While loyalty is important to maintaining a brand’s current market share, pulling in new leads is the catalyst for true growth. Increasing market share is easier said than done, however, as your company’s goal is the same as millions of other companies—and there are only so many consumers to go around. In a crowded, overly saturated marketplace, your brand must find a way to rise above the static and noise.
Continue reading “Creative Customer Rewards Program Ideas to Engage New Shoppers”
The brain processes images from photos and videos about 60,000 times faster than it processes text. With stats like that, it’s not surprising that brands want to leverage visual mediums as a powerful way to share their message. In fact, more than half of all marketing professionals state they see a stronger ROI with video advertising than with any other form of marketing campaign.
Continue reading “How to Measure Video Advertising ROI: The Metrics Brands Must Know”
While total projected fraud losses have gone down year over year, there is still anywhere from $6.5 billion to $16.4 billion globally — estimates vary widely — that will be lost to ad fraud in 2017.
And that’s just fraud. Viewability represents further wasted ad dollars when real people may view a page that hosts an ad, but not actually see the full ad.
Marc Pritchard, CEO of P&G believes there is “at least 20 to 30 percent of waste in the media supply chain because of lack of viewability, nontransparent contracts, nontransparent measurement of inputs, fraud and now even ads showing up in unsafe places.”
In this eBook, we assess the current state of ad fraud, and share a few best practices to help advertisers avoid losing precious advertising dollars to deceptive practices.
Competition among consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands is daunting; the industry is estimated at $2 trillion and most segments are highly saturated. In fact, an estimated 56% of U.S. consumers said the number of brands they consider for a given product or service has increased significantly over the past 10 years. It makes sense, then, that when brand affinity is not a factor, consumers will often make purchases based on price alone.
When markets are mature and saturated, it can be difficult for your brand to gain greater market share. Loyal customers want to stay with the brands they’ve already chosen. Cost-conscious consumers want the lowest price. Among all this competition, how can your brand hope to gain market share from its competitors? The answer is in leveraging digital marketing partnerships to reach new customers and build brand awareness.
The significant growth of the CPG marketplace over the past decade means that mass advertising and shelf placement are no longer sufficient to excite shoppers and convert them into customers. CPG brands often turn to coupons to entice and grow their customer base, but in the modern age of digital shoppers who are looking to deeply connect with a brand for more than just its price point, these steep discounts often result in nothing more than a one-time purchase—at a loss.
If your CPG brand wants to remain competitive in the new world of digital marketing, you need an alternative to the expensive discount programs of the past. This alternative can be found in mobile apps that drive consumers toward your brand as they shop. When consumers receive brand messages in real time while they are in a retail location, the sales funnel becomes short and effective, allowing your brand to naturally convert awareness into a purchase.
In a study involving a diverse group of consumers, eMarketer noted that 73% of consumers cite price and value as top sales drivers. This hasn’t changed much in the history of selling CPG products. What has changed is how brands make consumers aware of their value and quality. Brands have to be able to gain the attention of consumers—and the digital space is the place where they must do it.
62% of millennials, one of the largest groups of consumers, use digital services to locate products. To gain the attention of these shoppers, your brand needs to shift its focus to the digital world, particularly mobile apps that travel with shoppers. The top benefits of mobile apps for CPG brands trying to determine how to gain market share from competitors are:
As we review the statistics above, it becomes clear that a digital presence is crucial for any CPG brand competing in today’s retail market and attempting to gain market share over their competitors. However, developing an online presence requires time and significant investment, even for well-known brands like Band-Aid or Kleenex, names synonymous with a particular product. 2 million blogs, according to Hosting Facts, are published every day, with countless brands all trying to create an online presence.
Brand awareness is a major component of gaining market share. That’s no secret. But gaining that brand awareness requires the ability to stand out on digital platforms, which are often saturated with other brands attempting to do the exact same thing. To gain an edge in a highly competitive market, your CPG brand can’t start at square one. Instead, you need to find a way to use strategic partnerships to gain notoriety in the digital space.
Instead of a high-cost, full-scale online marketing campaign, many brands are finding ways to work their way further down the sales funnel, reaching out to consumers where and as they shop. By leveraging the ease and flexibility of existing mobile retail apps, CPG companies can incentivize consumers without damaging their bottom line. Partnering with popular app offerings which have an established foothold in the retail market offers brands the opportunity to build product awareness and consumer trust which, in the end, leads to a greater share of their target market.
