands.
In the following discussion, we explore how digital advertising can skyrocket the influence of your brand in the FMCG domain:Digital marketing is the new normal
With the rampant shift of marketing communications from traditional offline methods to online advertising methods, digital marketing is becoming the ideal channel for marketers. Digital marketing has some inherent advantages. Its scope is worldwide and isn’t bounded by any physical boundaries, unlike offline marketing. New campaigns are much easier to implement, analyze and monitor. The results can be ascertained in real-time without any delays that save time, effort, and money. There are no barriers to entry since any brand can set up its digital marketing channels and start running its campaigns almost instantaneously.
Digital marketing facilitates well-informed decision-making since marketers have access to all information about their audience’s needs, behavior, and purchase patterns. In traditional marketing, trial and error methods were used which are risky and come with a huge cost for the brand. There’s no guesswork in digital marketing as every move is calculated and well-planned before the campaign goes live. Several testing methods like A/B testing, Content testing, Multivariate testing, Geo-target testing, Eye-track testing, and Usability testing can be used to gather rich consumer insights and optimize the branding communications accordingly. This data is used to map out the consumer’s journey in the form of funnels. Funnels can be further refined and perfected based on customer insights.
Each campaign is designed according to these valuable insights, so the chances of failure are much less. With digital marketing, FMCG brands plan, execute and ensure the success of their digital campaigns pro-actively. Digital marketing is the new normal in the ever-changing marketing landscape, which has unlimited scope in terms of reach and potential.
Set Your Brand Apart
The market of FMCG products is wide, diverse, and heavily competitive. Brands in the FMCG sector face the fiercest and most cutthroat competition from their rivals on a limited market share. There are several well-established FMCG giants and many new ones keep on emerging to occupy their place in the market. Therefore, consumers get infinite brands to choose from, which makes it difficult for an individual brand to make the cut and set themselves apart without any concerted marketing effort. Differentiating your product from the competitors’ product is a strategy that pays off in the long run. A major benefit of digital advertising is that enables you to create a unique image and identity for your FMCG brand. You can communicate the same using different digital media channels in a consistent and impactful brand voice. Digital advertising helps you in implanting your brand cues in the minds of your target audience with strategic brand exposure campaigns. Different advertising campaigns can be run for product benefits, product features, product USP’s and so on. Continuous exposure to your brand elements builds familiarity and increases brand awareness, which can impact their purchase decisions in the future. All this lets you counter the competition systematically and differentiate your product in the FMCG market.
Targeting and Retargeting
Before deciding where to put your digital spend, it’s important to know whom to target. Digital advertising is an ideal medium of targeting audiences according to their demography, geographic location, psychographics, needs, interests, online behavior, and past purchase history. Marketers can use platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, Social Media Analytics, and Keyword Research to gather rich data for targeting. Collating and integrating all this data lets you create your ideal customer profile. There are also tools available to conduct user surveys, ask relevant questions and get qualitative feedback from your focus groups. Such data-backed model-based consumer profiling helps you in pinpointing your ideal audience group and facilitates quality targeting.
Retargeting is yet another function of digital advertising. It retargets those potential customers who have shown interest in your product or interacted with your marketing communications. Retargeting is that subset of targeted advertising that aims at converts an intended purchase into a final purchase decision. You can get behavioral insights from various analytics tools to design and test your retargeting advertising campaigns. Using these insights, you can decipher the stages of audience interaction, the stages where the consumers leave your funnel, for instance, tracking when they leave your website or at what stage they abandon the cart. Retargeting strategies can be made to bring them back in the loop and complete the purchase. This brings down your bounce rate and boosts conversions.
Additional Reading: How Social Media Drives The Sales Of FMCG Brands? Personalization at scale
Digital advertising allows the personalization of marketing messages on a massive scale, which wasn’t possible before with traditional advertising.
With traditional marketing methods, one standard message is broadcasted across all media. Personalization in digital marketing overcomes this shortcoming and takes care of the individual characteristics, preferences, and motivations of the target consumer while addressing them as a unique person and not as a mass.
Personalization influences the consumer’s perception of your brand. It creates a one-to-one brand interaction that is contextually relevant to an individual. This makes your customers feel heard and keeps the marketing interactions empathic, meaningful, and persuasive.
An example of this is personalized recommendations by Amazon at checkout. Amazon collects data about user’s browsing and purchase history. Taking this into account, it recommends products that the consumer might find interesting. This gives the feeling of exclusivity to the consumer. Other examples of personalized digital advertising are birthday offers, renewal offers and reminders, loyalty offers, geo-location-based offers, personalized search results, sorting products by interest levels, and so on. All this not only attracts new customers but also nudges them towards conversions. Therefore, personalization in digital advertising allures, acquires, converts, and retains new customers for FMCG brands.
Improved Consumer Feedback
Digital advertising makes consumer feedback efficient and instantaneous. The use of automation in the form of auto-responders and consumer service software gathers user feedback in real-time and answers all their objections. You can also use automation to find out the gaps in your consumer service and improve the same as per the recurrent complaints you’re getting from the consumers. Customer feedback can be collected using reviews, emails, calls, forms, and surveys. Their responses give you an insight into how consumers perceive your brand which further becomes the basis of revisions in your marketing interactions and branding experience. This greatly improves customer satisfaction and increases the chances of referrals or any form of positive endorsement by your customers. In the FMCG market, it’s not just enough to acquire consumers. Your brand creates real value only when it retains its old consumers and keeps delivering satisfactory customer service. Quality feedback paves the way to your brand’s healthy growth.
Immersive branding experiences
Immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are witnessing a boom. Digital advertising beautifully merges this technology with marketing strategies. Marketers can use these immersive technologies to translate abstract brand concepts into palpable experiences that are memorable for the consumers. It gives them a valuable and shareable experience at their convenience. It is slowly reshaping the marketing landscape where virtual experiences are becoming the ideal way of communicating product features and giving the consumers an opportunity to engage and interact with the brand’s world. This adds a new dimension to digital advertising and makes your brand a liveable experience. To know more about how immersive technology is revolutionizing FMCG brand marketing, click here.
From the above discussion, we can see how you can benefit massively from using digital advertising for your FMCG brand. When you use the power and potential of digital to leverage your brand’s messaging and communications, your brand stands out well among the competitors. With advanced tracking, testing, and feedback mechanisms, your digital campaigns have higher chances of success.
Is your brand ready to take the flight of digital success?
At Prakria Marketing Services, we have decades of hands-on experience in devising practical, actionable, and successful digital advertising strategies that bring you more reach, more engagement, and record conversions. With rich consumer insights, we provide you with the most effectively refined campaigns that are ROI-driven. Let’s get in touch to bring your brand industry-leading marketing services
Additional Reading: Why You Should Hire A Digital Marketing Agency? 