There are so many FMCG brands out there, big, small, niche and well not so niche, but one thing they all have in common is they want consumer attention. Before it was just about who had the biggest billboard or could afford the amount of physical shelf space in the most popular supermarkets, but with the boom of Ecommerce, social media and other wonderful digital playthings, it’s not quite so cut and dry to win over the consumers.
The Moment of Truth.
A tale of two lovers, Shopper and Product. FMCG powerhouse Procter and Gamble introduced this term to describe the beautiful moment a shopper meets a product in store and they fall head over heels and skip into the sunset together, until moment two occurs and the product after providing an amazing if fleeting experience, ultimately can’t satisfy the shopper anymore, and the cycle begins again.
Moment of truth, meet Tinder, Facebook and Instagram, no longer does shopper have to wait until for fate to cross products eyes across a busy supermarket, oh no, shopper can peruse at their own time, viewing multiple products with ease, stalk products across multiple sites that their friends are also on (and in many cases even have already tried the same product or at least one similar) they provide shopper with the gossip, how good was product, did product last long, did product work well with other products if you are into that kind of thing. Finally shopper doesn’t even need to go to a busy supermarket, wandering hopelessly looking for a product that might be the one, she can have the product she met online come straight to their home.
Leaving products who hasn’t ‘put themselves out there’ yet digitally speaking, left on the shelf, waiting.
This is known as the Zero Moment Of Truth or ZMOT.
You see, in the digital age with all the access to information we have, shoppers are now able to research products before they buy them and because of the explosion of the smartphone and social media platforms, they are able to be influenced before they even think they need a product in their life, before finally having said product delivered within 24hours to their home, never needing to even enter a physical store.
How does this relate to winning at digital? Well if you master the ZMOT you will pretty much beat 99.9% of other FMCG brands who couldn’t give a ZMOT.
Here’s 3 simple things you can start doing to be an A* ZMOT’er.
Search, Inspire and Be Part Of the Conversation.
Search
It sounds obvious but if your product can’t be found, then shoppers can’t buy it.
The most obvious place to start is Google, in fact around 46 percent of product searches begin on Google, and as the saying goes if you want to hide a dead body, hide it on page 2 of Google.
This statistic alone makes it pretty clear that if you even want to have your product considered by your customers ahead of your competitors, you need to invest in search optimization.
However, search isn’t just about paying out for ads or SEO to rank on page 1 for google or other search engines, as there is tons of competition out there especially for FMCG products, social media platforms like Tik Tok have seen their hashtag #TikTokFood has been viewed over 43 billion times and Instagram Food is the number 2 most searched category with over 250 million users talking about food.
This presents a huge search opportunity for brands willing to think outside the box, in how they can get their product seen by huge amounts of potential customers, and this brings us to our next win….Inspire.
Inspire
Too many brands feel that simply having an ecommerce website, with a gallery of all their products, then running a few search ads on google or maybe the odd product ad on Instagram for these will be enough.
Google alone has over 3.7 billion searches per day, so you need to do something unique that will make your shoppers stop and interact with your product.
This is where you need to inspire your customers before they have even thought about using your product, and this is where you can get really creative and innovative.
There really isn’t any limits to your creativity when it comes to inspiring your customers at the ZMOT stage, some brands enlist influencers to work on content for social media, others will create interactive elements to their onboarding processes, some will even use technology like VR and AR, but the idea remains the same give yours customers something inspirational and innovative that makes them use the products in real-life scenarios.
However, you don’t need to go mad creating tons of crazy content, it can be as simple as providing customers with recipe ideas, interesting uses for your products ‘hacks’ if you will, or even focusing on stereotypical customer behaviours like summer BBQ ideas. As long as you create interactive, inspirational ideas that involve your product you are already onto a winning strategy.
Be Part Of The Conversation
Finally onto our last big win, be part of the conversation.
Seems easy enough, but so many brands neglect the importance of being part of the conversation or even better, being the conversation.
Big brands like KFC, Lidl, Aldi and Iceland are all amazing at doing this consistently well.
The trick is to watch trends, breaking news or anything that might be a big talking point across social media for your customers and simply join the conversation as your brand.
A great example of this is Chipotle, who not just join the trend they start it, working with influencers and team members alike to start interactive challenges with their customers that ultimately become trends in themselves.
In Short
If I find you first, you’ve inspired me to try something new, and are who all my friends are talking about before anybody else has even had a chance to talk to me, I’m probably going to pick you.
It’s that simple.
