Pexels Digital marketing strategies have become highly sophisticated as more brands across industries leverage data collected through e-commerce transactions to develop personalized messaging and more effective tactics to drive sales.
In the early days of digital marketing, this primarily benefited industries with a strong online presence, such as consumer technology or retail. Online purchases provided manufacturers with troves of first-party customer data. Leveraging their knowledge of customer preferences, these brands were able to develop digital marketing tactics that reached their customers in the right ways and at the right times.
Brands within the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space have historically been at a disadvantage and unable to benefit from the same level of e-commerce data as other industries. Although CPG sales growth in e-commerce has been rapid, the majority of CPG sales today are still made in store. CPG manufacturers instead had to rely heavily on consumer models, rather than firsthand data, to design and target their digital media and marketing campaigns. As a result, CPG marketers generally believe they lack the data resources to design and implement a digital marketing strategy with the same level of personalization and efficacy as more digitally focused industries.
For a long time, that was true. However, new innovations in purchase measurement and consumer behavior tracking have created opportunities for CPG marketers to catch up to — and even surpass — the sophistication of digital marketing campaigns in other industries. [Full disclosure: My company offers CPG data tracking services.]