Data Enrichment in 2024: what your CPG brand should be doing to stay competitive

The CPG space is more competitive than ever. In 2024 you’ll see more DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands pop up, you’ll see bigger names acquiring smaller DTCs, you’ll see private labels come out with their own lines of CPG products, and you’ll see more and more brands like Frito-Lay trying to sell to their customers directly online. 

So what’s your brand's plan to stay competitive in 2024, in the midst of all of this? If it doesn’t involve any of the tactics mentioned above, then we hope your answer is data enrichment. 

Data enrichment is the process of adding new information (data points) to what you know about your customers. The more data points you add, the more complete your picture of your customer is. These data points could include customers' shopping behaviour, their core interests, their beliefs and values, or their engagement on social. 

When you have a complete picture of your audience or a 360-degree view, you can compete with DTCs, you can harness the power of personalization, and can create more loyal customers.  

We believe data enrichment is one of the top things that will help CPGs generate more sales, and remain competitive in 2024. There are many ways in which your brand should be using data enrichment this year, but for the sake of this blog, we’ve narrowed it down to our top 5, take a look: 

1. Holistic customer view 

First and foremost, this is the top benefit of data enrichment. There are so many brands out there that only have a one-sided view of their customers, specifically CPG brands that only sell through retail channels and don’t have access to all the rich consumer insights that some DTC brands have. 

One example of this is Burt’s Bees, the natural personal care brand. They always knew they had a customer segment of eco-conscious women who loved their chemical-free products, but they were unaware or didn’t have access to the data that would tell them that this segment was also made up of new moms, who were searching for the same chemical-free products for their babies. 

This enrichment of consumer data led them to create their own line of chemical-free baby products, for those women. 

When you can build out a 360-degree view of your customer, everything changes. You can treat them like DTCs, with incredible personalization, and you can get to the core of their top interests, and discover what makes them tick - all information that is needed to win them over and secure them as loyal customers. 

Your current customer view might look like a list of emails, enriched with shopping habits. What if you could take that data and enrich it even further, to understand what that audience values most? 

Social intelligence tools like Audiense and SOPRISM can do just that, by enriching your uploaded list of emails with interest and behaviour data, giving you that full view of who your customer is. This holistic, and enriched view of your customer then trickles down into the next 4 benefits we’re going to talk about.

2. Timely customer offers 

One key benefit of data enrichment is the surface of insights on your audience’s current behaviors. Social intelligence can unearth new behaviors and life events, such as your audience becoming new parents, trying out new diets, and or adopting a new hobby. 

It’s your job to act on those insights, and send them timely offers for your products that are related to their new “keto diet” for example.

Data enrichment should not be something you do once, it’s something that has to be done regularly so you can pick up on trends or changes in your customer's preferences. Once you’ve identified what those are, you can make your offers relatable and high-value, to the point where consumers will choose you over other brands because you approached them first, in a timely and related manner. 

3. New product opportunities 

Data enrichment can serve your entire CPG workforce, including the product development team. The ability to assess consumer trends is crucial for them. Data enrichment, more importantly, can identify the trends that your audience shows the highest affinity for - so you know which trends to jump on and which ones don’t make sense given your audience’s level of interest in them. 

Take for example L’Oreal, by enriching their data with Social Intelligence they can discover that their audience has an interest in the faux freckles makeup trend, and use that insight to justify the creation of their very own faux freckle product. 

You can also gain insights that inspire entire lines of products - maybe your audience of heavy drinkers is now turning to more non-alcoholic beverages. You can then choose to create your own line of non-alcoholic drinks. This type of audience enrichment allows your brand to grow and change, just as your audience does. 

4. Personalize your campaigns 

Unlike direct-to-consumer brands, CPGs usually don’t have the opportunity to tailor each campaign to each customer, because they don’t have access to the first-party data needed. But with audience enrichment, they do! When uploading an audience list, whether that’s website data, social handles, emails etc, social intelligence tools can fill in the blanks, and then segment these audiences. This allows CPGs to tailor each campaign to a different audience segment. You could get even more granular and segment your Gen Z audiences down even further, for example, to then pass the insights to your campaign design teams, who can tailor the ads to each different Gen Z segment. 

This is just one example of how personalization can be fostered by audience enrichment. In fact, 71% of consumers expect personalization from brands, and ads are no exception. One single product should be advertised and spoken about in a way that is tailored to each of your audience segments. 

5. Win net-new customers with look-alikes

A large part of staying competitive in the CPG market involves growing your reach. The more data you have on your current customers, the better equipped you are to go after similar audiences and make them your customers too. 

When you can tack on geographic, interest, affinity, and behavioural data to your overall view of your customers, you can then use look-alike modelling to find more like them. 

So let’s say you had an email list of 100 thousand customers, and you then inputted that into a Social Intelligence tool. That tool would not only enrich that data but could find similar social audiences out there that match the top interest and behaviour data that defines your current audience. 

Now you might have a list of a million people, who all look like your original list of 100 thousand. These people can be targeted and will likely become customers, as they display the same behaviours as your core audience does. 

In 2024 you will see an even stronger fight for consumer wallet share, with more DTC brands entering the space, and bigger-named brands buying them up. The leading way to compete is to enrich your customer data, with insights that lead to personalization, timely customer offers, new product opportunities, and net new customers. 

Sign up for Audiense and SOPRISM to enrich your consumer data today!