The 3rd 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.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.