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Today’s buyers are online. If you want to grab their attention, your company needs to be there, too.
It’s time for packaging companies to shift their approach to marketing. You can’t just rely on traditional, offline marketing techniques anymore—or your company will fall behind the competition. Instead, you must align the company’s business model with updated digital marketing objectives and goals.
In this digital era, the success of your packaging company relies on implementing a strategic, data-driven marketing plan.
An Overview of Digital Marketing Trends in the Packaging Industry
The packaging industry is changing—and so are the buying habits of your customers. For your packaging company to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive market, your approach to marketing needs to evolve as well.
Digital marketing trends in the packaging industry offer a glimpse into the best ways to reach new buyers, engage with prospective customers, and grow your business. Pay attention to these trends as you transform your packaging company’s marketing strategy.
Trend #1: Shift Toward Online Purchasing Behavior
Customer behavior and purchasing habits have turned toward e-commerce and online shopping. Buyers are more likely than ever to prefer shopping through digital channels, and they expect companies to have an online presence.
With this shift in online purchasing behavior, packaging companies must have accessible, well-organized websites and focus on connecting virtually with their target audience.
Trend #2: Use of AI Technology to Create Personalized Customer Experiences
Conversational growth approaches to marketing, like the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other cognitive technologies, has transformed the way packaging companies communicate with customers. With the help of AI, companies automate marketing messages, standardize responses to common customer questions, integrate live chat software into their websites, and more. Packaging companies need to incorporate this technology into their own marketing campaigns in order to keep up with the competition.
Trend #3: Demand for Transparency
Customers want transparency from every brand. Packaging companies are meeting this demand by providing sneak peeks into products, behind-the-scenes content, and product demonstrations—anything to attract customers who value transparency.
The good news? Educating your target audience about your products and services not only builds trust but also encourages brand loyalty. In the long run, your packaging company can benefit from being transparent and authentic.
Trend #4: Increased Popularity of Customizable Packaging Options
More and more customers are demanding customized and personalized packaging for branding purposes. Successful packaging companies are taking advantage of this trend by highlighting their personalized packaging solutions and creating content around this topic. Then, buyers searching for customizable packaging options are more likely to find their brand.
Trend #5: Focus on Sustainability & Eco-Friendly Solutions
Customers and brands alike are more focused on sustainability and eco-friendly packaging solutions than ever before. It’s now a priority for packaging companies to provide sustainable packaging solutions and to market those options to customers.
Buyers want to work with companies that give something back to their communities. Packaging companies aware of this trend know they can’t miss out on this emerging market.
Why Packaging Companies Need to Implement a Digital Marketing Strategy
There’s no question about it: Packaging companies need to implement a digital marketing strategy in order to stay competitive, increase revenue, target customers, and create predictable growth.
Why? Because a digital marketing allows you to increase awareness of your brand, identify and engage with your target audience, and measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
Let’s break it down.
Increase Brand Awareness
Digital marketing campaigns help you reach new customers and increase awareness of your brand. There are several pieces to this puzzle: For example, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics make it easy for interested buyers to find your website, and social media platforms keep your company’s name at the forefront of your audience’s minds. These digital marketing strategies (and more) help ensure potential customers are familiar with your business, brand, and solutions.
Identify & Engage with Target Audience
You need to identify and learn about your target audience before you can effectively build a relationship with them.
Through careful research and the use of buyer personas, you can identify segments of your audience and determine the best way to engage with different groups of potential customers. Based on this data, you can tailor your marketing approach and make it so customers want to connect with you.
Measure Success
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that you can use a variety of analysis tools and data software to discover whether your marketing campaigns are successful. It’s easy to track and analyze key metrics—and use those results to inform your overall digital marketing plan.
The 7 Best Digital Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Packaging Business
Digital marketing can be broken down into several different strategies, all with the same goals: to reach your target audience, to convert visitors into qualified leads, and to engage with customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
These strategies are essential to any successful digital marketing plan. If you want to promote your packaging business, you need to take advantage of what they have to offer.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website content to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your website ranks on search engines like Google, the more people will visit your website. This traffic is organic, free, and natural—meaning it is an invaluable part of growing your business.
One of the most common SEO methods is to research relevant keywords and incorporate them into your content. These keywords tell Google and other search engines which websites should rank for certain content, helping you reach people searching for those keyword phrases.
2. Pay-per-Click (PPC) Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of digital marketing where companies pay a fee for their website to appear at the top of SERPs, above organically ranked pages. When people click on the advertisement, the company pays a fee, and the user is taken directly to the company website. It’s a cost-effective marketing strategy—you only pay when people click on your PPC ads.
PPC ads have advanced targeting options and are an excellent way to drive qualified leads to your website.
3. Social Media Marketing
Your potential customers are on social media; you should be, too.
Social media marketing enables your packaging company to develop long-lasting relationships with buyers and engage with potential customers. You can use social media to interact with followers as well as share high-value content that instantly attracts customers.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide you with endless opportunities to leverage the power of social media marketing.
4. Content Marketing
The goal of content marketing is to engage with potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Content can take a variety of forms, from blogs and videos to white papers and ebooks. No matter the format, your content should be compelling, attractive, and helpful so customers are more likely to visit your website and connect with your company.
Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. While content marketing gives visitors something to engage with on your website, SEO makes it easier for people to find your content.
