Successful brands will always take a data-driven approach to their businesses and try to identify trends informing business decisions. A data-driven approach will leverage CPG data analytics, create continuous improvements, and allow companies to adapt quickly.
Don’t go anywhere because, in this article, we will go through the most important aspects of CPG data analytics and get the most out of your team’s efforts to increase their returns from investments and convert them into marketing and sales.
Let’s dive right in!
Why is CPG data analytics important for your business?
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) data analytics refers to the collection and analysis of important data points that result from sales marketing actions that are taken into account. Focusing on data will help CPG brands (like yours) use the data they are collecting for valuable things such as taking advantage of marketing trends and more.
What are the types of sources of CPG data analytics?
Overall, there are three types of data sources that companies should pay special attention to:
- Observational data: This type of data allows you to receive a complete picture of the opportunities you can gain. Some metrics include competitive activities, promotional compliance, and more.
- Activity data: Activity data includes the number of actions your team takes. This includes account visits, the type of actions they are taking more frequently, and more. Activity data is a picture of the steps your team brings to improve store execution. This type of data will significantly measure the factors impacting sales the most.
- Sales data: Sales data includes how much a product is sold in a certain period of time. This is crucial data and most likely the most meaningful data for you. Thus, it gives you a clear picture of what kind of activities will lead you to higher sales and so on.
CPG retail analytics
If you own a retail business, you can consider using CPG retail analytics as well. There are two types of retail analytics that your business should be collecting:
- Retail Measurement Data (RMD): This information is valuable for manufacturers trying to understand key performance metrics and competitor insights. For example, let’s say a small business that sells online toys wants to perform a competitor analysis; the company can complete a brand ranking report that will allow businesses to develop a go-to-market strategy.
- Panel Data: You can’t use RMD to show you who is purchasing products, but panel data has the power to show you. This data type will give you more information on demographics, product categories, specific markets, and more. Thus, when you get a hold of this type of data, you’ll know which item you should promote to your audience. Furthermore, panel data is segmented into many sections: penetration, buying rates, purchase sizes, and frequencies.
5 Ways businesses can use CPG data analytics
1. CPG data analytics can develop a new set of products and services
Data analytics are an excellent way of helping businesses create new products and services. For instance, this can be done by analyzing how past sales data are performed. This type of data allows you to fully identify sales patterns and how they fluctuated throughout the year. As a result, businesses can make much better decisions when their decisions are informed regarding their product sales. Moreover, this type of information can be used for other purposes as well, such as setting up new marketing campaigns that fulfill consumer demands and more.
Alternatively, you can also consider using surveys, focus groups, and other data gathering methods you can think of. This type of information will help businesses understand customer behavior patterns and their personal preferences.
Moreover, by analyzing customer data, businesses can identify the type of needs that are not being met by their current product or services. Thus, they can use this information to develop new solutions and address customer wants and needs.
So, as you see, CPG business analytics solutions are many to count, which helps you stay ahead of your competition, and trends and develop new products and services.
2. Allows you to avoid delays and data duplications
Data may be stored in different business areas, such as marketing, sales, and other departments. Still, you can use software that directly connects to data sources and allows you to provide insights from the latest data. Thus, it’ll prevent data duplication, delays, and even quality issues associated with the data.
3. Shopper loyalty
Loyalty is something that is a big part of the CPG world. While you might get a bunch of one-time customers, loyal shoppers will be the customers that will boost the revenue of your business. The first way they’ll do so is by constantly buying from you, and the second is by spreading good words about your product and services. Now, let’s not forget that word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools in the world.
When measuring this type of KPI, you want to break down loyal customers from one-time buyers. A popular method of finding loyal shoppers is using RFM analysis But, overall, the whole point of this is that if you understand your audience well enough, you can encourage new customers to become loyal over time.
4. Monitoring social media chats
CPG businesses have to pay special attention to data analytics since it provides unique insights into how customers feel about your business and the product or service you sell. Considering this, social media monitoring is an excellent way to identify issues and take corrective actions.
Data analytics helps you track social media activities in various ways. Thus, you can identify how people interact with your brand on social media by studying their buying and user behavior. This helpful information won’t only help you make better decisions but also improve your marketing strategies over time!
Above all, here are a few ways how data analytics can help you perform social media monitoring:
- You can identify how many mentions your brand has on social media networks. This gives you significant knowledge of your brand’s popularity on social networks.
- You can identify if social media users are saying more positive or negative words regarding your business. After you find this out, you can adjust your marketing strategies accordingly.
- Identify your social media posts’ click rates, engagement rates, and more. Thus, this gives you a clear picture of whether you need to adjust your content or not.
- You can track the number of new likes, followers, and shares you gain over a certain period of time. This helps you identify your social media growth.
- Last but not least, you can determine where most of your sales and leads are coming from. In short, it shows you whether social media marketing is worth it.
According to Henfield, data analytics helps CPG businesses understand their audience, track competitors’ activities on social media channels, and more. So, data analytics can always help you correct your actions whenever you see issues you need to fix.
5. Data analytics can improve marketing strategies
CPG businesses consider it essential to improve their marketing efforts. However, one of the only ways to do this is by using data analytics. Understanding customers’ interactions through a site allow you to make significant changes in conversions and the user experience.
Thus, with data analytics, CPG businesses can identify new opportunities for improving their SEO and enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Therefore, it can improve your SEO rankings, and here are a few other benefits it brings to your table:
- Analyze your site’s traffic to identify which of your site’s pages are the most optimized and most popular. Thus, this helps improve user engagement.
- Use keyword analysis to identify which keywords will increase your rankings organically; this way, it’ll help you focus on those keywords more.
- Moreover, you will be able to analyze demographics, and this data will help you adjust your marketing campaigns based on user behaviors.
- Continuously track how well your marketing campaign is doing, and if you need to adjust anything, you can do so based on the data you have gathered. This way, you continuously monitor your results and improve over time.
Wrapping it all up
That’s about it for this article. These are the top methods you can use CPG data analytics to help improve your business operations. In today’s digital world, if you don’t focus on your customer, they definitely won’t focus on you. For this reason, you should focus on collecting as much data as possible to improve your overall marketing efforts.
At the end of the day, everything will depend on your desire to gather enough data and how you can use it to improve your marketing campaigns. Of course, the more accurate the data, the better it’ll be for your CPG business!
