3 Things I've Learnt About FMCG/CPG Social Media Marketing #DigitalSense

I was kindly invited by the WeAreSocial team to speak at their recent FMCG Social Media Summit, alongside Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed and others from Mars, Britvic & Heineken. It was a great opportunity to look back on some of the key things I’ve learnt during my time working in the industry and it focussed me in on three main learnings that I wanted to share here.

Over the last decade I’ve worked in FMCG media from just about every angle, both client & agency side, in dozens of countries around the world, from being a local social & community manager, through regional social leadership, led partnerships with the platforms themselves, and moved into roles which also saw me looking at the full traditional media mix. I’ve worked a lot with Mondelēz’s brands, especially of course Cadbury & Oreo, but in my wider agency role at Carat Global I’ve now also seen some of a much wider range of clients including Beiersdorf, Diageo & Coca Cola. These though are all my personal take outs:

1. It’s Not Magic
If you go to many digital events, or believe everything you read in the press, then social media is presented as a magical new world of marketing which makes everything before it irrelevant. In this new age of social wizardry consumers have complete control over the advertising they see, only buy from companies they have relationships with, and desperately want to engage with brands. Traditional media tools now are just feeble slingshots compared to the powerful dragons of social marketing, and anyone who disagrees is just stuck in the past.

It’s a wonderfully exciting narrative, but pretty far from the truth. If you’re reading this you’re probably quite an active social media user lf but even you (yes even YOU) no doubt buy from dozens of brands with which you have never had a conversation, nor would you ever want one. Furthermore the tools of traditional media (TV, OOH, radio, etc.) remain incredibly impactful and effective tools, and are declining far less than skewed stats would have you believe – they may be old fashioned tanks & planes but they still do the task, and traditional marketing strategies still ultimately work. Of course social & digital channels ARE still powerful dragons and they do allow us to work in interesting new ways, so of course we should be embracing them and maximising them too.

If Facebook/Twitter or the like launched fresh today marketers would fall over themselves to invest in them – Sadly they carry such baggage (engagement, organic reach, fans, apps, conversation, real time, the list goes on…) and have so many third parties interested in maintaining a focus on this baggage that few brands are truly able to maximise them. It’s time to stop thinking about social channels as some niche engagement opportunity and plan meaningful reach video campaigns which span TV & these new online channels, with creative optimised for wherever it’ll be seen. To think about hown you distort investment on these platforms to reach those you are struggling to reach elsewhere, or to reinforce certain messages for those you already have.

It’s pretty simple really, social channels pull in huge audiences which we can reach very efficiently through paid media opportunities with fantastic flexibility and simple tricks like frequency capping. They are rich content canvases where creatives can produce classic images or videos, as well as exploring cinemagraphs, 360 videos and the like, and if you make that content good enough your audience might even help you share it on to more people. Not to mention the fact that you don’t need to reach everyone with the same piece of creative so you can begin to be personalised, targeted & relevant within that. Oh, and in a world where everyone’s spending more time on mobile and (arguably) trying to block traditional ads they’re one of the places where we can best guarantee our marketing will still be seen by real people, in the right moments.

2. Break Free From Algorithms
There’s nothing the marketing media (and those who make money perpetuating the discussion) likes to talk about more than when a social media platform tweaks or introduces an algorithm which controls what content people see. Yet despite all the noise in this area the fundamentals of the discussion and the impact it should have on FMCG marketers still seem to be widely misunderstood. Good news then – you can stop worrying about these algorithms almost entirely, and definitely stop posting ‘turn on notifications’ posts on Instagram.

You probably think Facebook’s algorithm decreases the ‘organic’ free reach of any content posted to your brand’s Facebook page, this is after all a widely held and often repeated industry narrative. It is however not true. What keeps people from seeing your content is the sheer amount of other noise on the platform, and Facebook’s algorithm actually does a better job of surfacing and prioritising brand content than if every single small update from within your network just streamed past. To quote senior engineer Brian Boland: “Given the amount of content in the average News Feed, using a real-time system for content would actually cause Pages’ organic reach to decrease further.”

Instagram’s new algorithm for its part doesn’t hide content at all, it simply reorders it to acknowledge that many people don’t scroll down and view all their updates so they might as well see the best stuff first. The panic that this causes firstly shows that people don’t understand how many people are missing their content in the first place, and then is presumably a wide spread admission that you think your content is rubbish and that no one would willingly want to see it?

So don’t blame the platforms and their algorithms, blame Apple for making it so easy for people to share updates & pictures from their phones, or blame Buzzfeed for creating so much better content that people would rather see. If anything marketers should be asking for more & better algorithms – these are the only things ensuring these platforms stay usable to consumers and thus that you have an audience at all. When Twitter trialled its algorithm it found that people then spent more time on the platform, were thus exposed to more ads within that and thus everyone was better off.

Now that I’ve indulged the debate here’s the even bigger point: IT DOESN’T EVEN MATTER. The whole focus of the algorithm debate is based on a completely false premise, that organic reach to your fans could ever be enough. This isn’t really true in any industry but it couldn’t be further from the truth in FMCG. Sure Oreo has an impressive 42 million likes, but they’ve sold 450 billion of those delicious cookies. Coca Cola has nearly 100 million likes, but their company sells 1.8 billion refreshing drinks every single day. Follower numbers on other platforms are of course even smaller, and the gap even wider. For FMCG brands it’s not a case of fighting to reach 5% or 10% or 20% of their followers, it’s a battle to reach 1000% or 10000%. Luckily Facebook does have 1.5 billion users, Twitter’s full reach is approaching a billion, Google has a number of properties over a billion - the reach is there but you are never going to get it by posting organically however much you try and game the system.

