Your shopper marketing strategy is likely a marketing and sales team collaboration with ample resource allocation and buckets of blood, sweat and tears.
How do you know which exact shopper strategies closed the sale, which strategies made little to no difference to the shopper, and which strategies are driving shoppers to your competitors? Quick answer: you need to measure and analyze your shopper marketing strategy at the micro-level by gathering sufficient consumer feedback at all points of the customer journey.
What is “Shopper Marketing”?
Before we delve into how exactly to measure your shopper marketing strategy, we want to first define “Shopper Marketing.”
Shopper marketing is entirely focused on the buyer journey from consideration to point of sale (POS) with the specific purpose of creating a compulsion to buy your product over the competition at the point of purchase. Shopper preferences and shopper habits are of particular interest to shopper marketers as they look to “hack” consumer behavior to gain market share and drive sales.
Shopper Marketing Tactics
Shopper marketing tactics are wide-ranging, and often overlap with various marketing and sales tactics. While shopper marketing and retail marketing may seem redundant, retail marketing focuses on the shopper’s overall experience with your brand and shopper marketing tactics drive the shopper to add your product to their cart and check-out.
Picture this: it’s nearly 8 p.m. and it just dawned on you that you scooped your last serving of coffee beans just this morning. You rush to the grocery store and into the coffee aisle. You are staring at the endless options of coffee beans. Most of the prices are comparable. Which brand do you pick? Why? It is in that moment that shopper marketing kicks into high gear. You may not be consciously aware of it, but shopper marketers have implemented a myriad of tactics to win the sale.
Shopper marketing tactics include, but are not limited to:
- In-Store Displays
- Marketing Collateral or Signage with a Distinct CTA
- Scents
- Lighting or Ambiance
- Planograms
How to Measure Your Shopper Marketing Strategy
We have established why measuring your shopper marketing strategy is imperative to the overall success of your marketing plan. But, how do you measure success? By going directly to the source: the shopper.
Conducting sentiment and survey analysis on your target market and executing regular retail audits will help you to monitor and measure the success of your shopper marketing strategy.
Sentiment & Surveys
Since shopper marketing is largely focused on shopper behavior and preferences, sentiment and surveys are an incredibly effective way to measure the effectiveness of your shopper marketing strategy. What brands do shoppers choose in-store or online? Why? How do they feel about your brand? How do they feel about XYZ display if they were to see it in-store?
Surveys can gather both qualitative and quantitative data from your target market segmentation, gathering actionable insights into consumer behavior and habits. Surveys can be as broad or as specific as you see fit for your needs. If you want to measure the efficacy of a particular campaign, you can use a survey. If you want to measure the overall sentiment of your brand and your competition, you can use a survey.
Retail Audit
Regular retail audits are a great way to monitor your shopper marketing strategy and measure the overall success or failure of your plan.
A retail audit is an assessment of in-store data including stock, planogram compliance, merchandising and any other in-store execution. A robust retail audit can provide key data about your shopper experience and monitor retail compliance of shopper marketing tactics as requested by your brand.
Retail audits analyze the shopper experience in-store. Data collected from a retail audit can include engagement with your products, engagement with competitive products, and how quickly the shopper can identify your products on the shelf. Retail audits can also inform your brand of whether in-store sellers provided aid during the purchase process, whether there were any OOS issues or scarcity on the shelves and how effective various shopper marketing tactics were in the shopping process.
How to Quickly Gather Shopper Marketing Data
Traditional survey distribution and widespread retail audits used to be daunting yet necessary tasks. In years past, a massively distributed survey would take months to execute, analyze and deliver insights; retail audits used to follow a similar, if not longer, timeline.
Data is more readily available than ever before, and recent innovations in crowdsourcing technology and gig work have expedited these processes. Survey distribution and analysis take days or weeks depending on segmentation and retail audits are delivered in real-time by unbiased shoppers in your target market. No more waiting around for results.
Premise can help you monitor and measure your shopper marketing strategy with high-quality data guaranteed. Visit us at www.premise.com/solutions or email [email protected].