How Digital Marketing Plays Crucial Role in FMCG Businesses

During COVID-19, digitalization is massively growing in Indonesia. According to We Are Social data (2021), it is shown that internet users grew 15.5% during the outbreak. At the same time, the average daily time that internet users aged 16 to 64 spend on various media shows 8 hours 52 minutes higher than the conventional media usage. These findings show that the consumers are now spending more of their time online.

As digitalization becomes a thing, the online economy is also growing fast and it comes with high demand. This phenomena is increasing the demand for Digital Marketing roles in many companies, including GudangAda. At the Coffee Break and Learning Session, one of GudangAda’s internal events, Dian Paskalis our VP Digital Marketing shared his experiences in handling digital field and how its effect and implementation in the FMCG industry.

As we all know, FMCG companies are selling the customers’ daily driver products and they span across many categories (food and beverages, baked goods, processed foods, cleaning products, beauty and cosmetics, office supplies, etc), thus FMCG companies need to be everywhere to reach the mass audience. To maximize its effort, he explained it is important to keep the marketing funnel in mind and work with digital platforms as direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel. Digital platforms provide more chances for FMCG companies to sell more consumers and shift the transaction to an online system as competition for the shelves gets heavier. The breakthrough in the industry came to a realization that the transaction in digital is growing, yet the most sales is still coming offline.

Seeing this condition, we learned that the retail companies are transforming, yet at the same time the challenges remain. To overcome the challenges, Dian made a couple of points that we could learn to maximize our brands through digital marketing. Let’s catch up!

Connect with the customers through O2O experience

Although transaction is increasing in digital, the customers still would look for offline stores. So brands need to think on how they could get the patrons to spend more or even bring in new customers. Here we can utilize online marketing to impact both online and offline sales. It could also enhance offline to online (O2O) experience. By delivering omnichannel marketing, brands can increase their awareness and engage with the targeted users, both online and offline.

In the midst of technological advancements where it affects users to seek out seamless shopping experiences across channels, retailers also need to rethink their strategy to reach their customers. One of the key solutions is to enrich the online to offline (O2O) experience while this effort is getting more integrated and measurable.

Utilize the connected packaging

The regular advertising media is no longer the only way to reach and retain consumers. Almost everything that the consumers use and see in their daily activities can now become media, for example, a bottle of shampoo. Brands can consider how such media can play a role in the omni-shopper world. This is where brands can leverage the power of what we call: connected packaging. Brands can incorporate unique scannable code on the product packaging and transform it into interactive media channels by stitching online-to-offline together.

This comes in 2 benefits:

1. Consumer engagement. The connected package allows brands to engage directly with the consumers and retain them with various campaigns in the online landing page. It gives brand owners a way to stand out from the noise and interact with their targeted consumers in ways that differentiate the product offers.
2. Track and trace. A connected package makes it possible to track the product through the supply chain. Manufactures would be able to track and trace their product histories, and it is possible to monitor their market easily.

Remove the gap and distance

Scaling up e-commerces as channels has become a challenge for many FMCG companies. One of the reasons is order fulfillment. The distance of principal warehouses to consumers and variables such as weight and volume could result in high delivery cost, especially for big basket size.

Therefore, the emergence of e-commerce logistic companies that leverage technology to reduce cost plays a big role in tackling the issue. Aside from that, the local warehousing model that is adopted by many e-commerces also helps to decrease cost and increase business efficiency.

Build relationship with customers

Consumers are purchasing FMCG products via retail channels, not directly with the FMCG companies themselves. Due to this, most FMCG companies will always have limited information on their own customers. Unlike many online and superapp platforms, FMCG companies have limited ways to capture online customer behaviour. They need to rely on their retail partners and 3rd parties to acquire and collect the data. Therefore some FMCG companies have started to create their own online platform so they can build direct relationships with the consumers and enable more personalized marketing.

From the discussion, we learned how digital marketing plays a crucial role in every aspect of business and industry. The role itself could ease the business challenges and remain as a solution to get closer to the customers.

The session was an insightful lesson for us to learn, and we are planning to have the Coffee Break & Learning regularly in the future. Stay tuned for the next session and let’s comment to let us know what topics interest you most.