Fast-moving consumer products, things we buy daily like meat products, beauty creams, soft drinks and many more.

When the COVID 19 pandemic started to make the world paranoid about getting infected by this dangerous disease, all the companies around the globe had to find a way to keep selling their products despite the catastrophic situation.

Luckily for these companies, people still have to consume these consumer package goods since we still have to eat and take care of our hygiene to live. To solve this problem, deliveries and e-commerce grocery stores were the perfect mechanisms to keep selling these products quickly at a relatively low cost.

According to Kantar Data, grocery sales through digital webs have grown by 75% in the UK. With vaccines worldwide, the future seems a little brighter for humanity and also, for FMCG companies, they could expect to see their customers back in all supermarkets.

This article will find out what FMCG companies can do to increase their sales after COVID 19.

“Zero moments of truth”

According to Google, this concept refers to the discovery and awareness stage in the buying cycle when the consumer researches a product before the seller’s knowledge. According to Think, almost 53% of customers research before buying a product, and your goal is to be the best option among all your grocery competitors.

If you win the category search and your supermarket is at the top of the consumer’s browsing list, it can better increase the sales for your company.

SEO and beating the algorithm are hard, so being at the top of every search engine can be difficult, but there is nothing that a good marketing strategy couldn’t handle. For your first step, you have to find a good product that many customers frequently sell and are backed up by strong ratings and reviews.

Physical retail stores get the winning search with scales. The problem is that there is an infinite shelf in online shopping. You have to defeat the algorithm, not growing in scale. Cracking the other retailers can be exhausting since the competition is huge, and they change a lot.

According to a WARC article, repeat purchase is 22% more frequent with consecutive shops because people tend to shop from previous shops or digital lists. You can intercept online shoppers through online retailers partnerships and boosting e-commerce ads. Amazon allows you to present an entire ad ecosystem.

Use pricing to empower brands.

Pricing is a key factor in a brand’s positioning. In the FMCG, there are a lot of price sensitivities. Because of this, every recession can impact a retail aisle and category in different ways.

Consumers are focused on spending less in 2021, and for this reason, price is the primordial characteristic they will focus on.

To improve your business, evaluating your product portfolio and segmenting it by price elastically can help you decide which pricing strategy is the best for your company.

A good strategy is to use promotional strategies to draw consumer attention to brands with higher elasticity. If this strategy doesn’t work, your last resort could be price cuts.

Increase your marketing investment

The consumption of digital media has grown through COVID-19, so it is an excellent opportunity to increase your digital marketing efforts. When you increase your spending in a recession, it can help your company tap into better opportunities.

Usually, business leaders think that to drive through recessions, the best option is to cut marketing spending, but actually, marketing is vitally important when recessions are happening.

When businesses ram up marketing during hard times, they can find better opportunities for their companies. While all the competitors are hiding and waiting for the storm to end, you can take a huge advantage to take all their abandoned customers. When people are pulling out from marketing, media tends to be less expensive. Also, during the lockdowns, people tend to spend more time in front of their computers or tv, and when they see your advertisement, they are all yours.

According to an IRI article, 70% of customers believe that a brand’s response to the pandemic can impact their likelihood of buying from them. Another 78% say that they have a stronger connection with brands that have gone above and beyond.

Now, for marketing, there are some “no-goes” you should focus on in your marketing campaign since customers dislike trends like:

  • Melancholic Music
  • Generic inspirational advertising
  • Historic brand values
  • Inautentic pretenses to car

Adopt a shopper led-store view to understand your customers

Customers change of perspective, and this is something every team of marketing should be aware of. While the pandemic situation can change some habits and beliefs about consumer products, it is vital to understand how shopper’s change of perspective could uncover new unknown needs from our audience or repurposed benefits in a different category.

It is a good idea to invest in tracking technology that can help you understand how you are target audience interacts with your products. Harness technology and analytics can make your sales increase by giving them what they really want and need.

Streamline and innovate your range

The crisis is the best moment to upgrade our projects since rough times require the best of ourselves to get over difficult situations. After COVID it is a great idea to streamline your product range and trim the merchandise that doesn’t work of your product range. In recessions, you can rationalize your range a recover some expenses to invest in new exciting products that are high on demand.

In many cases, flavour and size extensions can erode recognize brands. If you cut back those needless products and aim your marketing efforts to get stock on the shelves for consumers, your company will experience more customers excited for your range of products.

COVID 19 pandemic can be a great time to invest in research and develop as other companies hunker down. If you have the economic power to invest in innovation while your competitors can´t, you will be one step ahead of the pack as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic is over, so your efforts will see their revenues.

Global Revenue Growth 2020

  • Food 15.4%
  • Beauty and personal care – 4.2%
  • Alcoholic drinks – 10.3%

 


About the author:

We are Codedesign – a multi cultural, technology, award-winning digital marketing agency. We can be define as a result-led, innovative digital marketing agency specializing in Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, Online Sales, Amazon Sales with a team of experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Strategy and Campaigns, Social Media, Content Marketing, Data Analytics, Ecommerce development, Software development, CRM integrations.