How to Leverage Social Media in Your CPG Product Re-launch

Introduction

In today’s market, much of your communication with current and prospective customers will occur through digital formats such as social media. When you’re rebranding a CPG product, social media is key to your CPG product re-launch.

Instead of a well-promoted launch date for a secret new product, today companies use social media in a strategic way to give out hints about the rebrand. Through influencer partnerships and social media posts, they build brand awareness for the rebrand even before it launches. 

Learn how to: 

• Lay the groundwork for success with a well-planned social media strategy 
• Identify the right platforms for your brand 
• Create content that engages your audience 
• Use interaction and influencer partnerships to connect 
• Leverage analytics to measure the impact of your social media strategy on brand awareness

The Importance of a Well-Planned Strategy

A well-planned social media strategy can set your business up for success when you’re 

re-launching a CPG product. CPG products need to tell a unique and engaging story in order to stand out in a market that is full of similar products. By creating buzz on social media and through influencer partnerships, you can tell a story about your brand re-launch. You’ll pique the curiosity of consumers who may have tried your brand in the past and those who resonate with your new brand story. 

A well-planned social media strategy considers: 

• The new personality of your re-launched product, and how you plan to communicate this. 
• Where to find your audience on social media, and how to strategically target those platforms. If each platform has a slightly different audience that enjoys your brand, think about how to modify your message for the parameters of that platform and that audience.
• How to build a buzz about the product before and after the launch through the gradual release of information, influencer partnerships, and consumer engagement. 
• How to build trust in your CPG product re-launch by working with trusted sources such as influencers.

Identifying the Right Platforms for Your Brand

The first part of your social media strategy is finding the right platforms for your brand. As you consider how to build brand awareness, think about: 

• Your audience. What platforms do they use, and how do they use them? What segments of your audience go to each social media platform? 
• Your company’s current presence on that platform. Do you have a following and a track record? Does the platform work with your company’s way of communicating? 
• Your competitors. What presence do they have on that platform? Will it detract from your own? 
• Your brand personality and social media goals. How does each platform synchronize with your brand. 
• Your resources. How much time and money do you have to promote the brand on one or more platforms? How do you want to stretch your resources across those platforms? 

Crafting Compelling Content

You always want to create compelling content for your social media platforms. During a CPG product re-launch, what kinds of content are particularly engaging to consumers? 

Types of content that resonate with audiences during a re-launch include: 

• Content that explains your product. How is it different, and why does that matter? How is your product better or more targeted to a specific audience? For example, your new product might be more accessible to new users, the elderly, or children.
• Emotional connections. Content that connects with existing and new audiences, appealing to their emotions about your product. For instance, a soap could smell similar to the one they had in childhood, but it has a new, eco-friendly formulation and package. 
• Content that brings forth your product’s personality. If your personality is humorous and edgy, communicate through visual and written content that projects this personality.
• Content that reaches out to a new audience that will connect more closely to your re-branded product. 

Engaging the Audience Through Interactive Features

Social media is pervasive in peoples’ lives, and after a while it can become boring. How can your CPG social media strategy help your brand stick out in peoples’ minds? 

Interactive features can include polls, contests, and live videos. By getting people to interact with your brand, you make it more likely that your social media will have a lasting and positive impact on brand awareness. 

The Power of Influencer Partnerships

Collaborating with influencers can amplify your re-launch strategy. Influencers can help you build trust with your audience by acting like a trusted friend for those who uses your product. Influencer partnerships can also bridge the way to new audiences, allowing you to find people who connect well with your new, improved, and reenvisioned product. Influencer partnerships help you build brand loyalty as the opinion of the influencer is important to those in their audience.

Leveraging Real-Time Analytics

It’s not enough to create a product re-launch - you also need to measure how well it goes so that you can modify your campaign and use that information to shape future social media campaigns. 

You can use many metrics to assess the re-launch process and your CPG social media strategy. These include: 

• Impressions and reach. Who is seeing your social media? 
• Engagement. Who is connecting with your social media, and how? 
• Clickthrough rate. How many people are inspired to move on to learn more information about your product? 
• Conversion rate and bounce rate. Once consumers land on your website, what actions do they take? 

Using these and other metrics, you can determine how well your social media re-launch is succeeding and where you could improve. Using these real-time analytics, you can modify your social media plans so that you achieve a higher impact for your efforts.

Measuring the Impact on Brand Awareness

In addition to direct sales of your product, social media promotion also has an impact on general brand awareness. Consumers become more conscious of your product, and they mentally file away information and impressions.

To measure the impact of a CPG social media strategy on brand awareness, you can: 

• Track mentions of your brand on social media, considering what demographics mention it and whether the buzz about your product is positive or negative 
• Look at the number of backlinks from other websites to your product 
• Track searches for your brand name and your re-launched product 
• Examine changes in traffic from people coming to your URL directly 
• Conduct brand awareness surveys to measure brand awareness 

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

When you’re leveraging social media for your CPG product re-launch, you need to consider what platforms are right for you and how you want to use those platforms in a strategic manner, creating compelling content and engaging your audience in an interactive manner. You also need to consider how you’ll work with influencers to further popularize your brand online. Finally, measuring the impact of your social media success is key so that you can take lessons from your current social media campaigns and modify them in the future. 

Are you keen to learn more about CPG marketing? Connect with us at Hangar12. With our CPG resources, we’ll help you become a CPG marketing expert in one click.