How to Build a Winning CPG Marketing Strategy in 2026
Marketing has always been about reaching the right people at the right time with the right messaging. But when your audience constantly toggles between digital interactions and physical spaces, how do you effectively market the right, unified messaging story throughout?
Customer behavior is driving the next evolution of retail media: bringing digital precision into physical environments, and Terraboost bridges the gap between digital and physical marketing. With 120,000+ wellness kiosks across grocery, pharmacy, and health club partners, we have the expertise and data to help brands adapt their creative by moment, message, and mission.
We’ve uncovered the data to help you build a winning CPG strategy for 2026 and beyond. This article will explore how consumer goods brands can build an effective marketing and sales strategy to win in today’s evolving retail environment.
The evolving landscape of CPG marketing
In the past, end-of-funnel CPG marketing came down to traditional shelf wars. Brands with better shelf placement or attractive packaging would sell more products. While this will continue to play a role in consumers’ buying decisions, retail marketing in both digital and physical spaces is expected to become an even more important catalyst for brand recognition and buyer perceptions.
Retail media is one of the fastest-growing advertising channels worldwide. It reaches customers at or near their physical point of purchase, right when they’re deciding between two competing brands or products. In-store advertising reaches audiences that are 70% larger (on average) than digital retail audiences. It has evolved into a preferred choice for consumers, offering CPG brands a two- to three-times greater reach than an online retail strategy alone.
For CPGs, partnering with retail media networks (RMNs) offers a unique opportunity to access consumer data to better understand shopper behavior, optimize campaigns, and drive more impactful retail performance.
Learn more about how to master shopper marketing.
The future of this advertising tactic won’t be about boosting impressions. For a CPG ad to be memorable, your retail media brand strategy must integrate targeting with in-store experiences.
Think of it as intent-based market positioning and alignment. Your customers are physically in a place where they intend to make a purchase, such as a grocery store or pharmacy. They’re already in the “buying” mindset, so your retail media ad might be the “reminder” they need to boost conversions of your product at the register.
Success in retail media will require data-driven, contextual, and proximity-based marketing to build a full-funnel marketing strategy with unified storytelling. The goal is to:
- Build awareness of your brand online (through your owned or paid channels)
- Activate brand recognition in-store (through customer visibility near their point of purchase in-store)
- Boost conversions at the register
Key elements of a high-performing CPG marketing strategy
Three key elements will help you plan and design an integrated marketing campaign using retail media for your CPG brand: omnichannel retail integration, data-driven consumer targeting, and retail partnerships and media.
Omnichannel marketing retail integration
Successful CPG brands align their digital campaigns with their customers’ physical path to purchase (in-store marketing). A shopper sees your brand on social media or on their favorite website, then sees your brand again at the entrance to their trusted local grocery store. This lift in brand recognition puts your product and brand one step ahead of the competition, putting you top-of-mind while they’re in the buying mindset.
Understand your customer’s journey from discovery to purchase, and consider that they will be exposed to your brand through digital mediums and physical in-store advertising. Not only should your advertising be on brand across channels, but it should tell a unified story that the buyer can recognize, follow, and instantly connect to your brand.
Retail integration at point-of-sale locations boosts top-of-mind awareness for customers who already recognize your brand and products. Blind case studies show that omni-channel integration for beverage, snack, and wellness brands often experiences a 6–18% unit sales lift and strong brand halo effects. You can achieve this kind of brand recognition by combining consistent national creative with targeted local campaigns.
Terraboost enables the omnichannel marketing continuity that CPGs need for retail marketing success. We place large-format, wellness-driven media six inches from eye level at the exact moment intent peaks, around point-of-purchase areas where customers are making buying decisions.
Learn more about CPG marketing with Terraboost.
Data-driven consumer targeting
The growing volume of data that marketers have access to is transforming how they target customers in their campaigns. This data comes from many places, including:
First-party data (data you own)
- Your website analytics
- Retail analytics
- Email engagement
- Social media engagement
- CRM data
- Loyalty program data
- Customer surveys and forms
Second-party data (your partner’s first-party data)
- Retail media networks
- Co-branded campaign partners
- Other data-sharing agreements
Third-party data (aggregated other data)
- Market research firms
- Audience segments from ad platforms
- Geolocation data
- Benchmarking data
- AI tools aggregating other data sources
This detailed data adds new levels of precision to marketing and a greater understanding of your customer. With data-informed marketing and sales strategies, you can create a customer journey that better aligns with your customers’ expectations and buying behaviors.
Terraboost uses robust datasets to help CPGs target customers by variables like banner, ZIP code, or income tier, and then personalize messaging using customer data they already have. Other variables, such as time of day (dayparting), can further enhance advertiser relevance and drive higher sales.
For example, in the morning, your product promotion ad can feature your morning facial moisturizer, but it can dynamically switch to your nighttime formula at the end of the day. This maximizes relevance and has been shown to boost ROI for product-based brands.
As an added bonus, these greater, dynamic capabilities deliver more cost-efficient CPMs, often far lower than traditional Out of Home (OOH) or RMN displays alone. Terraboost’s average CPM is $2.49, far lower than radio ($6.75), digital video ($10.24), Network TV ($19), or newspapers ($46.83).
Learn how it’s possible by exploring Terraboost’s CPG marketing solutions.
Retail partnerships and retail media
Your future success will depend on merging your data, marketing your creative and storytelling, and your physical presence. Forming retail partnerships and networks (such as Walmart Connect and Target Roundel) will help you increase your reach and leverage the retail brand’s loyalty to your advantage.
