Packaging has become one of the most important ways to promote your product in today’s market. Although various marketing tactics have developed to influence consumer behavior, the packaging is still a significant factor to consider.
Before moving into marketing techniques, let us throw some light on the importance of packaging itself. It acts as a great promotional tool to make your brand popular among a group of masses. The packaging of the product makes the customers realize the value of your company.
To boost the productivity of your packaging business, various factors like product protection, its branding efforts and the impact of packaging on the environment play an important role. You have to also make the following considerations before studying the digital marketing tips and techniques to increase the productivity of your packaging business:
Is your Product’s Packaging a Revenue Driver?
It is true that you can’t develop a packaging without incurring a cost. You have to make an investment to create effective packaging. But at the same time, you can undergo some measures which offset your cost. This ensures that the packaging of your product is a revenue driver.
Your packaging has many capabilities to create a meaningful connection with the buyers. If designed perfectly, it can create great benefits which go beyond your imagination. Although there are numerous factors which affect consumer purchase decision, the importance of packaging can never be denied. By making a useful investment in product packaging you can build a long-term relationship with the customers. Moreover, the packaging is the best way to engage the customers towards your brand.
Is your Packaging Processes Streamlined?
Through the clever use of packaging, you can improve the productivity and efficiency of your packaging business. All you have to do is to streamline your processes. For this, it is necessary to understand what your packaging process is?
Take a deep round of your packaging operations. Try to identify productivity issues in your warehouse and distribution center. If you have been following manual picking and packing operation from years, it might lead to such inefficiencies. By switching to automated processes, you can increase your productivity and output. Time is money, so every second is valuable.
By using packaging machinery like conveyor, palletizer, case erector, and semi-automatic stretch wrapper you not only increase your efficiency but also reduce your cost by eliminating damage and waste.
Whether it is packing time, storage requirement or reusability of space every activity has a direct impact on productivity and cost of business. Although there are various other aspects which can determine the efficiency gains and the largest opportunity lies in your packaging process itself. If you are involved in a number of processes, they should be streamlined in a way to achieve maximum efficiency.
You should handle your orders, deliveries, and other fulfillment operations side by side. Improve and reduce the way you store your packaging supplies and retrieve your stock. By streamlining all of your business processes, you can improve productivity and efficiency to a considerable level. This minimizes the packing time, reduce labor cost, increase output and overall productivity.
Ways to Improve Packaging Efficiency for Your Business
There are multiple ways to improve the packaging efficiency of your business. Most of them are related to the product itself or its packaging process. Here we are going to discuss many of them:
- Product Protection:
Protecting the product is the most important aspect of packaging. If the product is delivered in a damaged condition to the customers, it not only destroys your brand image but creates a number of troubles for you. Customers definitely demand to get it repaired, replaced or compensate in any way to overcome their loss.
- Decrease Business Packaging Cost:
The cost of packaging is a significant factor to consider when it comes to increasing your business efficiency. If a business is incurring the huge cost and less revenue, it can’t achieve efficiency. For this purpose, the manufacturers have to find out various ways to reduce their overall business cost. The cost of packaging itself can be an issue of concern. If the processes are manual, this increases the time and decreases efficiency. Investing to automate the processes is a one-time expense. It allows you to reap unlimited benefits for a lifetime. Another good example to explain it is the case of a company which uses multiple sacks for the storage of large loads. It ends up in costing you 30% more than using a single large bulk bag. in order to bag 1000 kg load, you can use forty sacks of 25kg each costing £12 or you may use a single bulk bag to carry 1000 kg for just £7.50. unlike other sacks, bulk bags are easy to reuse several times. It means you need not to purchase them again and again, reducing the packaging cost a step further.
- Increase Worker Efficiency:
With the advancement in packaging techniques, worker efficiency has also increased. When your production process relies more on machinery, this decreases the number of workers once involved to carry out manual activities. This reduces the time, amount of labor and cost.
- Packaging Effectiveness through Quality:
With the evolution of packaging industry, a number of options have emerged to increase the effectiveness of packaging depending upon customer requirement. the changes in the quality of packaging can create a huge difference in increasing your business efficiency. For example, in the packaging of food and pharmaceuticals, the UK and EU safety standards have upgraded the packaging to sterilized food-grade bags. This increases the packaging efficiency by delivering a high-quality product to the customer. The use of eco-friendly packaging for food is another good way to improve the efficiency of the process. Sometimes the traditional packaging may contain toxic substances which may easily penetrate into the food items. This contaminates the food and proves dangerous for health. By using natural and eco-friendly packaging material for food items, you can retain the quality of the product and improve the packaging efficiency of your business.
- Compliance with Industry Standards:
In the case of the packaging business, it is necessary to comply with the industry standard to create safe packaging. The industries which deal with hazardous substances or chemicals during their production process should avoid these as per UN regulations.
The material should be perfectly safe to use and should not emit flammable gases which may harm any of the product. It’s the reason that the majority of packaging companies have switched to eco-friendly packaging which benefits the product as well as the environment.
- Minimize Waste and Increase Growth Opportunities
Minimizing your waste is the best way to improve your production efficiency. By cutting off the use of raw material you can reduce your cost to a significant level. This increases your growth opportunities. The main way is to switch towards custom boxes packaging. By designing a perfect sized box using box design software for every product, the use of excess material can be avoided. This satisfies the customers and benefits the organization in terms of cost and growth opportunities.
