Driving sales is crucial to the success of FMCG brands, and that success depends on your marketing team being able to anticipate market demand and take advantage of sales opportunities. However, many teams are marketing in the dark, lacking the data and insights needed to respond to market demand in real-time.
Is your marketing disjointed, not targeted enough, or generating results intermittently? Then you’re marketing blindly, and it’s costing you money. Every year, FMCGs spend up to 21% of their total revenue on marketing, yet over 60% of that marketing spend fails to deliver any noticeable ROI. Only real-time insights at every stage of the distribution chain and granular data analysis can solve this problem, showing you:
- Where there is demand for your products?
- Who is buying your products and why?
- Which of your campaigns are working and why?
The existing marketing analytics tools are inadequate
Many FMCGs already use data analytics tools to provide some data on their marketing performance, but the information received is not always actionable, often leaving more unanswered questions as the data is hard to interpret and turn into actionable points. The tools are disconnected, and the data gathered is not syndicated across each point in the distribution chain, resulting in significant gaps in the data produced that keeps your marketing in the dark.
For many marketing teams, the tools available provide too much unnecessary information, tracking metrics that are not useful and generating ‘noise’ that keeps you from getting a clear picture of your marketing performance or understanding buyer behavior throughout the customer journey. Another problem is that the analytics tools available cannot provide data in real-time, so marketers only have access to legacy data that only allows them to look back, not forward. The inability to perform predictive analysis means that you cannot rapidly respond to shifts in demand or create new routes to market, restricting you from becoming a true market leader in the competitive CPG industry.
Despite the seeming abundance of data, marketing teams don’t know where the demand for their products is, or which campaigns deliver the most revenue. This situation persists even though marketing data and analytics is a key investment area by FMCGs. A 2020 survey of over 400 marketing leaders showed that CMOs ranked data and analytics as the most important area to invest in. However, more than half the senior marketers surveyed, including CMOs and VPs of marketing, are unimpressed at the results generated.
Only real-time, actionable insights can close marketing gaps and drive sales
To create better campaigns that maximize sales opportunities and meet revenue targets, you need more than a tool. You need a connected commerce platform that doesn’t leave you in the dark but gathers syndicated data to shed light on every stage of the distribution chain.
For example, knowing that there is an increase in sales of a particular product is certainly advantageous, but it will be better to know:
- Why is there an increase in demand?
- How that increase is spread among different geographic locations ?
- Who is buying more of your product?
- What campaign or promotion was responsible for the increase?
With a market intelligence solution that gives actionable insights in real-time, you can:
- Identify where the increase in demand is coming from.
- Identify the type of buyer that is most likely to buy your goods (grocery store, supermarket, convenience store, etc.) and put the right products in the right store.
- Monitor the effectiveness of the end-to-end customer journey from store to shelf.
- Create laser-focused, cost-effective campaigns targeted at the right kinds of buyers.
- Communicate with merchants in real-time to discover the challenges faced at POS.
Syndicated data gives you the power to create specific campaigns targeted at the right buyers, drive consistent merchant engagement, and reduce the cost to serve each customer, thereby expanding your customer base!
This is just an example of how granular insights with data captured across the entire distribution chain can increase the effectiveness of your marketing. With these insights, you can create new data-driven marketing strategies and open new routes to market, taking advantage of the micro consumption patterns in the market to create new demand for your products.
Shed some light for your marketing team
RedCloud has built the world’s first open commerce platform that unlocks the full value of the distribution chain, allowing you to gain valuable data from every point of the distribution chain. With the actionable insights provided, you can now identify and maximize opportunities to upsell and cross-sell your products in real-time, identify gaps and opportunities within the market, create new demand for your products, target the right merchants with specific campaigns, and even drive merchant behavior with automated communications.
By partnering with RedCloud, you can bring your marketing out of the dark and increase your revenue by up to 25%.
In my next blog, we will explore how best to utilize data to increase engagement and sales.
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