By Lydia Chen Shah, Director Marketing Communications
Online consumer packaged goods (CPG) sales have tripled from 2004 to 2010, now at $12 billion, reported by eMarketer and according to Nielsen. Online retailing of CPGs is clearly out of infancy and rapidly growing into a sophisticated market where competition can be fierce. Increased competition for a shopper’s dollars along with continuous advancements in technology, increasingly savvy shoppers, and economic effects challenge marketers in a never-ending process of finding greater media efficiencies, greater ROI, and greater effectiveness.
The trifecta of wanted results:
- Greater media efficiencies
- Greater ROI
- Greater Effectiveness
When you examine your internet marketing against the trifecta of wanted results, you might realize it’s time for some spring cleaning.
What can you do to spring clean your internet marketing?
Use Data to Get Rid of Clutter
With the CPG sales expected to hit $16 billion in 2012, online retailers advertising their goods must be able to weed out the true bottom performers – whether it’s poor ad copy or an ad group in paid search, a site that should be excluded from contextual advertising, or ineffective display creative – and focus on those that deliver the trifecta of wanted results from internet marketing.
Keeping clutter in your plan could cost you more than a few dollars on clicks. It could disengage consumers from your brand/products, frustrate potential customers, and lose the sale. Are your ads appearing for irrelevant search queries? What about landing pages? What results have your split and multivariate testing yielded? Contextual advertisers, are you taking advantage of the web’s transparency and using Google’s Placement Performance Report?
Again, we’re no longer in the infancy stages of internet marketing. Enhancements and advanced technology have given us abundant amounts of rich data to help online advertisers gain valuable insights. Don’t let the data sit there; use it to make smart decisions and to get rid of the non-performing clutter.
Determine Which Marketing Products to Use
While the tried and true 1-2 punch of pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) have served you well, have you brought in any new tactics to complement your existing online marketing initiatives and strengthen your brand’s position? To capture additional market share? To ward off the competition? To engage your customers?
For example: Online video marketing can boost website conversions by decreasing a product’s perceived risk and enhancing a brand’s personality. It can help consumers understand how to use your product, the benefits of your products against competitors’, as well as enhance your existing search marketing strategy. Did you know that YouTube is the #5 destination for all “spring cleaning” broad-matched searches?
Another example: Contextual ads such as advertising in Google’s Content Network can increase highly-targeted sales very cost-effectively. Furthermore, search and sites within the Google Content Network are effective connectors between brands and their product landing pages on retailer sites. In a clickstream study Google commissioned with Compete that analyzed retailer product landing pages across 7 major CPG household brands, more than 40% of the unique visitors to the retailer's product landing pages were referred by Search (17%) or by sites within the Google Content Network (23%).
When properly developed to represent a brand and engage target audiences, these internet marketing methods have proven to deliver the trifecta of wanted results. They aren’t replacements for the 1-2 punch of PPC and SEO but additional ways to ramp up results.
Get the Family Involved
I don’t mean ask your brother-in-law who doesn’t know the difference between sponsored listings and results from natural search to review your internet marketing strategy. If you’re an in-house marketer, get a trusted agency to audit your marketing and advertising initiatives. They should look to see if your various goals are aligned, if your messaging is integrated, if your campaigns are properly structured, if you are properly tracking your campaigns, if you need to employ additional tracking, what your competitors are doing, and several other factors that impact significantly a brand’s ability to grow through the online channel. If you have an agency, challenge your agency team to raise the bar. Are they integrating your offline and online marketing? Are they tracking attribution between multiple touch points? Are they seeking to decrease the latency of sale? How are they keeping your brand ahead of the competition?
Whether you’re an in-house marketer or you leverage an agency, getting the family involved means getting experts with the right resources and experience, that live and breathe internet marketing, to help you spring clean and ultimately get the trifecta of wanted results.
Not too Late
Even though summer is fast-approaching, it’s not too late to spring clean your internet marketing. Of course, it doesn’t have to be done in spring but it does have to be done consistently. It’s part of the nonstop optimization in online marketing, the unrelenting and constantly evolving world of digital media. And we love it!