Engage and Activate Your Customers

Boosting Your Sales and Distribution Through Online Marketing

When people think of online marketing, they usually think one of three things: e-commerce, B2B lead generation or flashy ads from Fortune 500 companies. But, if you sell a consumer packaged good (CPG) at retail stores – the bricks and mortar kind – online marketing could be your secret weapon to grow your sales and distribution.

You’ve probably heard of email marketing, SEO and social. But simply engaging in these tactics will not necessarily deliver results. The key to success is having a strategy that can engage and activate your customer base – both existing and potential customers.

The Internet has been called the great equalizer between businesses small and large. And while it has become increasingly easy to buy online advertising from large publishers such as Google, the real power of online marketing is the ability for companies to communicate directly with customers without the need to buy advertising.

In times past, the only way to reach a large audience was to buy an advertisement or rent a mailing list. If you were lucky, you might have customer data from a survey or in-store presentation. All options forced CPG companies to be dependent on others for reaching their customers, or to invest significant budget into building their own customer database.

Today, CPG companies do not need to be so reliant on publishers to reach their audience every time they want to say something to them. The costs associated with building a customer database and messaging to them directly are a fraction of what they were even 10 years ago. Between email, social media and one’s own website, a CPG company has endless opportunities to reach and engage their customers, build their brand and influence purchases. Most importantly, the opportunity the Internet provides to communicate directly to consumers allows CPG companies to activate their customer-base at will.

Here is a notable example: President Obama’s electronic mailing list was generated almost entirely through his website. Through the course of his presidential campaign, the mailing list reached 1 Million subscribers. With a mailing list so large, he was able to engage and activate a passionate audience who then spread the word and pushed out the message. More importantly, it enabled him to step outside the box of the 30-second ad or 10 second sound bite to have a meaningful conversation with his audience. The engagement is priceless when compared with the cost of 30-second TV ads or prominent ads on the web.

That success formula is something that every CPG company should be striving to create today – build a customer database, engage the customers and activate them to build sales and broaden distribution.

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.