- Build Customer Awareness through Branding:
Packaging provides a good platform to build your brand. Businesses can create more awareness about their brand by creating an attractive packaging design. This not only popularizes your brand but make it stand out among the competitors. It is an effective way to increase the efficiency and productivity of your business.
Successful branding begins with the creation of a unique logo. In our digital age, AI technology simplifies this process, you can generate a logo you love in seconds!
- Manage and Track the Damage rates
It is important to assess the damage risks and other supply chains hazards which may take place during the product’s journey. Special measures should be taken to reduce its effects. Streamlining your warehouse packaging operations with your supply chain activities can reduce the damages by increasing your productivity.
Conveyors are a valuable tool for efficiently moving products at different stages of warehouse distribution, making them an essential part of warehouse supplies. They reduce the chances of accidental drops and damages. Damages affect the efficiency of your production process. By tracking the damage rates, you can easily address packaging, suppliers and logistic issues if they arise.
Marketing Techniques to Increase your Packaging Business Productivity
As we have analyzed the role of packaging, now it’s time to move on to various marketing techniques like email marketing services, SEO, local marketing, and taking the help of print media to increase awareness of your product in the targeted market. Such techniques are adopted by entrepreneurs to increase the productivity of your packaging business. Here we are going to discuss some of the important ones:
1. Make Your Product Relevant to Your Audience
Effective packaging helps the customer in understanding how your product fits into their lives. The time of traditional packaging has gone. Now, the one-size-fits-all approach does not work well. With the new advancements in customization, the manufacturers can create such packaging relevant to the audience.
You can design something which best fits customer requirement. Whether is shape, size, style, and color or user experience; everything can be altered to create something relevant to target customers. Let’s take the example of Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” campaign. It was a great marketing effort to create a product relevant to the audience. Unlimited number of consumers across 70 countries can find their unique names on the bottle of Coke in any of their local stores or get it personalized online.
Now the question arises, why this campaign gained so much attention? The reason is Coke took a product which is the same from unit to unit but transformed it into the one-to-one to create a personalized experience for each consumer. In the United States, it created a 2% rise in the sales of the product at the time of launch. This was a huge result for a brand of such a size. Some of the other ways to make the product relevant to the audience is:
- Support one of the local sports team.
- Support a Nobel cause.
- Relate your product to a celebration or a seasonal activity.
- Promote the values of your brand
Customers never want to be treated the same. The packaging is a good way to ensure that your product aligns their interests and values. It acts as a key differentiator to realize the customer why to choose your product over others.
2. Entertain the Competition
Most of the time it happens, that we are standing in a retail aisle with a number of similar products surrounding us. This confuses the customers which one to pick. Most of them may have a similar appearance, features, and price. No doubt, every one of us wants to purchase the best one. Here comes the true market competition.
Most of the customers pull out their phones and start gathering reviews about the product. Although it might take a few minutes, tracking the product reviews, videos, and other technical specification can save you from the future disappointment of choosing the wrong product.
Thus the shortage of information about some brand acts as a roadblock to hinder the consumer purchase decision. To entertain this competition, companies have implemented the latest marketing technology in their product’s packaging. The use of interactive labels, QR codes, and scannable images facilitates the customers in getting more knowledge about the product just by a single touch of a smartphone. Incorporating digital content in your packaging creates new opportunities to educate and entertain the customers even before purchase.
3. Capitalize on Trends
Every coming year brings a number of new trends across each discipline. These trends can be noticed visually in the marketplace complementing your product. Creating a short-run or a limited-edition packaging is a good way to capitalize on trends. For this purpose, you need to keep an eye on what is trendy in the market and what attracts the customers. This change in your packaging can provide a great aesthetic appeal to the customers fascinating them that they are received with something new. All you have to do is to keep an eye on upcoming trends to raise the customer’s interest. This is also a useful tactic to drive your sales.
4. Deliver the Brand Message in a Simple Way
The way you present your products deliver your brand values. A package which is clear and shows a focused representation of your brand grasps the customer’s attention at first. As the retail shelves are already occupied with a number of products, designed in a different way. A brand which over-crowds its packaging with excessive colors, images and text can never become the center of attention. Delivering your brand message in a simple and elegant way is a useful marketing tactic to increase your productivity. Let the brand speak for itself by using minimalistic design. Never destroy the simplicity of your brand message by bombarding your packaging with excessive labels. In this way, you can make your products more visible and valuable in the market place.
5. Empower your Brand by Digital Print
The main reason why today’s top brands are producing personalized, trendy and iconic packaging is the use of digital print. It has facilitated the printing process for the companies which have not been possible before. Digital print technology takes high-volume orders and extended turn-around time needed by any traditional print method. Digital printing eliminates the need for printing plates. As a result, it super-charges the production timeline and allows the manufacturers to leverage full spectrum colors by making an additional cost.
6. Measuring the Results
Whether you use online marketing or traditional media marketing, measuring the success quantitatively is necessary to determine the productivity of your packaging business. Regardless of what your advertising agency tells you, you need to analyze yourself that if your marketing is on the right track. For this purpose, an analytical approach is needed. Consider a dashboard which can summarize the responses. Whether you have to calculate leads, ad-clicks online and a number of incoming calls to your call center everything can be analyzed on the dashboard. For example, if you want to analyze who visited your packaging website, what they, see or purchased and how often they return. You can get all such information very easily through Google Analytics. It provides an online analysis. You can use this data to make future marketing strategies to gain more productivity and efficiency.
Conclusion
By using these techniques, you can refresh your brand’s look or launch something new to boost up your sales. They increase the productivity of your packaging business and make you achieve long term benefits which have not been possible before.
