Rethink Traditional Sales & Marketing Strategies in a Digital World
As a consumer products company founded in pre-digital times, what can you do to build, amplify, or differentiate to remain competitive and offer a choice product for consumers in this new digital world? Responding to and navigating the digital industry landscape is not easy – especially for organizations previously successful in the days of in-store only. Change requires updating, revamping, and potentially retiring traditional sales and marketing strategies. Take a step back from the business mindset of marketing and sales functions and become a consumer of your own brand. Imagine the possibilities and the new consumer experience resulting from the following practices.
Rethink Sales and Marketing Investments
- Consolidate the budget and manage brand, trade, shopper, and digital investments under one umbrella to minimize organizational inefficiencies and optimize investments.
- Define a cadence for budget planning and allocation review to amplify successes, course-correct, or discontinue investments where performances fall short of expectations.
- Establish KPIs upfront to focus effort, save evaluation time throughout the investment lifecycle, and enhance learning cycles for predicting optimal customer and consumer engagement.
- Inspire actionable insights and leverage consumer data to drive strategic insights and feedback into your budgeting process.
The relationship between sales and marketing is even more important with digital. Now you must establish a new norm for budgeting and adjusting investments. When done successfully, your brand’s underlying message is aligned with your retail customers, your consumers, and yields greater returns.
Reimagine Channel Strategies
- Reassess your channel strategy and manage the right channels for your businesses and establish a consistent consumer experience across eCommerce platforms, direct-to-consumer channels, and traditional in-store purchases.
- Strategize pricing and become well-versed in the art and science of pricing know-how, channel governance, retailer insights, and the technical analyses of elasticity, market data, and economic impact as it relates to channel strategy.
- Differentiate offerings through a creative blend of tactics – variants, pack sizes, bundles, and services – to drive differentiation and competitive advantage and limit the cycles of price reduction that instant cross-channel comparisons are causing.
Digital enables constant consumer access to product information and pricing can no longer be looked at in silos across channels. Pricing strategies need to be tight across all channels and the downstream impacts of those strategies understood.
Digital Sales and Marketing Strategies:
Get Started with the Right Foundation
- It’s never too early to start building a cross-channel commerce strategy and implement baseline capabilities. The consolidation of physical and digital commerce is real, and as an organization you need to evolve. eCommerce initiatives are in flight across the industry, is your strategy to compete clear? Has your transformation started?
- Product information management is critical to have a reliable cross-channel experience, you need to have accurate and well-managed data. With all the various teams developing and managing data across both digital and physical channels, a strategy and process to manage universal information is required.
- The digital world has added complexities to existing, new, and retired capabilities. To have a real chance at making digital transformation successful in your organization, a sales and marketing organizational capabilities review is key. Capitalize on your strength, understand your gaps, and accelerate your digital transformation.
In addition to the importance of your commerce strategy, product information management and organizational capabilities are two areas that are often overlooked. Getting started with the right foundation will progress your organization’s digital transformation forward and start to establish the new-normal.
Co-author and contributions by Swathi Bhaskaran.
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