Packaging PR Unboxed

Traditionally, packaging business have been slow to adapt to change from sales driven to marketing focused businesses, with for some, marketing being a more recent addition to the budget line.  With business under pressure, how can your marcomms department still deliver effective brand awareness and drive the sales pipeline on a flatlining or reducing budget?

The recent CMO spend survey from Gartner shows that although business is recovering, marketing budgets have fallen from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021.

Both budgets and resources are strained, so you need to make sure you are getting better value for money than ever before.  The temptation is to stick with what you know and not risk changing agencies in difficult circumstances.  But you also know that you need to support your business and continue to market your way through this maze – cutting back means losing both awareness and brand share.

Three key things:

• Make sure those you work with are not charging you for fancy overheads – you don’t need a global agency to access global expertise.
• Make sure everyone on the team you are outsourcing to knows your sector and can deliver expertise above and beyond that which you can source from your team – you need to add value, not create cost.
• Everything generated from your outsourcing needs to be multi-purposed; all your content needs to be sweated for value to the last pixel.

Once you’ve got those key points, it’s time to re-prioritise. Focus on where your efforts can deliver best value to the business:

• Owned digital is top of the list – you need creative, exciting, visually-led content – for your website, e-shots and newsletter marketing
• Paid digital is next – creative engaging ads where your audience can see you
• Earned media – is still up there as mission critical – editorial to you & me; milk it for all it’s worth
• Shared is next – your social media channels – not forgetting the power of LinkedIn – but remember social is not a vanity project – it too must help drive business
• Further down the list are traditional advertising, sponsorship and events, not surprisingly given the current risks.

There are two key points here – driving brand awareness remains the top priority for marketeers.

If you ease back on this now, don’t be surprised if sales take a dive next year.  Alongside this, use your data to help maximise digital marketing performance.  Analyse, analyse and analyse again.

But this is going to cost a fortune right? Not necessarily, it’s about minimum investment for maximum return.

Find the right people to work with and you will achieve the right balance of investment, multi-purpose content generation and return on investment.  Talk to agencies who both know what they are doing and what best value looks like.  Leapfrog really understands the packaging sector, what works, what is creative and what is great value.  And we will add value to your business.  Give us a call to see how we can help unbox fantastic marketing strategies for your packaging business.