1. Integrate plans offline & online: make sure there is a connection and integrated approach between efforts from trade marketing, shopper marketing, category management, marketing, communications, e-commerce and sales. Ultimately, you reach the same consumer with all your efforts. Also make sure that efforts on the store floor connect with the online efforts and reinforce each other.
2. Communication is key: make sure you are not on an island (with your immediate colleagues), talk to other departments and areas of expertise within the company, and involve external parties and partners. Do you work with different parties/agencies? Put them together. Gather as much input, learnings and ideas as possible so you have a good view of the market, the concept/your online plans and competition. Get the net up & inform: is the entire organization aware of your plans? Inform them regularly, include everyone and make them part of it so that everyone knows what the online effort is and you create support and thus ensure better integration and alignment.
3. Test & learn: start small. Base your bets on your strategy but dare to test and learn in it. Nobody has a crystal ball. Just because something didn’t work in the past doesn’t mean it couldn’t work today. Dive into new technologies and opportunities. Set up a small-scale hypothesis and test, set KPIs & targets in advance and see what this test can bring you. When you go for the “real thing” take these initial learnings with you. With such a test you can often also better show internally what the potential is and it is easier to get budget.
4. Set KPIs and targets: I just mentioned it in tip 3 and this is so important. When is a particular effort a success? What do you measure a campaign against? So logical perhaps but I still don’t see it happening in many FMCG and retail companies.
5. Measuring is knowing, missing is guessing. Following up on tip 4. Once KPIs and targets have been determined, make sure that you have set up your measurement properly so that you can allocate your efforts to a campaign. If you really want an overview, set up a dashboard with all your data together, both for your always-on efforts and for your online campaigns and e-commerce data.
6. Keep track of learnings: you have opportunities to do things better every day. Keep learnings internal so that everyone has access to them, can work with them and can more easily take them over.
7. Stay informed and broaden your view: stay abreast of new trends, opportunities and developments while also keeping an eye on competition and foreign examples.
8. Be flexible: the market changes quickly and make sure that your organization is set up for this and that you can change quickly. Of course, part of your plans are prepared in advance, but make sure you have a flexible layer and the ability to adjust your campaigns in response to both good and bad results. Prepare alternative material, or keep room in your budget to make adjustments.
9. Tooling: what tooling do you have within the company and all departments? Are all those licenses necessary or do functionalities overlap? Which tooling makes work easier and/or more transparent? Take a critical look at your tooling and take stock of what other “colleagues”/companies use in terms of tooling and for what reasons.
10. Finally, less meetings, more doing: I see in many large FMCG companies that there is (still) a meeting and mail culture. Take a critical look at the way of working in your organization. Can it be more effective? There are different methods (think agile and scrum methods that are often used directly in new online companies). What fits your company, culture and product?

About Tan

Tanya Köhler is a freelance strategist and online marketing and communications specialist: More than 15 years of experience in online (transformation) on both agency and client side at corporates and start ups and scale ups. We have had the pleasure of using her several times to the full satisfaction of our clients’ online issues.