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If you have no idea what Shopper Marketing is, you’re not alone.

Shopper marketing focuses on influencing the shopper during and at the point of purchase. It’s an insight-led approach to a customer’s plan to shop and their in-store experience in a way that builds brand and drives consumption and growth. In other words, using data to create tailored retail strategies and creative ways to communicate with shoppers to help brands sell more stuff.

It’s one thing to get your product into the store. But is your product at the risk of being sold?

You’ve probably seen multiple shopper marketing promotions without thinking twice about it. It’s an opportunity to talk to the shopper, Hungry? Thirsty? Pick-me-up! Buy-me-now! Try-me-free! The right messaging can make-or-break a promotion. If you’ve consumed a product sample, cooked an on-pack recipe, switched brands due to an offer or purchased a product for a chance to win, you’ve engaged with shopper marketing.

Is your product on-shelf to begin with? Is your product at the risk of being sold? However, it’s not only what you do in-store, it involves an approach to pre-store, in-store, post-store, and digital engagement during the customer’s path to purchase, their journey.

Many businesses need all-sorts of marketing help to increase growth. That’s where we fit. We help brands combine shopper, promotions, in-store activation, social, content and influencer marketing to help you stand out. We thrive on the challenges of working on the agency side, which often means thinking quickly and creatively with one eye on the clock, another on the budget and another on what is possible and legal.

Pioneering promotional marketing. Delivering on beautifully crafted brand promises. Inspiring ongoing shopping behaviour.

Shopper Marketing is key to connecting with customer’s and ultimately driving sales for your brand. If you haven’t started thinking about your shopper approach, we’re a great place to start.

For a while there, clients would ask why we wanted to structure a promotion in a certain way. We’d wave our arms around and talk about the magic and the mystery of how promotions work. The art and science.

Cash is King, we’d always say. Three major prizewinners, a must!

That all got blown to pieces when IMI International started to publish their PromoTrack. It’s very good. It has become a guiding light for many agencies and clients and gives us the confidence to recommend more and better ideas. While the guts of it remain unchanged with some basic rules. Instant wins are good and keep everything simple and give away stuff that people want. We also get new news every time it is published and the latest version (2019) is no different.

The highlights from the most recent report can be partly explained by an evolving consumer attitude – everyone likes promotions more than they used to. And of course, our media consumption has changed – we find out about promotions and engage with them through different media.

The concept of brands offering added value in some form or another as a promotion – whether it is winning the holiday of a lifetime or receiving a free set of steak knives seems to be very much back on the agenda for consumers.

In fact, consumers are actively searching out promotions. We are back on the agenda! People love ’em! And of course, Bamboo is exceptionally good at them…. albeit that wasn’t part of the research!

A budget can go a very long way – don’t spend the whole thing on gifts and prizes – gold, frankincense and myrrh. A well-structured incentive needs to encourage a behaviour and you want to do that for the smallest cost. Why give your consumer a $300 cashback when a $200 cashback will do the same trick.

Cashbacks are often used as a competitive response and it is believed that brands have to match each other. If the competition is offering a $300 cashback, then you must too. This is so evident in the electrical appliance sector. It comes at a cost but the loss of market share that comes from not matching the competition has proved to be so great that you have to be in it and take the smaller hit.

Kellogg’s, many moons ago, used to put little gifts in every pack. Research then threw up the finding that putting a free gift in every 3rd pack of cereal (1 in 3 wins) would have exactly the same outcome from a sale and a consumer engagement perspective. And in practice it was true. It takes a brave marketer to take that risk, but the consumer and retailer remained happy and the promotional premium budget was hacked down to a third of what it was!

So, save your spend by giving away all that is needed to give you a creative hook and an incentive that will drive a sale and then spend the rest of your budget telling everyone about the incentive, amplifying. If we can’t tell anyone about the activity, then it probably isn’t worth undertaking. Luckily social media makes it easier to amplify activities cost effectively.

Long live the incentive – that little something extra!

Source Citation: PromoTrack™

Effective promotions developed through the right-consumer insight are a great way for a brand to maximise sales opportunities whilst maintaining loyalty and market value.

THE RIGHT-CONSUMER INSIGHT

• Consumers are most likely to participate in a promotion if it is simple, relevant, and compelling
• Consumers are most drawn to promotions that offer higher tangible value, with intrinsic offerings
• Promotions should drive not only volume, but also brand loyalty
• Consumers are more loyal to retailers who make an authentic effort to connect with their customers through the right value-add

BENEFITS OF GIFT WITH PURCHASE

• Strengthens brand awareness and drives sales
• Encourages consumers to switch to your brand
• Provides instant gratification for your consumers
• Allows you to maintain price points and value
• Effective in moving excess stock or mature products
• Gifts can be physical or digital offers
• Allows you to collect valuable consumer insight and data

HOW WE DO IT

• Right-consumer insight and strategy
• Right-retail creative and path to purchase
• Full campaign planning and set-up
• Design and build of promotional microsite and CRM
• Claim handling and validation
• Email communications and SMS notifications
• Sourcing, warehouse storage and distribution of gifts
• Always-on client reporting system which allows you to measure campaign performance
• Always-on consumer visibility which allows end users to track progress of claims

A FINAL WORD

Consumers still love promotions! They form an additive part of the value equation and can so often be the tie-breaker between your product and the competition.

