How Consumer-Packaged Goods Should Prep for the Holiday Season to reach 4th quarter goals
To ensure your brand reaches its 4th quarter goals, planning and prepping for the holiday season rush is crucial. Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have had a particular advantage during and post-pandemic times.
According to the digital shopping platform, Chicory, most consumers surveyed plan to attend holiday parties with an increased need to purchase pre-packaged or ready-to-eat foods. Interestingly, Pinterest users began searching for holiday inspiration in April. And on trend with previous years, there was a significant increase in searches in October.
Plan Early. Promote Now.
Planning holiday campaigns early in the year is essential and the sooner, the better. But if you haven’t quite started, there’s still a short window, but you need to start now. Look back at previous years and the most recent quarters’ results and analyze what worked and what didn’t.
Let’s look at the example below of a potential holiday promotional campaign.
Goal: Increase online sales of milk chocolate candy bars by 40% by EOY
Results YTD: 27% increase in online sales
% needed to reach goal: 13%
All 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarter campaigns:
– 3 email subscriber promotions for 10% off bags purchased with code
– Organic social content promoting more milk chocolate products
– 10 micro-influencer collaborations YTD
– 3 product giveaway initiatives (pushing milk chocolate)
– 3 3-month-long general ads on Meta platforms
These campaigns, with the exception of the last campaign, are all focused on awareness and promotion of the milk chocolate bags. The goal of each campaign was to drive traffic to the milk chocolate product on the company website where a button to purchase was clearly visible.
Of these campaigns, the two that brought the best results in product purchases were email promotion and influencer collaborations.
Why the campaigns worked
What was the primary reason these campaigns performed better than others?
1. Emails: People who subscribed to the company’s email were already interested in the product. Making it easier to invite them to the call-to-action to purchase.
2. Influencer Collabs: The authenticity and trust of the influencer played a major role in their audiences’ next-step action. In which some collaborations offered a discount code for purchase.
Get Creative.
You and everyone else are trying to promote their brand, so you need to get creative. How will you stand out? How will your brand be recalled for potential buyers this holiday season? Why should a potential buyer purchase from you?
A lot of the best promotional campaigns focus on the emotion of the viewer. What type of emotion did seeing your product elicit? Will your product fulfill a need? Does it satisfy a desire?
When brainstorming keep these questions in mind.
Optimize the shopping experience
It’s 2022. If buying your product is not easy, customers will not purchase—end of story.
Before you start promoting your campaigns, be sure that your website, and Amazon storefront, if applicable, are performing at their best. To read more about why you should optimize your website, click here.
While we could talk more about what other things you can do to launch a successful holiday campaign, these tips are a strong foundation to kick things off. Not sure where to start? We can help. Contact us today.