In case you work in FMCG social but have somehow never wondered how your company actually makes money, here’s the skinny: big FMCG brands are big because they have high penetration and they sell to a very large number of buyers, many of them occasionally. Over 50% of FMCG sales (yes the majority) come from very light consumers, and it is ultimately these that are most swayed and influenced by your marketing. Of course heavier & more dedicated consumers do exist, and they do still matter, but they’re arguably the group of people you least need to reach with media given the option. If you don’t have paid media budget to support everything you post on social media then you’re probably both not investing enough and also making far too much content. You wouldn’t make a TV advert, burn it to DVD and leave it lying around, so don’t invest in social content a meaningful audience won’t see. If this whole paragraph confuses/scares you then go and order a copy of Byron Sharp's 'How Brands Grow' before reading on.

3. Fish for the Right Things
Let’s assume you’re now making some pretty impactful content and getting it in front of a meaningfully large audience on social platforms, how can you begin to know if it’s working? Here again one of the perceived advantages of digital marketing can become one of its biggest weaknesses – the widespread availability of data.

Social media marketing creates a huge amount of data in real time, from reach through engagement into intricate details of who saw what, where, when, why, how etc. and of course being diligent marketers we want to pick through this data and use it to optimise and improve our campaigns as much as possible. Makes perfect sense but it’s a dangerous game to go fishing in this pond of data because it turns out some of it can be quite poisonous – worse yet, once you’ve caught one of these bad fish you’ll be able to follow them to keep catching more. Urr, weird analogy I know.

Here’s the thing – active ‘engagement’ (ie how many people liked, commented, replied, favorited, shared, etc.) is a pretty standard metric across the industry. It is however a metric which can be shown to have no correlation what so ever with the ultimate ROI and success of your campaign. Here’s a chart from Facebook which looked at over 100 FMCG campaigns measured right through to purchase:

Far bigger factors than engagement are at play and affecting results (not least amongst them reach). What do these active ‘digital actions’ really tell us then? They tell you how clickable your content it is, and in particular how much it appeals to the small 10% minority of Facebook users who between them generate around 90% of clicks on the platform. A really powerful video advert might transform how people think about your brand and your chances of buying it, but once they’ve watched it they might not feel a need to comment. A cute ‘spot the difference’ guessing game with two cute puppies might get hundreds of comments and likes but chances are no one will remember who posted it, and the silent majority who still won’t click will think your brand is a bit of a desperate idiot.

Here’s the thing – 99% of FMCG sales driven by Facebook (as seen in similar data to the above graph) are from passive consumers who see your activity but never engage with it (similarly fans only represent 1% of sales from big, successful campaigns). Any time you optimise for engagement you optimise for a tiny minority at the risk of alienating a much more important audience. Sound surprising? Let’s not forget ALL your traditional advertising channels work without anyone having to click and actively respond. It’s lucky too, because whilst you might be easily able to reach tens of millions with your campaign it’s typically hard to get more than thousands to engage… and thousands of people don’t move the sales dial for any major FMCG firm.

It’s not that engagement is bad, it’s obviously a positive indicator, can mean consumers are spending more time thinking about your brand, and treated wisely can be a helpful directional indicator. If however you ruthlessly use it as a KPI to optimise your creative the temptation to post ridiculous questions, games and other ‘engagement forcing’ content (which by any rational standard is crap creative) is almost impossible to avoid. If you really want real time results on your content there is increasingly more value to be gleaned from passive engagement metrics (watch times or skip rates of videos, dwell time on newsfeed posts, etc.) signs that you got someone’s attention which don’t rely on them outright telling you that they did.

In reality for all the rich new data we have you sometimes need to be quite old school in how you measure new digital & social channels. Nielsen’s ‘Reach, Resonance & Reaction’ framework is a pretty good place to start. Did I reach enough of the right people, with the right level of frequency, over long enough a period to have a hope of impacting sales? When I reached those people was it having the right effect on them, did it change how they think about my brand, are they more likely to buy it, do they even remember hearing from me? And ultimately is it causing them to act differently, have they gone out and bought my product for the first time, have they tried new variants, are they even buying more often?

Some of this stuff isn’t easy to measure, but if marketing was easy it wouldn’t be fun right? Third party tools & research can increasingly validate reach & frequency across different channels. Online survey based ‘brand lift’ studies are increasingly robust & scalable ways of measuring impact, though traditional research methodologies can also do so if your digital is big enough. Social networks can provide data that feeds right into MMM modelling and ROI research, and there are also now direct opportunities to track the impact on sales using loyalty card data matches and the like. Focussing on any of this usually means stepping back from the ruthless treadmill of engagement.

So there you have it. Three key learnings I’ve personally taken away from my time working in FMCG marketing. You may disagree in which case I’d love to hear & debate your side of the various discussions. Hopefully you might agree in which case do share this post with others, and hopefully we can move the industry onwards together.

I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I am Digital Partner at Carat Global, an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media, though these are my personal thoughts.