Food, Beverages, Email & Social Media

“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!

As discussed in our previous post, the key to efficiently spending your marketing budget is to engage and activate your customers, and communicate with them directly through cost-effective means, while avoiding an over-reliance on advertising (at least the paid kind).

The strategy you can employ to do this is through collecting data from your customers online, and communicating with them through email and social marketing. When you have a dedicated base of customers, you can communicate with them at will. This provides you a critical, and cost-effective, opportunity to test, learn and understand how your products can be successful, how you can drive more sales, and how you can increase your distribution.

Implementing such an approach ties directly into the core activities needed to build awareness, sales and distribution of a food and beverage product. A recent study published from Emarketer sheds light on the testing strategies that you can employ to test marketing concepts via email and social, by outlining the top activities people are likely to do after receiving marketing messages directly from consumer package good (CPG) companies:

• Download and print coupons (offers, upsells)
• Purchase products online and offline (sales, distribution)
• Try a new product for the first time (awareness, cross-sells)
• Order a product sample (trial)
• Research more about the product and company (awareness)

According to the same study, 74% of people who receive opt-in messages from CPG companies, “have a more positive impression of the company,” and 70% are “more willing to engage with [the] company.” Best of all, collecting customer data on your website and building email and social marketing programs is cost-effective, turn-key and provides a plethora of data that you can use to analyze and plan your next move.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

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