Helping a CPG Drive In-Grocery Sales via Digital Media

A category-leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specialising in the fresh and frozen food industry sells exclusively through national grocery chains. Historically, their advertising budgets have focused on building brand awareness and consideration, with below-the-line programs (such as couponing) to drive trial and sales. With a growing number of competitors encroaching on their market position, they sought new ways to engage with consumers in digital media to help maintain/grow their market share.

Their Need

The CPG brand marketing team had identified that digital marketing was the priority, but they were unsure where to start. Should they invest more in mobile web? Search? CRM and emails? Native content and partnerships? Social media?

Our Approach

Based on consumer insights, we helped the client prioritize where their marketing dollars could have the greatest impact on driving immediate ROI for in-store sales (to increase market share). Once channel priorities were identified, using our targeted media and optimization process we set out to demonstrate social's unique benefit: creating a direct relationship with the consumer to foster loyalty, advocacy and product trial of their broad range of products. More importantly, we committed to measuring how our media could have a positive lift in in-store (grocery retailer) sales. Working with a creative agency partner, a content strategy and media calendar was developed, focused on testing and learning the optimal tactics for fostering consumer engagement for product discovery and advocacy. Once established, we then executed a program to measure the in-store sales impact of hyper-targeted messages via our proprietary targeting and optimization methodology, using a geo-fenced campaign to measure the relative lift in in-store sales within a number of markets ("exposed") against comparable market sales ("control").

The Results

Our targeted methodology not only grew loyalty and consideration, we demonstrated that in exposed markets, the campaign drove a 29% lift in in-store grocery chain sales versus control markets. Based on the total marketing spend to support the campaign (creative and media costs combined) vs. the lift in units sold, we could easily demonstrate exceptional ROI compared to traditional couponing programs... with the added benefit that our campaigns also delivered measurable increase in awareness, trial for new product launches, and scalable marketing ROI.