Digital Shopper Marketing's Offline Impact

Digital shopper marketing typically isn’t as much about sales transactions as it is about storytelling, advocacy and content sharing – “brand journalism” as some call it. Sales, for various reasons, are often not the main measure of success for a marketing campaign that involves a heavy dose of digital tactics and tools.But shopper marketers do want to know what’s working when they leverage the reach and power of digital. To find out just how manufacturers, agencies and solution providers are measuring the impact of the digital shopper marketing efforts, Shopper Marketing organized a pseudo roundtable, calling upon the following executives to weigh in on the topic of digital shopper marketing measurement:Jason Katz, senior vice president, digital, Acosta Mosaic GroupHaley Rubin, manager, digital shopper marketing, Diageo North AmericaMary Tarczynski, chief shopper marketing officer, Collective BiasRosa Ziebell, vice president, marketing, Meyer Corp.BIG PICTUREIs being able to measure the offline impact of digital shopper marketing the holy grail? How important is it in your organization to be able to measure the offline impact?Katz: “It’s the holy grail in the sense that it’s the ultimate measure of ROI, but there are many other KPIs [key performance indicators] that are almost equally as important such as equity/attribute shifts and moving to a more strategic partnership with key retail partners.”Ziebell: “Measuring the payback for shopper marketing is very important. Given the brevity of campaigns – about two to four weeks – we analyze short-term ROI on the marketing spend. It is important to make sure we are being effective and ensure that we are continually improving our tactics. We’d like to measure success on the basis of brand measures – like brand awareness, ‘brand that I trust’ – but that takes more time and money to measure than we find value in right now.”Rubin: “At Diageo, we are working hard to learn about the potential sales opportunities we could capture by activating within the digital space. There are many factors to consider in terms of rethinking how to leverage digital to drive sales and shift from leveraging it only for a consumer awareness and engagement tactic. It’s very important to us because of what we know so far: The digital space gives us greater opportunity to track shoppers’ interaction with our brands; an increasing number of shoppers are leveraging the digital space to determine their future purchases; digital coupons are on the rise in terms of usage across many shopper demographics; search is a critical component of shoppers’ efforts in this space; shoppers are embracing social media and leveraging word of mouth to impact their future purchases; and mobile usage is gaining traction and increasingly being leveraged as a shopping tool for many.”Tarczynski: “I wouldn’t say it is the holy grail, but it is certainly a priority. It can be difficult to separate the impact of each component of the overall marketing mix, but over time it’s important to understand how digital shopper marketing elements – media, message, target, promotional offer – affect both short-term sales and long-term brand loyalty.”WHAT’S POSSIBLECan you attribute in-store sales to digital efforts? Is there a link between online metrics and offline sales? Does the effort need to be integrated with in-store activity to be measured?Ziebell: “We do measure the impact of digital efforts on our bricks-and-mortar business as well as dot-com business. Our promotional calendar is pretty steady, so it’s easy to tease out the impact of our shopper marketing overlays. In general, we find that digital shopper marketing impacts the overall portfolio as well as the specific product offer in both channels. For our category, the majority of sales are in-store, although our programs are stimulating demand online as well. To drive maximum impact, we find that digital shopper marketing needs to be an overlay to a traditional trade promotion. Given the preponderance of bricks-and-mortar sales, we need the multi-channel focus to meet ROI hurdles.”Tarczynski: “We have several case studies where advertisers have solely implemented social shopper media and seen an in-store lift, and also where they added social media to other shopper marketing tactics and saw a greater impact on sales. You can measure offline impact of strictly digital efforts if the online program has enough scale to make an impact, and while most shopper marketing programs have multiple touchpoints along the path to purchase and correspond with a price discount, display and/or promotional offer, we have also seen a sales impact with social shopper media alone.”Katz: “While it’s a challenge, measuring the offline impact of digital shopper marketing is achievable with the right retail and/or vendor partnerships. To try to attribute in-store sales to digital efforts, we have conducted several test-versus-control studies that have shown in-store sales lifts from our digital shopper marketing programs. There are many factors impacting the degree of sales lift: strength of idea and offer, media weight/targeting, 360-degree integration, category, etc. Finding a link between online metrics and offline sales is a huge challenge and focus for us. Analyzing the real value of a click, a ‘Like,’ a post … can be mapped to volume in some cases but requires heavy lifting from a data and analytics perspective. Digital efforts do not need to be integrated with in-store activity to be measured. However, we do recommend strategically connecting the dots across the path to purchase with seamless messaging and experiences as a best practice.”WHAT AND HOWHow do you measure the offline impact of digital shopper marketing? What do you measure?Ziebell: “Our