The new realities of COVID-19 bring both challenges and opportunities with it. With digital fitness classes and events going online, and restaurants hiring out-of-work waiting staff to deliver food to consumers, people expect deliveries to their homes so they don’t have to step out of their homes.

Your online presence matters to them because they prefer to submit orders online. This new way of life makes selling directly to the consumer an essential requirement for any brand. Brands that have been investing and experimenting with digital capabilities enjoy the benefit of a captive audience growing with them.

It is time for CPG companies to step back and reconsider their market engagement strategies to include D2C methods. Rethink approaches that can supply them with valuable data insights into their consumer mindsets. Help them better understand consumer likes, interests, and product use, helping enable a more meaningful connection with them.

Here is what your competition is doing and what you too can do, as a measure to drive traffic to your e-commerce website in the times of COVID:

Target with Digital Precision

CPG brands that can leverage technologies—by meeting changing consumer demands online, enabling seamless interactions through D2C offerings, and enhancing the consumer experience with augmented and virtual realities—have the opportunity to earn consumer loyalty.

SEO STRATEGY

80% of CPG shoppers say the searches they make on their mobile impact their CPG purchase decisions, and more than 60% search multiple times during their purchase journey (Source: GeoMarketing).

D2C competition among brands is growing, showing 8% growth from last year, and SEO is pivotal to this. With COVID-19 hampering the consumer’s free travel and access to essential items, they have expanded into the digital space.

Creating content and posting it on a website is no longer sufficient. It is also crucial to boost your brand’s visibility on searches and make it accessible by building a strong SEO strategy around it. To drive traffic to your e-commerce site, brands need a strong SEO strategy that includes design and website optimization, innovative marketing ideas, pushing out personalized content, running campaigns and expansion on offerings.

How it Works:

The process includes a whole set of target areas such as - keyword optimization (paid and referral), better site structuring, mobile responsiveness, as well as building relevant and optimized content. You will know if you’re doing it right, as this will result in quality traffic amplification, customer engagement, repeated visitors and high conversion rates.

Tip: Paid and Referral Traffic is also an important part of the traffic acquisition strategy that drives good results. Brands need to regularly optimize search queries and ads per consumer intent, for better relevancy and lower bounce rate.

Secondly, it is essential to create mobile-first experiences. Take the example of the food industry, 70% of the traffic in the food industry comes from mobile. 72.92% of traffic for Betty Crocker comes from mobile, while for McCormick it is 76.84%, and for Hershey’s, it’s 73.14%. (Source: SimilarWeb)

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT

Social media provides the most significant focus group; brands that tap into the consumer base available here see great success. With 60% of consumers on social media, there is an enormous opportunity that brands can tap into, by doing these basics right: reaching consumers directly, promoting appropriate content, driving strategy by segments, and interacting with the audience.

How it works

First, social media is an ideal place to encourage loyalty and pitch the usage of products. Secondly, it can be used to: support the personalized consumer experience, collect consumers’ data for customizing content, and create sales opportunities on social to facilitate consumer service.

Tip: Facebook and Pinterest Marketing Attract Good Response, since they allow scope for visual content. It is also easier to run campaigns on Facebook and target as many demographics as possible.

UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER INTENT

Consumers have three fundamental use cases when they engage with brands: First, they want to Transact, second Engage with the brand, and third Improve product usage. While we addressed the transaction part in the SEO and social media strategies, let us talk about the other two.

Engage with the Brand
Several #CPG companies are focusing on brand messaging to help consumers connect with them and see value in their products, to drive customer’s engagement with the brand.

Axe Find Your Magic:

A shift from hyper-masculine brand narrative to young men who don’t subscribe to traditional gender identity. This concept, strongly advocated by Gen Z, should be more open to being true to their personal choices, almost ‘redefining’ masculinity. Axe empowers men to be their most attractive self – as they are.

Result: Axe has enjoyed a significant increase in brand sentiment and consideration.

Marriott:

A brand that stands for unique travel experiences launched the #lovetravels campaign using popular Hispanic influencers, intending to urge travelers to explore their passions and celebrate their unique perspectives.

Result: The Marriott brand now gets top-of-mind brand recall for potential travelers within this target segment

Improve Product Usage
Customers today are looking for ways to use the products better or generally make a good decision while making a purchase. As a result, they are looking for more ‘DIY’ videos, cooking videos, and informative videos.

Here are some key emerging trends based on consumer intent and how the competition is tapping into these:

Kitchen is the restaurant, and ‘How to’ content is of utmost importance to them.

‘How to’ videos are a great way to keep the audience engaged with the brand. What brands today need to do is share ‘How to’ type content, ‘recipes’, ‘learn about ingredients’ videos, give reviews and also engage socially.

For instance, these brands are making the most of this trend by answering these searches and translating them into commerce:

Betty Crocker- Using Recipe Keywords as an Opportunity

For Betty Crocker, meal planning and recipe keywords drive the majority of their traffic. Their content production is based on what’s trending in recipes.

Betty Crocker wins traffic share for taco and pumpkin pie recipes, an important product set for McCormick.
Betty Crocker relies on paid as well as social, organic and referral (Swagbucks). They have a strong content strategy for recipes (how-to and Recipe).

The rise in DIY and Learner Category of People, Searching for: “How to” Videos

Keywords starting with “How to” drives the majority of the traffic for laundry and cleaning. These keywords are related to laundry and fabric care, laundry basics, removing stains (color, oil etc).

Clorox has a powerful strategy for content on “How to” articles related to laundry and is winning the most traffic share, i.e., 65%.
Tide is winning traffic share of more than 30% by focusing on the “How to” related to laundry basics, cleaning etc.

Wellness and Hygiene is Top of Mind for People

People are searching for what will help them stay in good health. There is a rise in vitamin oriented searches, on Amazon, vitaminworld.com, vitaminshopee.com and more such sites. Vitamin searches are driving the highest share to Vitamin Shoppe with MoM increase of 61% in March, and businesses are generally benefiting from this rise in the trend.

Informative Videos

COVID-19 has changed the requirements of consumers, they now want information hygiene—complete transparency on how a product is manufactured, packaged and delivered. Consumers want more consumable content around the brand’s products for information such as buy /transact, coupons, and “where to buy information.”

For instance, these brands are pulling off this idea successfully:

Clorox

Clorox has seen a massive increase in traffic by creating content relevant in COVID times, based on the consumer shift. They are informing consumers about what products they can use where, to combat COVID-19, which is helpful for the buyers, and they are winning this game.
Clorox elaborates on its website, what product to pick for your specific purposes of disinfection, as there are various products available for each purpose.

End Note

The shift from being a legacy brand to being a digitally proactive one that reaches out to its consumers has already started. There is no better time than today to start thinking digitally and bringing consumer experiences that inspire loyalty and bigger business outcomes.