According to Quirk’s Marketing Review, “Just a few years ago, [shopper marketing] was a little-understood task driven by promotions or channel marketing and focused primarily on trade. Today, 77% of CPG companies and retailers have a dedicated shopper marketing function, and there is an increasing view that shopper insights are strategically essential." The discipline is growing because CPG brands are beginning to understand its critical and central role in growing revenue.
iMediaConnection points out another fact central to the inherent value that shopper marketers can provide: “while shopping behavior increasingly starts online, it often still ends in the store. It is true that e-commerce has grown significantly over the past decade, but brick-and-mortar stores still rule.” Shopper marketers are getting customers in stores.
CPG is a fractured and crowded space, with unprecedented competition for customer attention. Shopper marketers can leverage and increase their critical role by bringing innovative promotions to retail partners, thereby accomplishing several goals:
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Introduce new products: increase trial, sampling, and exposure to new products among target customers.
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Drive store visits: get people through the doors--qualified, interested, relevant people.
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Acquire new customers: leverage retail partners’ audiences to grow social, mobile, email databases in order to drive more store traffic.
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Boost loyalty: increase membership in a loyalty program, activate lapsed members, and surprise and delight of core fans.
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Incremental revenue: drive short-term revenue boosts; drive sales with pinpoint accuracy over a short or specific period of time.
Here’s how this worked for one national CPG brand whose shopper marketing team partnered with a number of partner retail stores to execute a fun and unique promotion with the Quikly platform.
Quikly works by offering fans a specific set of brand-relevant rewards. The brand pushes out the promotion via existing channels (email, social, advertising, etc., both via their own database and those of retail partners), directing customers to the branded campaign landing page, where fans opt in, providing their email address and mobile phone number. No one knows when the campaign will go live but when it does, all players get a text message, and the fastest to respond locks in the best reward. The Quikly mechanic encourages social sharing by giving players a competitive edge for every customer they refer fueling thousands of organic traffic into each campaign.
We put together an infographic showing how one national CPG brand delivered ROI against some of the common shopper marketer goals we listed above:
What other goals do you have as a shopper marketer that promotions can help address?