ROI is a simple measure: We evaluate the incremental business lift and divide by total marketing costs. We measure revenue and unit lift; our focus is on sets as well as accessories, tools and servingware. Our strongest barometer of sales has been the lift on gift card promotions. We do see that the digital programs boost redemption significantly. Our brand managers analyze ROI. Unfortunately, syndicated data has a lot of limitations in housewares so we use retail POS data to assess success. It really depends on the retailer and what they are willing to give us. Data analysis is limited to product sales. Eventually we will field a piece of research so we can measure awareness and brand health measures. For now, we will stick to sales as it is good enough for what we need today. In an ideal world, we’d like to analyze impact on brand share. Hopefully we will get there over the next few years.”Tarczynski: “We measure sales primarily, but also engagement metrics like click-throughs, sign-ups, coupon downloads and brand surveys. We use Nielsen, IRI and vendors that have access to retailer loyalty data – News America Marketing, Valassis and Catalina, and can go as deep as aggregated household level.”Katz: “We measure offline impact two ways, either by working in partnership directly with retailers or through third-party vendors, like panel data, FSC databases. We measure penetration; short- and long-term sales lift, source of volume, loyalty, what else is in the basket, and category growth. With the right support and tracking mechanisms in place we can confidently report in-store program performance like sales, store traffic and coupon redemption. There are a variety of inputs required to measure the impact of a digital shopper marketing program that could include vendor data, like Catalina Marketing’s BuyerVision, retailer data, social listening and other standardized digital tracking tools. We can go fairly deep but it really depends upon tracking/inputs available per effort. Also, if we are able to map back to retailer data we can prove out the effectiveness of an offer tied to a shopper card.DIGITAL TACTICSWhich digital tactics have the greatest offline impact?Ziebell: “While banner ads drive traffic to the retailer dot-coms, we keep getting strong results from SEO [search engine optimization]. Banners grow in efficacy as retargeting efforts gain momentum. We also find that social media is very impactful. We look at the sharing of content between our Facebook sites, the retailer’s Facebook sites and our celebrity/partner sites. When we turn on shopper marketing, our sweepstakes participation and Facebook likes double or triple.”Tarczynski: “We advocate social shopper media because the highest form of trust in advertising is a recommendation from someone you know, because organic content is 85% more likely to be clicked on than paid advertising, and because organic content is discoverable via search well beyond the campaign time period.”BEYOND SALESHow else do you measure the impact of digital shopper marketing – other than offline/in-store sales?Ziebell: “The biggest measure of success, besides straight lift, is retailer support. Display always pays, and getting a customer to agree to an extra feature and/or display is a big financial win. We also like seeing the merchant team get excited and mobilizing their internal resources to garner a Facebook post, a Pinterest contest, etc., as part of the program integration. Finally, we love it when a retailer asks for our brand assets to set up a brand shop online. Our ability to help them bring the full lifestyle story – videos, photography, recipes, brand voice and copy – drives both sales lift while delivering the brand experience that makes our products come alive.”Katz: “Five ways: Improvement in retail partnership; shifts in brand and retailer equity and attributes; standard industry metrics for digital media, social media, mobile media versus benchmarks; new insights, like who is responding, what messaging and offers are they most responsive to, etc.; and social listening, to quantify if we were able to shift shopper conversations within social media, such as from price discounting to extended usage occasions.”Tarczynski: “Growth in brand advocates, like fans and followers; engagement, like interaction with brand, shares with others; and growth in transaction size and frequency.”Rubin: “Working closely with our partner agencies, we collaborate on many different metrics. This is a highly collaborative effort, as a success story will involve many different touchpoints. With the space being very new to all, there is a learning curve involved and we optimize our efforts every day.In general, to measure the impact of our digital shopper activations we follow this method: Our digital media agency will measure and track click-through rates as typically measured via traditional brand media. It will also compare that rate against industry benchmarks and traditional brand media results, and measure mobile phone tap-through rates as typically measured across traditional brand media efforts. Our digital coupon agencies – production and fulfillment – will measure the click-to-print rate that tracks the number of clicks and, ultimately, prints of our digital coupons, track the redemption rates on coupons, and compare these rates across industry benchmarks. Our internal finance team and customer marketing teams collaborate to measure depletion data by ZIP code to correlate with activations across the nation – if spikes are showcased in certain markets where high consumer engagement was identified. They also generate a market-by-market monitoring and evaluation story with all data combined.”

Digital Shopper Marketing's Offline Impact

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