Whether it's a typo in a social media post or placing a window poster on a hanging banner placement, mistakes happen in marketing.
But when you're relying on your in-store marketing to carry the baton across the finish line and drive sales, can you afford to get it wrong?
Our recent whitepaper found that only 48% of multi-location retailers have a process to ensure proper implementation of marketing materials.
Some retail marketers are some of the best planners I know, but with the best intentions, the most detailed plans, and diligent instructions, they aren't equipped with the right tools. Relying on spreadsheets and complex emails, you're introducing more opportunities for human error.
In this email, I'll share our framework for ensuring 100% display compliance in every location, and how Colateral can help.
Firstly, let's explore an example of when this process has worked.
Helping Paddy Power Increase Compliance from 42% to 100% in 3 months
PaddyPower is a leading entertainment company with over 600 betting shops across the UK and Ireland.
In 2018, Paddy Power was looking to streamline its in-store marketing process. The hefty workload seriously strained its small marketing team managing daily marketing messages across 600+ locations.
By implementing Colateral, Paddy Power’s marketing team could easily distribute store-specific materials to each location. In addition, we enabled seamless communication between head office and shop teams and implemented advanced campaign analysis to ensure they identified and resolved issues efficiently.
Using Colateral, the 1-person marketing team at Paddy Power communicates 130,000 campaign-specific instructions every 3 months to effectively rotate their offers in over 600 stores.
And they can verify remotely that each piece of marketing comms is implemented accurately. As a result, in-store campaign compliance has significantly improved from 42% to a perfect 100%.
So, how can you achieve similar results? Here's our simple 5-step framework to ensure display compliance in every location.
1. Create detailed store profiles
Every store has its own unique layout, number of windows and places for display fittings.
This presents complexity immediately, as you need to store and regularly maintain this data. If you distribute materials daily or weekly, relying on an annual or even quarterly audit means that your information will likely be out of date for some of your campaigns.
The solution we often see is retailers distributing the same materials to every location. While this does solve a compliance issue, it also leads to stores receiving materials that they can't place. And those materials go in the trash.
Conducting an initial audit to map out your stores is essential, but you also need to accurately maintain the information as layouts change and new stores open and close.
If you follow this 5 step process effectively, you can update store profiles every time you launch a campaign - but we'll get to that later.
You probably already issue implementation instructions with your marketing packs, but it remains a critical step.
Ensure that your instructions are clear and easy to understand. When testing your marketing packs, also test the instructions and see if people go wrong when following them.
For big campaign launches, the instructions can be more complex than the materials themselves. On a busy day in the store, this leads to instructions getting ignored completely and store teams just trying to figure it out themselves.
If you can, take the step to personalise instructions so stores only receive instructions for the materials they receive.
Or check out a tool like Colateral, which provides visual instructions for each location and automatically adjusts the view based on the materials they can implement in their store.
3. Distribute feedback forms
Regardless of who you use to install your materials, you must ensure a clear feedback loop is in place.
Our recent whitepaper found that the retailers that used verification as part of their implementation process did not identify accurate implementation as a pain point.
Verification can be as simple as distributing post-installation surveys that store teams complete and return to you every time you launch a campaign. You could even distribute surveys at multiple points throughout the campaign lifecycle, including at end-of-life.
You could use a tool like Google Forms to collate results in one place. Provided you send one form to each store, you will be able to see which stores have completed it, and which haven't.
With this in place, even if displays aren’t compliant, you will find out right away and be able to resolve it.
4. Capture regular feedback from store teams.
Using regional managers for checks may seem logical, easy and convenient, but it is a big issue for your campaigns.
Regional managers are responsible for multiple aspects of sometimes up to 50 stores. If they need to check the implementation of your marketing in every store they are responsible for, it could be days or even weeks before they find the problems.
In almost every circumstance, having your installation teams evaluate the setup will be best. They can review it immediately after setup, so you get real-time feedback.
Relying on your store team can be a very efficient and cost-effective method, but it may require more training and time. If you use a specialist installation team, speak to them up front to ensure they know it's part of their role.
5. Maintain control & visibility.
Implementing these changes can be difficult when managing hundreds of stores across different regions. For example, you might run new campaigns daily with regional variations. It’s a lot to track.
For this reason, you must have visibility of every stage of your campaigns. You need to see at a glance which campaigns are coming up, which are live, and if you have any issues at any stage.
This allows you to manage by exception and intervene only on the campaigns that need your input rather than trying to review every campaign.
Do this, and you can be free to focus on creating impactful campaigns that drive revenues, not tediously checking the implementation in every store.
Colateral can help!
Colateral makes it easy to plan, implement, and analyse targeted marketing campaigns in multiple physical locations.
Our retail marketing platform takes the monotonous spreadsheets, endless email chains, and complex instructions out of campaign planning, so you can focus on driving revenues.
We equip you with the tools to tap into location insights, scale localised campaign creative, and ensure 100% accuracy of implementation.
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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