How is this accomplished? Consumers want to feel like fiscally savvy shoppers. However, CPG brands, often operating on slim profitability margins, can hardly afford to slash prices to make a sale, especially since this can lead to long-term devaluations of their brand name. After all, greater market share and customer loyalty don’t necessarily equate to profitability. Shopping apps that aggregate rewards from partner brands benefit both the consumer and the brand in three ways:
CPG brands spend roughly $225 billion on marketing each year, with discounts that cut into margins. Brand managers are beginning to approach marketing in a new way, however. App-based advertising programs are becoming a highly profitable addition to digital marketing strategies as they draw in consumers without requiring companies to compete at a loss.
Brand awareness breeds greater market share. Partnering with the right shopping apps can significantly increase awareness of your brand, allowing you to claim a greater share of your market segment from your non-digital competitors. By leveraging strategic partnerships with popular mobile shopping apps, your CPG brand is given access to an active user base in the digital space—and all without the risk and high cost of a stand-alone digital program.
Shopkick offers our retail and CPG brand partners a new voice in a saturated marketplace. To connect with Shopkick, contact us today.
Mobile apps have ushered in a new wave of advertising. In addition to building brand awareness through traditional methods, such as television or print, brands are focusing on more genuine connections with consumers in way that makes sense for them. Mobile apps offer that opportunity. Print and television ads are simply unable to travel with consumers as they go about their day-to-day tasks. Innovative retail mobile apps, then, have become a second driving force behind many modern brands gaining market share at brick and mortar locations through increased brand awareness.
Marketing was traditionally, as a rule, one-sided. Brands reached out to customers without a way for customers to directly respond. The internet made marketing a two-way street, allowing for interaction and communication. Mobile advertising via retail and shopping smartphone apps has personalized this process even further and made the engagement between consumers and brands more immediate.
Let’s explore how CPG brands, in particular, can take advantage of this consumer-focused technology. By leveraging third-party apps with their own established, loyal users, it is possible for your brand to successfully target and achieve product awareness goals—and in a way that naturally increases market share.
Since the development of the internet, it has become much easier for consumers to reach out to and interact with brands. This creates a closer, more personal relationship, something that your brand can leverage to gain loyal customers as well as grab the attention of new consumers—provided you capitalize on what third-party retail mobile apps have to offer.
Rather than advertise at consumers, you must engage them. In that sense, mobile is the perfect platform as it demonstrates your brand is:
Mobile marketing allows your brand to craft an organic personality. It humanizes your brand by allowing it to dynamically respond to consumers, target your marketing to a specific audience, and reach out at the right times and in the right places. Of course, it’s not as simple as creating an app for your brand; developing a mobile advertising platform is a major challenge that very few companies are ready to undertake.
The biggest hurdle with any mobile advertising platform is adoption; there’s a significant amount of competition for new apps. If you look at the numbers, you’ll see there are 2.8 million apps available through Google Play and another 2.2 million apps available through the App Store. Those numbers can make it next to impossible for any one brand to stand out among the competition. However, adoption is the key component to gaining brand awareness via mobile advertising. Unless your app is used, it cannot drive awareness.
Unlike television and print marketing campaigns, mobile advertising is dependent on the permissive use of your target audience. That means that consumers must seek out the apps related to your product and add them to their device. When you note the average consumer has 21 apps on their phone, but only regularly uses one or two of them, you quickly realize why adoption can prove challenging. However, there is a solution—and one that is friendly for CPG brands marketing budgets.
When focused on gaining the attention of your desired market in a highly competitive app store, you are competing against an infinite number of brands for the attention of a finite audience. The ideal solution to this problem is often to eschew creating a standalone app and, instead, leverage a partnership with a company that already has an established following of your potential consumers.
While brands may have the people power necessary to create mobile advertising programs in-house, or a platform to work with, newly created apps do not come with a built-in audience. However, by partnering with an established app, your brand can gain a competitive edge in gaining brand awareness and growing market share via your mobile advertising strategies.
Specifically, innovative third-party retail mobile apps that focus on rewards programs offer:
Retail mobile advertising is a proven marketing strategy for CPG brands that want to gain the recognition, and business, of a growing, tech-savvy audience. However, the best approach to this strategy, retail shopping apps, is a saturated market. To ensure success—and to optimize your marketing budget—your brand must align with a program that offers an existing, loyal audience.
Consumers trust the apps they give valuable smartphone space to—and your brand can leverage the credibility of the most popular shopping apps. By partnering with platforms specifically designed to appeal to consumers, and right in the moment when they’re ready to make a purchase, your brand can naturally increase not only product awareness, but market share.
Shopkick offers an innovative rewards-based shopping app for CPG brands and retailers. To become a Shopkick partner, or for more information, contact us today.
