Benefiting From Multiple Marketing Models, Part 2

This is the second installment of a two-part series about the integrated use of consumer package goods (CPG), transactional and retail store competitive, growth, multichannel and customer segmentation strategies. This post will focus on multichannel and customer segmentation strategies. (Part one focused on competitive and growth strategies.)

Though the examples are B-to-C, many of the following strategies are applicable to B-to-B too.

Multichannel Marketing and Sales
Not to be confused with "omnichannel" strategies, this section is about the integrated use of multiple marketing and sales channels. In terms of marketing channels, looking to enter new direct-to-consumer (DTC) markets for vitamins, nutritional supplements and meal replacements, we tested our meal replacement brand. Competing with other DTC marketers relying on search engine optimization, paid search and "traditional" e-commerce channels, we looked for marketing channels fewer competitors used to integrate with our e-commerce marketing channels.

Using syndicated research on where to locate meal replacement consumers, we identified offline advertising channels competitors weren't using aggressively (specifically radio) that were more cost efficient. This strategy allowed us to reach more consumers more quickly and were more effective for differentiating product.

We drove more traffic to search engines, more visitors sought us out by brand name, and we generated more traffic from lower-cost, higher-converting branded searches.

Specific to sales channels, working on a brand relaunch, we conducted research with past and prospective customers to better understand, rank and quantify purchase motivations, needs, feature preferences, price sensitivity and sales channel preferences. We then fed our findings into a statistical model, modeling most often used by CPG companies.

Modeling the research, we identified important differences between e-commerce and retail store buyers, allowing us to optimize and differentiate our SKU-mix, pricing and merchandise by sales channel, different product offers, pricing and product positioning in retail stores and e-commerce sites.