For CPG companies, strong content marketing can be the difference between your products flying off store shelves or languishing in the discount aisle. If your brand is struggling with its content marketing, consider taking a lesson from the biggest names around. While we don’t recommend copying these tactics directly (it lacks authenticity), an homage to these tried-and-true content marketing campaigns might be just the ticket to boost your CPG sales.

The Future of CPG

The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is worth about $2 trillion in annual sales. Industry giants like Unilever and Procter & Gamble are still holding strong; however, the industry has witnessed a shake up recently, thanks to brands like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s Razors. These CPG-disruptors have taken a massive $18 billion dollars of industry sales since 2009.

What does this mean for your CPG brand?

It means that every dollar in the CPG market is up for grabs. The better your story and connection to your target audience, the greater your potential revenue. Strong content marketing can be a key factor for communicating who your brand is in a way that educates and inspires your potential customers.

Be Inspired By These 3 Content Marketing Lessons

1) Create Personalized Content Like Coca-Cola

Customers respond to the personalized approach. Too many businesses view individual customers as nothing more than walking dollar signs. By taking the time to personalize branded content, this signals to current customers that you not only value them, but you’re also a brand worthy of consideration. When it comes to leveraging personalization, no one does personalized content quite like Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign has been a marquee content marketing program since it launched in 2014. Every summer, customers flock to stores nationwide to purchase products that feature their name. The content marketing aspect of this campaign comes into play with what happens next.

Personalized bottles in hand, many customers opt to share their coke with their social networks, snapping pictures and using the designated hashtag #ShareACoke. Each image snapped becomes a piece of content in and of itself. It not only pushes the Coke brand, but also helps to support the emotional relationship the consumer has with the brand and the person posting the content.

This type of content, when it’s created by your customers, is known as user-generated content (UGC). UGC is a powerful form of content for CPG brands – in fact, it’s found to be 20% more influential than any other type of media. UGC’s increased influence over other media types is because it lets consumers show off your CPG product(s) in a real-world setting.    

Lesson Learned: Encourage your customers to create content on behalf of your brand by personalizing their experience with your product.

2) Vote It Out Like Lay’s

Lay’s Potato Chips has gotten into a fun new habit of asking their customers and fans to do them a small flavor – er – favor. In their “Do Us a Flavor” contest, consumers are able to vote on which new potato chip flavors will go into long-term production. This voting process helps to create buzz, excitement, and plenty of content marketing opportunities.  

Polling your audience is a powerful way to create an emotional connection with your brand. Not only is your CPG company soliciting feedback and advice, (in the case of Lay’s) it’s acting on that advice to create a product that its audience has requested. Active voting shows that your brand cares about the opinions of its customers.

As stated before, voting campaigns can produce scores of content marketing opportunities including:

• Announcement and buzz-building content pieces of each vote that build awareness
• Progressive content pieces that keep your audience up-to-date with the current status of the vote
• Videos, images, and blog posts that provide detail about each option on the voting block
• Celebration posts introducing the winners of the vote

Lesson Learned: Developing a new product or product line? Get your customers and fans involved by hosting a voting campaign.

3) Use Your Fans To Amplify Your Content Reach Like Avocados From Mexico

All the best content in the world won’t do you any good if it doesn’t get seen by your customers. To help drive in-store sales and online social engagement, Avocados from Mexico (AFM) partnered with SocialToaster (that’s us!) to create a consumer advocacy marketing program.

Fans of AFM and avocados in general use their social media account to join the advocacy marketing program. Once they become a member, they receive access to unique content, fun quizzes, videos, and so much more! Even better, the SocialToaster program makes it easy for members of the program to share AFM’s content with their friends and family on social.

This extends not only the social reach of a content piece but also consumer engagement with the content. As a bonus, fans that share AFM’s great content can even earn rewards and other cool swag.

AFM has even used their SocialToaster fans to top branded mentions during the Big Game in February, even though they were going up against brands with larger market budgets and more commercial time!

Lesson Learned: Don’t let your content languish. Leverage your fans to share your content on their social networks through an advocacy marketing program.

Get Started Today

Let us help you create a fun, exciting, and creative advocacy marketing program. You’ve already got the content, now you just need help creating advocates. Email or call us today for a free demo and let one of our advocacy marketing strategists help you create a program that fits your needs.