How to create a social media marketing strategy for CPG brands: Winning the digital shelf

Key points

• Discovery, evaluation, and purchase decisions now happen across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, making social media a critical driver of both CPG brand preference and sales.
• The strongest strategies unify high-volume publishing, UGC and influencer content, real-time customer care, and social commerce to protect brand trust while driving demand.
• Tracking sentiment, share of voice, and intent-to-buy signals helps CPG teams link social engagement to real commercial outcomes.

For Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands, the shelf has become virtual.

Today, shoppers aren’t just browsing the aisles of brick and mortar stores; they’re heading to TikTok, Instagram Reels, Pinterest, and YouTube to find genuine reviews.

Whether they’re saving a recipe or watching an unboxing video, shoppers are discovering new products via their favorite creators, and scrolling through comments to see what others are saying too.

In this guide, we break down how CPG brands can build a modern social media marketing strategy that fuels discovery, protects brand reputation, and connects engagement to real commercial outcomes.

Why social media is critical for CPG

For decades, CPG brands obsessed over shelf placement, packaging, and in-store promotions. Those same principles still apply, but now the setting is digital.

Social media has become a critical channel for consumer discovery and decision-making. According to Emplifi research, 39% of consumers prefer engaging with brands on social media, and nearly 50% have made a purchase via social media in the last 90 days.

Customers now discover products through content like:

• TikTok recipe videos
• Instagram Reels featuring “what I actually buy” hauls
• YouTube reviews comparing flavors, formats, or value
• Pinterest boards saved for future shopping trips

The CPG conversion journey is non-linear

Click the image to explore an interactive tour of AI-powered listening summaries!

Rather than following a straight line, today’s CPG buyer moves fluidly across platforms, with social influencing multiple touchpoints before purchase. By using a unified platform, brands can distribute content, listen to their audience, and consolidate reviews across channels, making it easier to understand where content is having the most impact.

Building a strategic foundation, beyond brand awareness

Reach and impressions are key metrics for brand awareness. But on their own, they don’t tell you whether your brand is winning or just making noise in the CPG space.

Looking past surface-level metrics can help you understand if your brand is standing out amongst your competitors, and how your audience is truly feeling about your products.

That means tracking:

• Share of Voice (SOV): To see how often your products show up in social conversations compared to competitors across key categories, campaigns, and seasonal moments.
• Brand sentiment: Monitor sentiment in real time during launches, promotions, or recalls to spot quality concerns, packaging issues, or misinformation early, and respond before they escalate.
• Customer satisfaction: Tools like Emplifi’s Voice of Customer offer out-of-the-box surveys to reveal how shoppers actually experience your products — from taste and texture to packaging and value — across the full lifecycle.
• Ratings and reviews: Solutions such as Emplifi’s Ratings & Reviews capture verified product feedback at the point of purchase, helping CPG brands increase conversion by 30%, and surface recurring product insights that inform formulation, packaging, and merchandising decisions.

Emplifi’s competitor benchmarking and AI-powered sentiment analysis can help your team monitor brand health in real time, spot emerging risks early, and understand how campaigns are landing across markets, all from one unified view.

How CPG brands can segment audiences for video marketing strategies

Video is the top medium for social posts right now with 73% of marketers saying short-form video will dominate their content strategy in 2026.

Standing out on the digital shelf means meeting each audience with video content that feels native to how they scroll, search, and decide.

But rather than relying on demographic data that separates your audience simply by age or location, it can be helpful to dig deeper and segment by platform behavior, purchase triggers, and content preferences for a more personalized experience.

For instance:

• Household decision-makers on Facebook and Instagram may be more likely to engage most with practical, utility-led videos like quick recipes or family routines that reinforce repeat purchase, such as this short video from Barilla Pasta:

Health-conscious millennials may respond strongly to lifestyle-driven video on Instagram and Pinterest, where education, ingredients, and everyday wellness moments feel authentic, like this Reel from Alpro:

31% of Gen Z consumers are most likely to purchase when humor is used. They expect to see creators, and culture-first storytelling on TikTok and Snapchat – content that blends into the feed, not ads that interrupt it, like this video from Tony’s Chocolonely.

The biggest challenge comes in managing these videos and audiences at scale. Choosing social media software that can help you manage multiple pieces of content across multiple channels is key.

Emplifi allows CPG teams to publish content simultaneously across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, while keeping analytics unified, so it’s easy to see where you’re having the most impact.

With Emplifi Publisher, you can:

• Publish platform-specific content in two minutes, with custom timing for each channel
• Track sentiment and share of shelf across channels to understand audience behavior
• Maintain brand consistency across multiple product lines with AI copywriting support

Edu-tainment and “how-to” work best for CPG brands on social media

In CPG, edu-tainment and utility beats polish. Consider content like:

• Recipes and “how-to” videos: These show products in real use, answering practical questions like “What can I make with this?” or “How does it actually work?”
• Snack or product taste tests: Taste tests reduce hesitation by surfacing honest reactions, especially in comments, where viewers compare flavors and preferences.
• Unboxings and first impressions: These videos replicate the in-store moment online, helping shoppers understand packaging, product quality, and perceived value.
• Everyday “life hack” content: Utility-led clips position products as part of daily routines, not special occasions, reinforcing repeat purchase behaviour.

