Grocery marketing may well be the toughest gig in all of marketing.
Consider the macro factors like unforgiving profit margins and increasingly price-sensitive customers. Compounded by the internal challenges of siloed teams trying to manage a huge array of must-have channels. Everything about this job is hard – from what you’re trying to accomplish to how you’re accomplishing it.
At Opal, we partner with grocery brands like Whole Foods and Target, who face these pressures every day. We’ve seen firsthand how the best grocery marketers turn these impossible constraints into competitive advantages – and how they use Opal to do it.
So what are the make-or-break challenges that keep grocery marketers up at night? We’ve identified 7 that absolutely MUST be solved if you want to thrive in today’s grocery landscape.
7 Must Solve Grocery Marketing Challenges
You’ll probably recognize some, if not all, of these grocery marketing challenges from your daily experience.
1. Under-Resourced Teams – When you’re working in the context of a 2% profit margin, there will be limits. Compared to leaders in profit-rich industries, your teams will likely be smaller, and your ad budgets will face more intense scrutiny. Simply put, every marketing dollar and every hire MUST count. There’s virtually no room for error. You need campaigns that drive traffic AND increase basket size, all while competing against deep-pocketed national chains and nimble local competitors. This is prompting many grocery marketing leaders look for AI tools to maximize content production and in some cases replace costly marketing employees.
2. Loyalty Program Fatigue – Speaking of working overtime, your loyalty program is facing an uphill battle. Consumers now belong to an average of 18 loyalty programs (with 2-3 for grocery alone), leading to serious engagement challenges. This leads to a world where you may be investing heavily in loyalty infrastructure, YET seeing diminishing returns on engagement. Your personalized offers get lost in the noise. Your carefully crafted rewards go unredeemed. Of course, that’s just the beginning of it. You’re expected to make your program stand out while everyone else is offering similar discounts and points. What this means is that your loyalty marketing must be exceptional to break through!
3. Economic Uncertainty Causing Price Sensitivity – You know the reality on the ground: inflation and rising costs have fundamentally changed how Americans shop for groceries. With 83% of Americans actively adjusting their shopping based on prices, your marketing faces unprecedented scrutiny. Since shoppers are comparing prices across multiple stores and apps, your messaging needs to balance value communication with brand building. This becomes doubly difficult considering customers might abandon their regular store for a competitor’s sale. The extreme price sensitivity mandates a delicate balance between promoting deals and maintaining brand equity.
4. The Need to Capitalize on Impulse – The opportunity to boost the all-important ATV comes squarely from impulse buys. Approximately 60 to 70 percent of cart value comes from impulse purchases. Grocery marketing NEEDS to push this, but here’s the rub – it’s harder than ever! Plus, your marketing must create desire while shoppers are increasingly budget-conscious. Of course, it’s also fighting against shopping list apps and meal planning trends that work against spontaneous purchases. There’s also the challenge of ensuring that your most attractive offers are present in ALL of your highest leverage channels.
5. Omnichannel Coordination Complexity – No marketing in 2025 is single-channel – least of all grocery. Grocery marketers like you juggle an overwhelming number of critical touchpoints: social media, billboards, weekly circulars, email campaigns, digital ads, video content, in-store signage, app notifications, and more. Each channel has different requirements, timelines, and audiences. By the time you coordinate a promotion across all these channels, market conditions might have already shifted. Given how many moving pieces exist, maintaining consistency while optimizing for each channel poses a real challenge.
6. Tool Proliferation & Team Silos – You know what makes it harder to manage a galaxy of brand touchpoints? Working in tons of different tools. Statistics show that grocery marketing teams use an average of 10 to 15 different tools (yes, really!). When each touchpoint has its own platform and process, silos are inevitable. It can create a situation where your circular team doesn’t know what social media is promoting, email operates independently from in-store campaigns, and digital ads might miss this week’s biggest deals. To make the most of your marketing, you need visibility and coordination. You need systems that connect rather than divide. By breaking down these silos, grocers can provide consistent messaging that actually drives traffic and basket.
