Marketing that moves product
Practical advice on retail media advertising + breaking news on 🐝 in the orchards
Last week I explained what shopper marketing is, when to plan for it, and why it’s important. Today, I’ll help you out with some practical advice. But before we get to that —
Breaking news:
If you ate only one type of food every day, you’d not be healthy. Just as a balanced diet is important for humans to be healthy, so it is for bees🐝 as well. This is immediately important because I wrote a series on regenerative almond farming this past spring and failed to mention that probably the most important reason to plant cover crops is so bees have more than one thing to eat.
In the last of that series, I visited the ideal almond orchards of Gemperle Orchards, full of mustards and flowers that feed bees, and learned Christine Gemperle’s view on what it will take for the regenerative industry to scale.
And turns out, we can’t just gloss over the bee thing. The BBC nailed it last week. Watch here at 44.40 Christine Gemperle explains:
If you’re not convinced, take a look at how the demand for bee colonies and shipments of colonies are not catching up to meet almond acreage needs.
It’s not just for the almonds. If we don’t figure out the bee problem, we are all screwed and will have to colonize Mars sooner than later.
If you’re an almond grower, please do your part. Almond processor Select Harvest recently added >9K acres of certified Bee Friendly almonds because more of their growers are stepping up. Learn how they did it on Select Harvest’s podcast episode here.
Learn about Seeds for Bees program on the Almond Journey podcast here
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Shopper marketing includes retail media advertising, and has the ability to influence what is happening in stores though digital ads.
Let’s get into it.
Merchandizing
Before you execute on any shopper marketing, you’ve got to be actively monitoring your shelf placement, number of facings (and SKU assortment), and that your price tags are correct. This is the job of merchandizers and if you do not have merchandizers, run don’t walk and hire a team. These are the boots-on-the-ground that will report the store by store happenings and fix problems for you. You need this, especially if you are a new-ish brand, because most retailers are still short staffed and struggling to keep products stocked.
Merchandizers:
Why do I need merchandizers if I have brokers?
If your brokers go to each of your store locations once a week and report back to you complete with shelf pics then you’re right, you don’t need merchandizers.
How much do merchandizers cost?
$1500 - $2000 per region
I am going to focus on the retail media aspect of shopper marketing. But remember it is important to align the in-store efforts with the online.
Instacart
Advertising on Instacart should be at the top of your retail media plan. Once you start showing up on Instacart, you can go into your Ad Manager account and optimize your listings and add products. Instacart has been removing restrictions for brands so you have more control. Other great things:
· ROAS on ads is very good (like 7 or 8 good)
· Sponsored Search results are good
· Self-service Display offering is good – (these are the banner ads that require you to upload creative. It’s upper funnel marketing which typically start-ups don’t do, however Instacart has opened up a new bidding structure that makes this cheap and effective).
Remember, consumer purchases on Instacart are running through the register at the retailer. This counts towards your velocity at that retailer. You want your product listings to show up when consumers type in certain keywords or competitor keywords – the first 3 placements perform the highest.
Budget = $1,000 - $ 3,000/mo
Retail Platform ecommerce advertising
Find out who runs the ads on your retailer websites and coordinate campaigns. Reach out to 3rd parties such as Criteo and CitrusAd. You can run ads on individual retailers and get reporting broken down to the retailer level.
Budget - $1,000 - $3,000/mo
Digital Coupons
Once you’re winning the bid on paid search, you’ll want to offer deals to drive trial. Retailers usually don’t upload TPRs onto ecomm platforms so you’ll want to run coupons. Inmar and Quotient offer solutions but you can run coupons more inexpensively. Look at Mandlik & Rhodes.
Budget: highly variable, you set the limit
Ibotta
If you are distributed at Walmart, or nationally with a top 10 Ibotta retailer, you’ll want an Ibotta program. If you’ve been reading this newsletter you know I’m big on Ibotta. Ibotta works as a loyalty program that uses verified consumer purchase data to target consumers and keep them coming back to re-purchase your products.
Management
If you have no experience with retail media advertising, you can hire help. For example, if you don’t know what an attribution window is, get help. Selecting keywords and monitoring your bids frequently (like daily in some cases), and analyzing campaigns by aligning attribution windows is part of the management required.
Thanks to these shopper marketing experts for the tips and tricks in this post. These are the folks you’ll want to hire as fractional help to get your shopper marketing program rolling:
All my best,
Jennifer
News
The FDA currently does not regulate food safety in the meal delivery businesses. in June of this year superstar meal delivery company Daily Harvest issued a voluntary recall for illness related to the French Lentil SKU. A month later the source of the pathogen was identified. Read about it here —
