Since the great majority of CPG purchasing occurs in-store, how important is digital in the path to purchase?

The title of this post is the question that Joel Rubenson asked Catherine Roe, head of CPG for Google. What stumped me was the sheer volume of "interest / passions" related searches, which just goes to indicate the opportunities for the CPG marketers.

Catherine reports that searches on Google.com related to recipes are up 38% in 2011 over 2010. And it’s a huge number. It’s 7.8 billion recipe-related searches on Google.com.

Just to give you a perspective, there are more searches around food and recipes than there is travel, beauty, and luxury. It is absolutely huge. The iPad or her computer or her phone has replaced her cookbook. So, she’s doing that research ahead of time on Google and then going to either a recipe site or a food site or whatever it might be to get the tips, to get the health information, to get the ingredients to get everything she needs. 

Read the interview in parts here

Related articles

• Procter to Rely More on Digital Marketing to Boost Brand Sales.
• Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment?
• CPG website visits boost in-store sales.
• Mobile and Social Steering Future for CPG.
• Do CPGs need to up the ante and invest more in mobile?
• 1 in 1100 CPG Ads are clicked.
• CPG Marketing Trends: Social Media in 2012

Twitter integration into Google search results

Integration of the real time twits into Google search results in my view does three things;

1. gives a new reason for brands to not just be on Twitter but ensure they are monitoring conversation on Twitter, not just of the brand but of the entire eco-system.

2. it brings together the twittering "elite / few" to a searching "majority" and hence cannot be ignored.

3. has an amazing effect on the search engine optimization of any brand / site. In fact majority of 1st page search results seem to be from the social media space, with Twitter leading them all. And it is a lot faster.

Also there is a wonderful way of integrating twitter results specific to your google search into your results for every possible subject. Read here about Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google