How are you measuring your in-store campaigns at the moment? With the growth of e-commerce, marketers are being asked more and more to demonstrate the effectiveness of their physical campaigns too.
However, measuring effectiveness and assigning attribution is near impossible with the current tools most retail marketers are using today.
Here is our simple no-tech framework to measure and optimise your in-store marketing campaigns.
Map your stores → Plan targeted campaigns → Develop compelling creative → Store-specific distribution → Accurate implementation → Analyse and improve.
This is the framework our retail marketing platform is based on.
Let's take a look in greater detail.
1. Map out your stores
Imagine creating a video ad without knowing if it will be played on TV or on TikTok. You won't know the dimensions to film in, the resolution, the budget to put behind it, or the style of video to create.
That's what it's like when you don't know the exact size, layout and spaces available in your stores.
And it's why mapping out your store spaces is the first step in our framework.
Using a spreadsheet can be a great tool to start mapping out your stores. Or ask your printer if this is a service they offer.
Start by conducting an audit of all your stores to identify all the in-store marketing points available in each. There are many ways to conduct an audit, from an extensive annual audit conducted by a 3rd party agency to getting store teams to update a central database regularly as changes happen.
When conducting an audit of stores, it is important to provide detailed information about the measurements, materials, and location of each store. It is also important to note any unique features of the stores, such as whether they are located in a city centre or in the countryside, or if they have an attached cafe. The more detailed the information provided, the better the audit will be.
And, importantly, allow your store managers to help maintain it. They are your eyes and ears on the ground in the store. They know every change that happens. Empower them with forms to fill in whenever changes happen so that your database remains maintained.
2. Plan targeted campaigns
Different shoppers in different types of stores in different parts of the country will shop in different ways. They will favour different products, speak different languages and have different price sensitivity.
Armed with your detailed store profiles, you have all the information you need to reach your customer segments with personalised campaigns for them.
Always have an aim and objectives to achieve with your whole campaign and the role that shopper marketing will play in achieving these objectives.
You may have some stores located near a competitor store. In this case, you might want specific window displays in those that help your customers enter your store rather than your competitor's next door.
Tap into your shopper insights, segment stores based on features and buyer behaviour, and plan targeted campaigns that will resonate with your customers.
This supports research that found that consumers who look at an ad for just two seconds have only a 5% increase in brand choice compared to those in a control group who did not see the ad at all.
But if the audience dwells on that same ad for longer, that uplift increases significantly. A 14-second dwell time delivers a 9% uplift in choice. More dwell time delivers better top- and bottom-of-the-funnel impact.
Whichever way you slice it, getting your creative right is critical to your campaign's effectiveness.
Using the previous steps, you are equipped with knowledge about how are why shoppers shop in each store, and you segmented your campaign plans by these segments. Ensure your creative follows a similar path.
Provide clear briefs for each customer segment so your campaigns make an impact.
4. Store-specific distribution
If you have been thinking, "This all sounds nice in theory, but it'll be a lot of work!" up to this point, you're not alone.
You need a strong relationship with your suppliers, printers and production team to ensure the right materials reach each store. Not only that, but each item needs to go to the right part of each store. With 82% of shoppers making in-category purchase decisions in-store, having a dump bin in the wrong place can damage your end sales results.
It's critical to stay in control at this stage. Own your own data and link your campaigns, creatives and stores together so you can easily provide a detailed list of which material each store needs to go to.
This is where the Colateral platform is incredibly powerful. All of your data is accurately maintained, the quantities and variations of materials are automatically calculated based on the spaces available in each store, and you can track when items are in production or out for delivery thanks to integrations.
All of this means you don't need to spend days checking data with a fine-toothed comb, and it keeps you in control of when campaigns will arrive in store.
When you're distributing a campaign to 1000 or even 100 stores, there's a good chance mistakes will be made in implementation. We're all human, and store teams have a lot of tasks every day.
But these implementation issues have a big impact. If promotions are damaged, in the wrong place, or missing completely, then how will it inspire customers to choose the product?
Secondly, poor implementation can result in misleading campaign performance results and impact decisions about future campaigns. For example, if your campaign didn't perform well in one store, do you know if it's because the message wasn't right or if the campaign wasn't installed correctly.
This is why it's critical to ensure accurate implementations of materials and ensure display compliance.
Here's our step-by-step guide to get it right:
Deliver clear instructions to installers with planograms to ensure displays are arranged properly
Issue checklists with every campaign, and ask installers to send photos to ensure accurate set-up
Schedule store teams to check displays throughout the campaign lifecycle and at end-of-life
Create a feedback loop with store teams to ensure any issues are identified and resolved efficiently.
6. Analyse, learn and improve
Finally, it's critical to measure performance, learn from it, and apply those learnings in future campaigns.
When you know that your campaigns are executed accurately, you can have faith in the data that your campaign is generating.
While you may have seen tenuous links between campaigns and your in-basket sales before, you should start to see clear correlations.
You might need to work with your IT department to combine your datasets and understand how it all works.
However, when you have it, you can use this information to test messaging, placements and timings to determine which campaigns deliver the biggest revenue spike.
Optimise campaign performance with Colateral
This framework underpins our approach to in-store marketing campaign management with Colateral.
While following the advice here will help measure and improve performance, Colateral automates the administrative complexities and aligns the whole team around a single source of truth.
Learn more about how you can optimise your in-store campaigns with Colateral.
We're on a mission to improve in-store marketing performance. If you found value in this email, please share it with colleagues and friends so we can improve together.
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