Compared to businesses in other industries, fast-moving consumer goods companies spend a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising. In fact, a report published by the CMO Survey revealed that FMCG companies allocate the highest percentage of the total company budget to marketing. And this budget is divided amongst several channels across both digital and traditional medial.
Nevertheless, most of this advertising and marketing spend doesn’t fully allow marketing and sales decision-makers to evaluate if they are receiving the highest possible ROI for each dollar spent. There are numerous FMCG companies that waste resources and budgets on marketing campaigns that have minimal impact on sales.
If you are part of the FMCG industry, here are some tips you can use to optimize marketing spend.
1. Assess Data for Opportunity
The first thing FMCG marketers need to do is assess their data to identify where opportunities exist from the marketing mix. Particularly, the marketing team should amalgamate the data from their attribution and modeling measurements with the insights generated in their customer journey to figure out the how, when, and where of consumer engagements along touchpoints and several channels.
2. Identify Priority Touchpoints and Channels
Everyone has unique preferences and patterns when it comes to the media they use and interact with. Consequently, FMCG marketers can review the engagement across their offline and online efforts and determine the channels and platforms that their target market reacts to most frequently.
Then, they can take a closer look into the particular touchpoints across those channels and platforms that have the greatest influence on consumers. For instance, if you notice engagement increasing after night TV ads but during morning TV ads, you can divert the morning TV advertising spend somewhere else in the marketing mix.
3. Enhance Marketing Operations
There are several amazing marketing automation tools that allow FMCG marketers to organize and automate their processes and optimize marketing spend. Marketo, SharpSpring, Pardot, and Hubspot all provide great features to enhance marketing operations. With these tools, FMCG marketers can
- Enhance SEO and tracking for content engagement and site traffic metrics through several channels and do more of what consumers like.
- Optimize marketing spend by automating marketing processes to free up monetary and human resources.
4. Re-evaluate Creative Messaging
When it comes to increasing consumer interests and encouraging them to move down the sales funnel, FMCG marketers often miss out on a major differentiator –creative messaging. To optimize marketing spend, marketers have to comprehend what creative messaging resonates with which type of consumers.
For this, marketers need to make effective use of the marketing analytics platform, A/B testing, etc., until they can determine which one is the optimal messaging.
Conclusion
Now that we have identified the essential tools, models, and steps required to optimize marketing spend, it’s crucial to remember that true optimization is actually a process. Particularly, it’s a combination of accurate insights, quality data, and frequent tests to identify opportunity areas for optimization.