For example, a consumer sees your mayonnaise ad on a wellness kiosk at Kroger. You automatically harness some of the trust the customer has in the Kroger brand, and that trust is passed to your brand. This happens regardless of whether they’ve seen your brand before. Ideally, though, if they’ve already been exposed to your brand through another channel or medium, the brand lift is even greater, leading to higher POS conversions.
Terraboost complements RMNs by providing tangible, verified customer engagement (including photo documentation, intercept sentiment, and sales lift data from matched markets). It brings digital sophistication into the store itself, turning high-traffic retail locations into performance media that drives proven (and verified) ROI.
Check out some of Terraboost’s trusted retail partners.
CPG retail marketing tactics that drive sales
Eighty-five percent of CPG purchases happen in-store. But not every CPG advertising and brand strategy will drive the ROI and sales you want. Your choice of tactics (in addition to the three marketing strategies above) will help you create a campaign that is poised for success.
Here are three retail marketing tactics we’ve used with our top clients to achieve their sales goals through wellness kiosk advertising:
In-store visibility and customer engagement
What makes a shopper respond to an ad? We’ve learned that combining relevancy and utility drives greater shopper engagement. This might mean placing shelf displays next to your products or utilizing the prime real estate around store end caps to increase visibility.
Engaging a customer’s tactile senses can also boost customer engagement. For example, wellness kiosks and wellness wipe stations meet customers at their most receptive moment: when their attention is heightened and they are preparing to shop. The physical act of reaching for wellness wipes creates a tactile connection that drives memory (of your brand) and action. Our research shows that eight in ten engage with this media.
Experiential and sampling programs
Creating a sensory experience is a great way to bring your brand into the real world, something digital experiences can’t do. It creates memorable and emotional moments that drive connection to your brand. Sensory product-promotion experiences may include motion creative (video), personalized content, QR codes to scan, or opportunities to taste-test or sample your product.
The experience you give your customers amplifies your exposure. For example, one OTC wellness brand aligned regional creative and local health messaging to offer a customer coupon. Their campaign increased brand favorability by 11%.
Experiential activations build authentic brand trust and strengthen their retailer relationship. It’s a win for you, the retailer, and the customer.
Digital-to-physical conversions
Have you tried aligning your digital media for in-store visibility? By carrying your creative and marketing storytelling from digital media into in-store activations, you sustain brand recognition and boost visibility. There are many ways to bridge the digital and physical world to encourage physical purchases, including:
- Social ads
- QR codes
- CTV
- Mobile, email, or SMS marketing
- Geotargeted ad campaigns
- Click-and-collect campaigns
- Digital loyalty and reward programs
- Retail media network campaigns
- Wellness kiosks with digital smart displays
For example, a popular CPG snack company aligned Terraboost digital placements with retailer CTV retargeting to achieve an 18% increase in household penetration (versus control markets).
When done on-brand, this bridge between your digital and physical brand placements closes the loop between online awareness and in-store action for your customers.
Measuring success: KPIs for CPG marketing strategies
Traditional marketing metrics may be difficult to measure when you bridge the digital and physical advertising. Even when it can be tracked (such as with QR codes), traditional metrics may not provide you with the true ROI and outcome of your campaign.
The modern KPI mix includes metrics such as:
- Incremental sales lift – Extra sales generated by your campaign, compared to similar markets that didn’t run the campaign.
- iROAS (incremental Return on Ad Spend) – Additional revenue earned per dollar spent, compared to revenue if the campaign didn’t happen.
- Brand recall & favorability (via intercepts): How people remember and feel about your brand directly after purchase.
- Engagement: How people interact with your campaign, such as scanning QR codes, wipes pulled, and impressions served.
- Cost per acquisition: How much you spent to acquire each customer in your campaign (calculated by dividing your campaign spend by the number of attributable acquisitions).
Terraboost verifies CPG brands’ campaign success through photo audits, intercept surveys, and retailer POS analysis. Across several blind studies, Terraboost has driven consistent sales lift and brand halo across many categories. Every campaign is accountable from impression to impact across the campaign’s digital and physical media. We can link physical kiosk impressions to digital analytics using geolocation and campaign codes.
The future of CPG marketing: predictive, personalized, purpose-driven
Privacy concerns will limit the data CPG brands and retailers can access. This means the future will see greater reliance on the power of physical proximity (combined with first- and second-party data available digitally). We expect that the future of CPG marketing will include more AI-informed dayparting, real-time and geolocation context, and purpose-driven messaging to fuel the shopper’s journey.
CPG marketers can no longer separate digital marketing and brand strategy from in-store reality. The real opportunity lies where audience precision meets physical engagement. It’s time to think of the store not as a shelf, but as a dynamic, data-driven media channel that converts every entrance into a brand moment.
Terraboost’s evolving platform supports this vision to create dynamic digital campaigns at scale, tied to verified in-store outcomes. As hybrid retail media takes hold, the brands that win will be those that balance national voice with local precision and measurable empathy.
We’ve helped national brands deliver cost-efficient CPMs, measurable lift, and nationwide reach with our digital wellness kiosks.
Want to learn how it can work for your CPG brand? Contact us today to begin planning your next retail campaign with Terraboost.
FAQs about CPG marketing strategies
What is CPG in marketing?
CPG marketing focuses on strategies to drive product and brand awareness and encourage increased physical point-of-sale conversions for consumer products. Modern marketing strategies for CPG brands will combine digital and physical campaigns.
What is the 3-3-3 rule in marketing?
In marketing, the 3-3-3 rule stands for what your messaging should include: 3 key points in 3 sentences or less and repeated 3 times across channels. This helps boost brand awareness and recognition without being overwhelming.
What are the 4 P’s of CPG?
The 4 Ps of CPG refer to Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. It helps you decide what to sell, your price point, where to sell it, and how to promote it.
