There has always been a divide between advertisers on the web - those looking for direct response results and those looking to do branding. Today I’m going to talk about how we’re fusing the goals of both with a concept we call hyperlocal brand activation. The goal: to activate consumers in their local trade areas, drive in-store purchases, and ultimately increase sales. This innovative concept, using a host of targeting capabilities, meets the specific ROI requirements of shopper marketing budgets and retail co-op budgets as its proven to drive local activation and provide actionable insights and measurement.
So what do I mean by hyperlocal activation? Hyperlocal activation means to “activate” brick and mortar store sales in a given marketing territory by leveraging Point of Sale data (in AOL’s case through SymphonyIRI Group) from tens of thousands of stores nationally.
Seems pretty logical but how is it done? First, we target consumers (based on POS data) in DMA’s and custom micro-markets (zips) where a brand is lagging compared to the category. Next, we leverage thousands of discrete behavioral, demo, and psychographic data elements to create audience segments, at scale, which ultimately eliminate wasted impressions. And finally, we target these audiences in the right locations at the right time with the right messages focusing on where the brand’s development index (BDI), perception of the brand, lags compared to the category development index (CDI), product category demand as measured by actual local retail receipts. By understanding where the maximum potential for growth exists, the proper targeting and engagement strategies can be used to produce the best results.
Let’s look at an example… In the diagram below users are clustered based on behavioral and geographic targeting. In each quadrant you can see suggested tactics to engage the various customer groups.
If we wanted to focus on the largest opportunity, we’d target users where the category of the product we’re selling is developed (e.g. the market is large) but our brand is underperforming in the category (Quad 1). This way with some brand awareness, we hypothesize that we can take share in a large, developed market. To do so, we may promote trials, run coupons, or simply raise awareness.
Once the campaign is up and running, we can take a mid-point sales measurement to monitor performance and determine the impact the campaign is having on the customers, making changes to the targeting, media and messaging along the way.
What are the key benefits to a marketer?
- Provides focused messaging to drive in-store sales and increase Brand Development Index (BDI) relative to Category Development Index (CDI)
- Designs a custom territory and activate campaign within days to elevate sales
- Leverages premium media to persuade consumers while maintaining accountability and gaining market insights
- Offers pre/post/test/control campaign brand sales change measurement with optional matched market validation
Through a combination of building audiences in the right areas and showing them the right message on the right media marketers can now achieve measurable results with display, mobile and video from AOL and Advertising.com.
Seth Demsey
VP, Product and Strategy
Twitter: @SethDemsey
Tags: Advertising.com, BDI, Brand Development Index, Category Development Index, CDI, Hyperlocal, SymphonyIRI Group
