Today’s marketing campaigns have many moving parts. In general, brands and marketers accept that they need to work with multiple vendors to get the best output from different channels. With that, they usually work double-time and do what they can to coordinate the various disparate activities. It becomes their responsibility to make sure every channel and every team is working together to amplify messages and create a positive customer experience.
But that is rarely true. Multiple vendors almost always involve multiple hand-offs, longer timelines and inconsistencies in the customer experience and brand identity.
What is true: Brands can’t deliver a seamless customer experience or the results the C-suite demands, without a seamless marketing process.
Yet, companies struggle with the fallout of this issue without recognizing what’s behind it. That’s the exact problem a specialty grocery retailer was having as it expanded nationally. After a string of early successes, the chain experienced store-traffic declines in some regions. This slowed sales and caused a drop in customer loyalty program enrollment. And, they weren’t finding enough new customers to offset these negatives because of several underperforming markets.
The chain’s marketing team thought the answer was to spend ad dollars better. Quad was printing 1.5 million of their weekly inserts and, based on that relationship, they asked our media planning group for recommendations on how to improve their offline and online media spend.
After more than four decades executing clients’ marketing programs, we know process and channels, and knew that simply moving ad dollars around wasn’t going to fix their problems. In fact, we knew our client needed a whole new marketing strategy, one with four important objectives:
1. Optimize media spend
While evaluating ad spend isn’t enough to reverse disturbing trends, it’s still a necessary step. We started by reviewing the media plan and budget. We analyzed their print distribution by looking at both efficiencies (rate negotiations and circulation optimization) and effectiveness (store sales by contributing zip codes) and found significant savings – 25% of the total spend.
2. Get a better fix on the customer
Often, the customer data businesses collect and keep is under-used. For this client, we set out to learn more about shopping patterns at the chain’s stores. In order to plan a successful multichannel campaign for them we had to:
- Review demographic, psychographic and media consumption data for target shoppers.
- Conduct a competitive analysis of similar retailers or businesses.
- Take a closer look at underperforming stores or markets – weekly customer counts and sales, average basket size and loyalty engagement.
- Understand foot traffic both around and in the store by day and time.
3. Surround customers and targets with brand touchpoints
So what exactly should their customers be seeing? We used half the media-spend savings to test an integrated multichannel marketing program that targeted their customers better. Focusing on several underperforming stores, we proposed to create an array of opportunities for customers to interact with the brand where and when they wanted to drive store traffic, customer loyalty and sales.
We suggested they launch the program during a big weekend in college basketball’s March Madness with a “Stock Up and Score” promotion of four products: baby back ribs, avocados, beer and the chain’s fresh store-made pizza. We built and managed hyper-local mobile promo hubs for each pilot store. Then we paired mobile promotions with print circulars, direct mail postcards, in-store signage, and geo-target social and programmatic digital advertising. Building the promotion around products (rather than categories or departments) allowed us to measure marketing effectiveness more accurately.
The two biggest priorities of our strategy were:
- Amplify promotions by integrating offline media with digital and online media. This included connecting shoppers to the promotion hubs by including mobile response vehicles such as QR codes in print media.
- Leverage owned media (direct mail, in-store, website) along with social posts on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest pages.
4. Personalize, Personalize and Personalize
The more relevant personalization is, the more successful. In fact, useful and targeted communications create lasting customer loyalty and drive revenue growth of 10 to 30%, according to a recent McKinsey & Company report. And to personalize really well, marketers need more customer data.
During the promotion, with beacon technology, which tracks cell phone signals and communicates with mobile devices, we captured shopper foot traffic data. The beacons measured what phones were entering the store and when. We could also tell which of those were new customers and what areas people shopped when they were in the store. In addition, they allowed us to capture where they went when they left the store. This information, along with the data from the hyper-local paid social and programmatic media, told us about traffic sources around the store. All this helped us target direct mail and retail inserts to those neighborhoods.
Having customer data by store made it easy to respond to shoppers’ interests with localized, personalized offers. The campaign delivered immediate results.
Results
Over the initial Friday through Sunday promotional period, the pilot stores experienced:
- 10% increase in new-customer traffic.
- 10% sales increase.
- 18% conversion increase.
- A more than 200% increase over goal in loyalty enrollments.
And, the retailer actually ran out of its house-made pizza in the test stores.
So I guess you could say that, by putting all their avocados in one marketing partner’s basket, the grocery retailer was able to connect with consumers in ways it hadn’t been before, nimbly and at a lower cost. When change is a constant and consumers are increasingly in charge, nothing is more important.
To learn more about how to create a truly integrated marketing campaign, visit QUAD.com