Source Citation: Harris Insights & Analytics and PromoTrack™

How is Influencer Content Is Used?

Influencer content is being utilised in every channel imaginable. 68.8% of brands already leverage it on their websites, social campaigns, emails, print advertisements. 21.3% say they plan to do so in the future.

Popular uses for influencer content include:

• Testimonials
• Print Advertisements
• In-store Displays
• Digital and Banner Ads
• Building a Content Library
• Press Releases
• Email Marketing
• Live Presentations
• Social Media
• Profile Pages
• Websites and Landing Pages
• App Store Listings

90.1% of brands either are or plan to repurpose influencer content across different marketing channels.

Where to start? Getting from A to B.

Define your objectives: What are you trying to accomplish with influencer marketing? Do you want exposure, brand awareness, feedback, or direct sales? Brands who begin with well-defined objectives are far more successful. Anything in your plan that doesn’t support these objectives probably doesn’t belong.

Find the right influencers: The right influencers can make all the difference both in quality of content and time invested. Influencers are professionals and those who are a good brand fit and have a great work ethic will create more authentic content.

Cultivate long-term relationships: Influencers require a relationship and like all relationships, they take time. After you’ve executed a few campaigns and both parties have learned about each other, successive engagements will take incrementally less work. Long-term influencers will better understand your guidelines, what performs best, and know how to navigate success.

Use micro-influencers: The data is incontrovertible: micro-influencers achieve higher engagement for a lower CPE. They do take more work, however, which is why influencer platforms offers a great advantage.

Leverage a platform: Influencer platforms automate the difficult portions of discovery, vetting, negotiation, content creation, payments, and analytics, and free marketers up to treat influencer marketing as a standalone channel rather than a full-time role. The more you invest in your strategy, both in preparation and tools, the more output you’ll see in terms of content and ROI.

Source Citation: State of the industry influencer report 2019

The Power of Influencer Marketing

In fact, 68% of Instagram users say they come to Instagram to interact with creators. Despite influencers being such a driving force behind the platform, Instagram stands behind its algorithm. Why? Because advertising is where the company makes its money. More ads on Instagram means less space in the feed for organic content, which reduces the organic reach.

Regardless, influencers still manage to promote and sell product on behalf of brands, with 87% of shoppers taking inspiration from an influencer before making a purchase.

Increasing The Reach Of Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Boosting means putting paid media advertising behind the post(s) of an influencer. This way, you can ensure that the influencer content reaches a wider audience besides just followers of the influencer. Based on interest and demographic targeting, you can extend your audience and reach people your content is relevant to, increasing your return on investment.

Five Tips For Boosting A Campaign

Influencers can be valuable because of the close connection they have with their audience. Extending the reach of your campaign shows the best results when it is done with respect to the influencer’s original audience. Boosting should only ever be used as an extension of organic reach, not as a standalone strategy.

1. Don’t make changes to the influencer content: The influencer post should be boosted in its original state. Don’t make changes to the caption, no matter how small. Again, you’re not advertising from your own channel here.
2. Think about your audience targeting: Make sure your target audience for boosting complements the organic audience of the influencer. Influencers are likely to gain new followers thanks to boosting, but if these new followers are not like their existing audience, their audience quality can go down. By ensuring that your target audience location, age range and interests match the influencer’s current audience, you’ll be able to strengthen their audience quality and not damage it.
3. Don’t boost your influencer content until it has been live for over 24 hours: Most post engagements and impressions on organic Instagram posts happen within the first 24 hours that the post is live. Boosting best practice asks that you wait 24 hours before you start your boosting. That way, any occasional overlap between the organic and boosting audiences happen on different days.
4. Don’t drag out your boosting unnecessarily: Try to boost your content for no longer than one week. Influencer content is often seasonal or related to a specific event. To make sure you boost your posts while they are still relevant, we recommend activating them within one week of the organic post going live.
5. Respect the influencer’s organic reach: If your influencer’s organic post achieved 100K impressions, as a rule of thumb you should limit your boosting to this as well. Boosting too much compared to an influencer’s organic reach will take you from an influencer marketing campaign to an advertising campaign. Why is this distinction important? The power of influencers lies in their credibility, in the connection that they have built with their followers.

Source Citation: Instagram Business, IMA, IAB