5. Email Campaigns
If you don’t take advantage of the power of email campaigns, your company is missing out on a significant source of revenue.
Email is an incredibly effective marketing strategy, and it regularly generates a high return on investment (ROI)—especially when it’s used as a form of remarketing. When people share their email addresses with your company, they demonstrate enthusiasm about your products and services. That means email marketing targets potential and current customers who have already visited your website, so it’s more likely they will be interested in what you have to offer.
6. Video Marketing
The popularity of video has skyrocketed in recent years, and packaging companies need to invest in this growing content area if they want to increase brand awareness.
Video content takes many forms:
- Product demos
- Instructional videos
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Customer testimonials and reviews
- How-to videos
- Interviews
- Educational videos
While long-form videos tend to rank higher in search engines, short-form video content dominates social media. Either way, video marketing is a required part of any successful digital marketing plan.
7. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a popular strategy that aims to automate customer engagement, integrate software platforms, streamline repetitive marketing tasks, and keep track of all digital marketing efforts. These marketing automation tools help you organize and manage a wide variety of data and workflows.
Automation is one of the best ways to make your marketing team more efficient because it frees up their time to focus on creating content, meeting goals, and converting visitors into qualified leads.
Digital Marketing for Packaging Companies: A Framework for Success
Digital marketing strategies like SEO, PPC, social media, and video marketing are effective, but they aren’t enough on their own to sustain and grow your business. Instead, your packaging company must focus on reaching new buyers and keeping existing customers.
At OneIMS, we have created a framework to help companies promote consistent, predictable growth. By using our growth formula framework as the basis of your marketing approach, you will develop a plan that combines all the best digital marketing strategies and takes the guesswork out of growing your business.
Acquire New Business
To acquire new business, your packaging company needs to create brand awareness as well as generate and capture demand.
Reaching and educating potential buyers in your target audience about their problem, your solution, and your company means that when they’re ready to make a purchase, they are aware of and will be more likely to engage with your brand. Establish your company as the best option to address their pain point—in other words, generate demand for your products and services.
By reaching the right customers in the right place and at the right time, you will successfully acquire new business.
Retain Existing Business
To retain existing business, your packaging company needs to manage and nurture both current customers and qualified leads.
Your goal is to turn buyers into loyal, lifelong customers who will act as ambassadors for your brand. But first, you have to build relationships with active customers and create an exceptional customer experience. Nurture existing business through customized, multi-channel campaigns that provide valuable, relevant content as well as opportunities for future engagement.
These delighted customers will spread the word of your company and stay loyal to your business.
An Example Marketing Plan for Packaging Companies
Creating an effective digital marketing plan for your packaging company is a daunting task. You have to consider a variety of factors, channels, tools, and data—all at the same time. It’s easy to focus on one aspect of marketing and forget about the others or get lost in the numbers. That’s why we’ve created a digital marketing plan you can use as a jumping off point.
Our example marketing plan is based on our proven growth formula framework and includes the many different marketing strategies every packaging company should take advantage of. Get inspiration from this example or make it your own.
Establish Objectives
What are the objectives of your digital marketing plan? Consider these goals:
- Increasing organic website traffic by %
- % of website visitors who convert
- Number of email subscribers
- Amount of marketing-contributed sales
- Number of followers on social media channels
Depending on your company’s unique marketing objectives, establish goals you want to reach as well as a specific time frame in which to achieve them. These objectives will guide your digital marketing strategy.
Create Assets
Your company should dedicate resources to creating and frequently sharing a variety of assets. These assets can take several formats:
- Podcast episodes
- Webinars
- Blogs
- Videos
- Emails
- Landing pages
- Pillar pages
- Social media content
When it comes to asset creation, the goal is to nurture leads and turn them into prospects by creating valuable, engaging content. Fortunately, you can repurpose content across these asset types to make content production and distribution more manageable.
Execute Marketing Campaign
Now it’s time to execute the marketing campaign. At this stage, the goals are to nurture leads that convert and retarget website visitors that don’t convert. Consider promoting YouTube videos, optimizing and refreshing your packaging company’s website, leading website visitors to a Get Started or landing page, and using Google Search Ads to retarget visitors.
Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
As you implement your new digital marketing plan, it’s important to also track key performance indicators (KPIs). Common digital marketing KPIs include the following:
- Total website traffic (by source and by trend)
- Number of sales qualified leads
- Weekly email newsletter metrics (open/click rates)
- Weekly blog metrics
- Weekly social media metrics
- Keyword progress
- Search engine ranking
These metrics make it easy to see what parts of your strategy are working well and which areas could be improved.
Conclusion
For your packaging company to stay competitive, reach new customers, and increase revenue, you need to implement a data-driven, strategic digital marketing plan.
Need a hand developing a marketing strategy that plays to your strengths and creates opportunities for growth? That’s where we come in.
OneIMS is a full-service marketing agency, and we are here to help your packaging company succeed. Our team of experts works with companies in a variety of industries to develop innovative marketing solutions that produce measurable and sustainable results. From content marketing services to SEO and everything in-between, we have the strategies, tools, and solutions you need to connect with clients and reach your marketing goals.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
When you’re ready to take the next step in reaching new buyers, keeping existing customers, and growing your business, schedule a consultation with us. We’ve got you covered.
