Despite the seismic changes in consumer shopping behavior and the greater breadth of data available to marketers, the solutions available to most brands—especially CPG—to reach people efficiently and drive retail sales through digital channels have been less than optimal.
However, there are emerging strategies which are providing results for a number of CPG companies. These approaches often center on bringing together both retailer data and shopper insights. The powerful combination of disparate data sets is creating a way for the world’s largest consumer brands to adopt a new focus that highlights signal-based targeting—with companies like Triad Retail Media leading the way.
In fact, a recent study by data platform Evergage found that product purchase history is currently being used by 36 percent of marketers to personalize their brand experiences.
Signal-based targeting looks at buyer intent. Instead of building audiences purely based on demographics, behavioral data or purchase data, it gives marketers the opportunity to use a spectrum of real signals activated by consumers to identify where they are on their path to purchase. These signals are a way of seeing people raise their hands to declare an actual interest in making a purchase.
The challenge in retail
Solving for a critical market need can often be an impetus for change, and in this case, one that is required to help retailers and brands drive their bottom line. Investments in data targeting for retail advertising often fall short of delivering their desired outcomes because the sources of data are disconnected from one another. That is no longer sufficient in a world where multichannel touchpoints have become the norm.
Retail still remains the best source of data to drive sales, given that 94 percent of all CPG sales occur in-store. As a result, using purchase data is an approach familiar to many brands.
Traditionally, access to retail data for national media executions has been limited to purchase-based targeting from third-party data companies. In many circumstances, it has given brands opportunities to identify buyers, define their characteristics and build up interpretable targets; however, it has also revealed its inherent limitation. This limitation includes the operational challenges of efficient delivery and effective measurement.
Consider for a moment the lack of retailer insights that can impact today’s purchase-based targeting tactics. Primarily, the method falls short of capturing where customers shop for a product and why. Brands end up with limited visibility into shoppers’ purchase dynamics.
That’s where signal-based targeting serves an enhancement to today’s more traditional approach.
What impacts the choice of retailer?
Let’s remember that where customers choose to shop matters. The choice might be affected by convenience, location, services or competitive offers. For example, geographic proximity to home or work can influence the choice of retailer. When and where a retailer schedules a promotion can impact consumer decisions. Just as much, which brands or products a retailer carries can be important to a consumer because it gives them access to the products they like.
All of these signals and metrics give way for more impactful media delivery that drives a higher return on investment. But pulling them all together through a unified, customer-centric analytics approach is complex, and is only now taking off.
At mdrk Consulting, we’ve partnered with Triad Retail Media as it develops a new platform for signal-based, data-driven media programs.
By connecting the consumer journey and its relationship to a retailer, this proprietary solution enables brands to reach the most relevant shopper and convert them to buyers in real-time. Triad’s platform makes it possible for brands to pinpoint product usage and penetration by retailer, while taking shopper footfall and frequency of visits into consideration. It can also deliver based on audience, locations, price and promotions, and certain trigger events.
For brands, what matters now is knowing shopper behaviors, purchase dynamics and understanding where consumers shop. By bringing these multiple data signals into one place and stitching them together, the most effective, next-generation media solution is now available to brands.
—
Sumi Duttaray is cofounder and principal owner of mdrk Consulting, a boutique data analytics consulting firm based in New York City. She is an expert in consumer data analytics, insights and brand research, and previously worked with American Express, Barclaycards, Wolters Kluwer and the NPD Group.