For example, this TikTok video, with over 17,000 saves, shows creator Morgan Chomps trying all the Oreo muffins available at Walmart.

Partnering with influencers or User Generated Content (UGC) creators to further your reach can be hugely beneficial, with consumers being 2.4x more likely to make a purchase if they’ve engaged with UGC. 

DMC, creators of the finest needlework materials in the world, used Emplifi to bring UGC and influencer content to life across their website. Customers that interacted with their influencer content were 1.6x more likely to convert. Overall, the team has witnessed a 119% increase in AOV (average order value) and a 105% increase in conversions with Emplifi.

Social media community and care for CPG brands: Your 24/7 focus group

Reputation management is non-negotiable

For CPG brands, social media can act as a public feedback loop. Product quality complaints, packaging issues, or safety concerns can surface in comments and DMs at any time, and a single unresolved post can escalate quickly across platforms.

The top 5% of CPG brands respond to nearly 90% of customer inquiries on platforms like Facebook, highlighting how crucial it is to stay on top of feedback.

With Emplifi’s social customer care software, brands can stay ahead of issues by:

• Detecting negative sentiment spikes as they emerge
• Instantly moving sensitive conversations from public threads into private DMs
• Routing messages to the right team or agent for specialized responses

This ensures customers feel heard quickly, while protecting brand trust at scale.

Crisis prevention through social listening

Reputational risks can build quietly across comments, reviews, and mentions long before they snowball into a bigger crisis.

AI-driven social listening helps CPG teams spot early warning signs, such as:

• Repeated complaints about a specific product
• Confusion around packaging, ingredients, or instructions
• Misinformation or misleading claims gaining traction

By surfacing patterns early, you can act fast to clarify messaging, escalate internally, or adjust communications before a small issue becomes a public crisis.

Driving commerce for CPG brands: From scroll to sale

Platforms like TikTok Shop and Instagram Shopping are collapsing the funnel, making it much easier for consumers to shop as they scroll.

Lean into formats that make buying feel natural, not forced, including:

• Shoppable recipes that link ingredients directly to purchase
• Link-in-bio product collections that mirror how consumers browse in-store
• Retail-linked campaigns such as “Available now at Target” or “Find us at Walmart”

Emplifi’s social commerce tools help brands connect content to conversion seamlessly, turning everyday posts into measurable revenue drivers, without adding friction to the customer journey. Embedding genuine ratings and reviews via Emplifi, for example, can double your conversion rate, and build trust with your customers.

How CPG can support retail partners without competing

Although it may seem that social media has completely replaced brick and mortar shops, it can actually help to amplify them. The strongest CPG strategies use social media to support retail partners and drive demand where products are actually sold.

With the right setup, brands can:

• Drive in-store foot traffic through geo-targeted social campaigns
• Align content with retailer promotions, launches, and seasonal moments
• Measure lift and engagement around key retail activations

Connecting social performance with retail outcomes helps your team to prove the value of social beyond engagement, showing how it influences real-world sales and strengthens partner relationships.

Measurement & AI optimization

CPG-specific KPIs that matter

For CPG brands, success on social media is about understanding why people buy, hesitate, or switch brands. You should track KPIs that reflect real commercial and brand impact, including:

• Intent-to-buy mentions across comments, DMs, and reviews
• Coupon redemptions driven by social, linking engagement to purchase behavior
• Influencer ROI and Earned Media Value (EMV) to identify which partnerships actually convert
• Sentiment shifts during launches, promotions, or recalls, where perception can change quickly

Because Emplifi unifies publishing, engagement, listening, and analytics, your team can monitor these signals in real time, without stitching together data from multiple tools.

Future trends shaping CPG social media strategy

There are a couple of trends on the horizon for CPG social media, including:

• Sustainability transparency: Consumers expect receipts, not empty promises. Social storytelling around sustainable sourcing, packaging, and ethics will become even more vital.

• AI-assisted creative variations: Using AI to create variations of your content can serve different visuals, messages, and formats to different audiences, without multiplying effort.

Final thoughts: Is your brand winning the digital shelf?

For CPG brands, a solid social media strategy must focus on discovery, reputation management, customer insight, and commerce, all at once.

By unifying publishing, analytics, commerce, and care, Emplifi gives CPG leaders the command center they need to:

• Manage a high-volume of content across multiple platforms
• Protect brand trust in real time with pre-approved messaging
• Leverage UGC and influencer content to build trust with their audience.

Take a virtual demo to see how Emplifi could help your CPG brand build a social media presence to rival your competitors.