7. Local Store Support at Scale – While you primarily think about large-scale, brand-wide campaigns, there is always the matter of the individual stores themselves. They have their own Instagrams and Facebook pages that they want to use to amplify deals and news. Typically, the central brand team is responsible for enabling local marketing efforts while maintaining brand guidelines. You’re trying to create social posts, promotional materials, and local advertising for vastly different markets, all while ensuring brand consistency. Skipping this support isn’t an option – it leads to local stores going rogue with off-brand messaging. By aligning central resources with local needs, grocers can empower stores without sacrificing their brand.
Speed: The Competitive Advantage in Grocery Marketing
These seven challenges have radically increased the complexity and pace of marketing for all grocers. You feel it every day. But winning in this environment doesn’t require inventing a whole new strategy; it means executing your own, proven strategy with unprecedented speed and alignment. To deliver on winning tactics – like bundling, flash sales, and omnichannel promotions – you need to eradicate friction and get everyone on the same page.
SELF-TEST: Check if your team is working at the speed of grocery!
To capitalize on these opportunities, you need your marketing, merchant, loyalty, and digital teams moving together like a well-oiled machine. That means rapidly aligning on strategy, creative, channel execution, and measurement. But here’s the rub: when each team is stuck in their own system (disconnected from everyone else), what should take days stretches into weeks. By the time your perfectly crafted campaign reaches customers, the moment has passed. The opportunity? Gone.
While speed is the name of the game, it can’t occur at the expense of alignment. You need to have alignment between the diverse touchpoints that impact different customer segments. Getting your flash promo out on social media quickly is of course essential. However, if it’s not reflected on in-store signage and in the circular, you miss huge opportunities and possibly even make customers second guess the validity of the offer. Since AI content creation can generate publishable work at near instant speed, this tactic is being employed to maximize speed to market.
Doing what works in record time is the difference between growing your average transaction value and watching customers walk out the door with smaller baskets.
Easier said than done. That’s why there’s Opal.
How Opal Empowers Grocery Marketers
Feeling overwhelmed? We get it. No single platform can magically eliminate the brutal realities of grocery marketing – those 2% margins aren’t going anywhere. But here’s the thing: the smartest grocery marketers aren’t looking for magic. They’re looking for tools that actually understand their unique pressures and help them work smarter within those constraints.
That’s exactly why grocery brands choose Opal. We’ve built our platform specifically around the chaos of coordinating weekly circulars with social campaigns, supporting hundreds of stores without losing your mind.
Make Last Minute Adjustments
Like we’ve said before, speed is the competitive advantage grocery requires. Utilizing Opal’s planner and content creation, you can capture ATV-boosting opportunities before they expire. Accomplish this in Opal by creating flash promotions on our first-of-its-kind visual planner. Not only does this space make adjusting your planning easy, it ensures that everyone knows what’s happening. From there, you can use Opal to create the content that will comprise the push – across channels like social, email, in-store signage, print media and web. Since everything lives in one central space you can make, create and approve last-minute adjustments in a matter of minutes – instead of days.
Unify Your Messaging
Having a unified slate of offers across all of your touchpoints is critical for two reasons: creating a unified brand and making sure that your highest-impact offers are reflected across all channels. By centralizing on the Opal GTM calendar, EVERY team can see what they are promoting and if anything is missing.
Scale Local Support Without Losing Control
Supporting hundreds of stores while maintaining brand standards is one of the big problems in grocery marketing. Opal empowers the brand to create a repository of approved content for local stores to use and modify to their specifications. Not only does this save each store team time, but it ensures that EVERY message is on brand.
Explore the Opal Platform
Want to discover how the Opal platform empowers grocery marketers to boost their ATV by executing faster? There’s a few ways to do that.
First things first, you can schedule a conversation with a product expert. Together you’ll explore these solutions together – live in the platform.
Of course, if you’d rather take things at your own pace, here’s a click-through of the Opal platform that’ll show you exactly how it works for Target, Whole Foods and many other nationwide brands 👇