Planning Your CPG Brand’s Social Media Calendar | Part 3

The 3^rd step in planning an outline for your CPG brand’s social media calendar for the entire year focuses on promos, coupons and giveaways. Remember that the goal is to have everything already thought out so you’ll just need to create your content when you have more details. After you’ve outlined all relevant holidays and events, we can move on to step 3: 

Plan Out Your In-Store and Online Promos, Coupons & Giveaways

Start by Marking Down or Planning Your brand’s In-Store Promos:

• You may already have a good idea of when your in-store promos will take place. Work with your food retailers to promote any ongoing store sales on your social media, and boost to reach your regional consumers. Your retailers will love that you’re driving consumers to their store, and you’ll likely gain a few followers! Don’t forget to tag the retailer in your post!
• This one seems obvious, but if you’re selling your CPG online and you’re having a sale, it only makes sense that you would let your social followers know about it. Letting your audience know about a sale will drive traffic to your site. Now is a great time to plan those dates if you don’t already have them on your calendar!
• Whether you plan to share digital coupons on a regular basis or occasionally, mark down the months that make the most sense to promote those coupons so that you don’t forget when you begin creating content for that month. You may consider linking the coupons to a holiday, event, or ongoing sale.

Then, Fill in Your Social Media Calendar with Contests & Giveaways:

You may have done this when listing out holidays, but if you haven’t, brainstorm different contests and giveaways to drive engagement, social following, loyalty club membership, etc. These can be as small and simple or as extravagant as you like, as long as they are relevant to your brand. In addition, they can be as frequent as every month, quarterly, or even an annual giveaway that you promote for many months!

• Caption contest with coupons as prizes
• Recipe-Sharing contest
• Enter-to-win (collect email addresses) with a prize pack that can be used with your CPG
• Tag a friend for a chance to win coupons
• Follow, like and share to be entered to win free product

Stay tuned for Part 4 of Planning Your CPG Brand’s Social Media Calendar in the next blog!

Finally, If you’d like to learn more about how to optimize your food brand’s marketing plan for retail, we can help! Please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.