Online shopping may be big in 2016, but brick-and-mortar retailers aren’t disappearing anytime soon. (In the irony of all ironies, Amazon is opening bookstores on the West Coast.) Some products (for now) simply make more sense to buy in store: perishables, heavy items with expensive shipping costs, and items with variable pricing (e.g. competitive food brands vying for shelf placement in the grocery). Of course, there are viable online alternatives to all of those items, but the reality is… the average consumer is not buying groceries, bags of mulch, and new sofas online. Most consumers continue to go into a brick-and-mortar store for these types of goods.
For brands and marketers trying to attribute brick-and-mortar sales to digital marketing campaigns and channels, this gets messy. Brian Stempeck, who works in a tech company for media buyers, offers a new way forward in a recent AdWeek article. Stempeck suggests that since we still live in an age where major retailers like “Target and Wal-Mart only get about 3 percent of their sales online,” we should expand our view of marketing attribution.
Read more about some of our advice regarding attribution in Discovering the ROI of Social Media.
Use Digital. But Don’t Limit Your Marketing Team.
Stempeck suggests…
- Use offline sales metrics. SKUs, zip codes, shelves, stores… all of this data and more may be available to you. Don’t ignore it. Dig through any and all data you have to identify trends and find out what’s working (as well as what’s not).
- Partner with offline metric services. Cardlytics is one service we’ve been impressed by. The data company has deals with 1,500+ financial institutions, which allows them to peak into credit card purchases. Cardlytics can take your cookies and data sets on ad impressions and connect them with the behaviors of the actual in-store purchases.
- Do a wild experiment on a local level. And if it works, take it national. You could, for example, kill all marketing except for one channel in a particular market (thereby isolating the marketing campaign) and measure the results. If the test generates a sales lift, you could apply that strategy to other markets. The risk can be big, but so can the payoff.
Physical Street Teams… Digitally Organized
At BuzzPlant, our own team has been bridging the physical/digital worlds of marketing and attribution for over a decade. We’ve had great success in organizing street teams in target markets all around the U.S. for book and movie releases. We build and incentivize street team members with prizes, exclusive promo materials, and usually a grand prize to the movie premiere.
The result is an extensive on-the-ground team of brand advocates who will share our client’s campaign with their friends, family, and community leaders. These influencers provide an invaluable way for us to connect with a massive audience that simply wouldn’t be as effective and affordable if we were to limit the campaign to “digital-only.”
Do you attribute your physical sales to digital campaigns? If so, how?