Until about six months ago, brands in the grocery space viewed eCommerce as a supporting role — important to the business but didn’t produce enough measurable value for organizational change. It’s a different story now. In the span of eight weeks, eCommerce grew faster than it did in a decade and it’s making a serious dent in brick and mortar revenue.
By the end of the first half of 2020, the industry recorded $7.2 billion in sales, fueled by a record number of first-time online grocery shoppers. Online habits appear to be sticking. Nearly 30% of all U.S. households are now considered monthly active users of online grocery services. And shoppers are not just buying differently, product preferences are shifting too.
For many CPG organizations, adapting to the new demands of digital commerce has been challenging. Language is the biggest barrier. Executives with decades of brick & mortar experience find themselves at a loss when trying to understand the digital jargon and alphabet soup of terms eCommerce teams use every day. Instead of building a bridge to understanding, language is building a Tower of Babel that inhibits decisioning.
So, how can we simplify things for our colleagues and create the shared consciousness we need to grow digital market share? My advice: Channel your inner diva. I don’t mean like Beyonce breaking away from Destiny’s Child. I mean D.I.V.A. — being Discoverable, Informative, Valued and Agile. This helps make eCommerce understandable and actionable.
Be Discoverable. If consumers can’t find your products, they can’t buy them. In store, that simply means being visible on the shelf when consumers browse the aisles. Online it means being highly visible in retailer search results.
We know that getting good placement on the physical store shelf drives more sales. The same is true on the digital shelf. In fact, moving from page 2 to page 1 (organically) can increase sales by 50%, on average, and securing a Top 10 spot can result in a 63% jump in sales, according to data from Profitero. To get there, brands must optimize constantly, adding specific keywords to product descriptions to boost relevancy and nailing all the digital shelf fundamentals (high in-stock rates, plenty of reviews, and top sales performance). With more shopping now on mobile, there’s usually only space for 4-6 products before scrolling. So ranking high in search is even more critical.
Being discoverable – especially on mobile – is more important than ever before.
Be Informative. In store, you can only include as much detail about your products as will fit on the package. But online, there is limitless real estate available to promote your brand. Take advantage of it. This can come in many forms: Adding video to your product page; Bolstering the number of product images you show (Amazon allows 10); Or simply beefing up the quality of your benefit copy.
With potential customers spending more time at home and consuming content online, Anastasia of Beverly Hills’ SVP of Digital and eCommerce recognized a growing appetite among consumers to spend more of their time learning about the brand and products. Her team responded by amping up production of video content and tutorials to offer practical information and application advice. This helped set them apart from competitors at a time when some consumers were pulling back on beauty. Investment in content pays off: Profitero has found that simply adding more images to a product page can boost conversion rates by 90%.
Be Valued. Getting on a shopping list is hard enough. Having your brand listed instead of a generic category is even harder. With the risk of economic downturn, investing in brand building to ensure brand preference can help stave off competitive threats.
What does brand building look like in the new digital world? In the old world, it meant investing in paid advertising. And while that helps, consumers crave more authentic brand experiences. They want to form opinions of your brand based on what other consumers think and say about you. A study from BightLocal found that 91% of consumers between the age of 18 to 34 trust reviews as much as personal recommendations, showing the importance of reviews. It’s also important to build your brand by investing in new top of funnel media options, such as shoppable ads, which are becoming a mainstay of Instagram.
Be Agile. Among countless other things, 2020 has taught us that the only constant is change. Brands that took notice early and incorporated fluidity into their strategies and processes are better positioned to navigate the uncertainty in the months ahead. Agile brands adapt quickly to changes in both consumer behavior and macro issues. A great example is PepsiCo, which recognized supply chain issues early on in the pandemic and quickly launched a Direct-to-Consumer website to ensure consumers who wanted its products could get them.
To be agile, arm your teams with data, so they can sense and react to changes in near real time. More importantly, give them autonomy and freedom to run. Inflexible budgeting processes, matrixed organizational structures and red tape are the enemies of digital agility. So strip them out.
Brands embracing the eCommerce D.I.V.A. framework can steal the show when it comes to online growth, not just in Q4 but as digital retail continues to accelerate in 2021 and beyond. And after all, stealing the show is what being a true diva is all about.
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