Brand-retailers’ partnerships: Precision Marketing finally accessible to brands!

Antoine Grégoire, Marketing Manager at Numberly, intervened at this 2019One to One Biarritz conference to introduce Precision Marketing. For all brands, one of the biggest challenges when creating marketing strategies is measuring the impact of media activations on sales and business. With Precision Marketing, the possibilities of follow-up go even further thanks to the partnership between certain brands and distributors.

How do these partnerships improve customer knowledge?

One of the stakes of this partnership is to reconcile brands and distributors, who traditionally had a conflictual relationship, and to enter into a logic of partnership.

Brands and distributors can reconcile in the field of data:

• Distributors are historically linked to CRM, the world of loyalty cards.
• The customer data collected is named or also called PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
• Brands are more traditionally led to purchase media spaces; it is the world of cookies and internet browsing. Their data are not nominative or non-PII.

These brand-distributor partnerships are interesting to better understand the consumer. For brands that pass-through distributors, it is difficult to follow the information up to the end of the sales cycle, which makes it difficult to optimise marketing investments.

These partnerships make it possible to identify purchases made by people from media campaigns. Antoine Gregoire, coordinator of media activations for brands at the Numberly agency, explains: “What is essential is the notion of People Based. That is, how we are able to talk to individuals and not cookies.”

The other possibility offered by brand-retailers’ partnerships is to have a better knowledge of CRM loyalty programmes. This pooling helps to understand if some consumers have a greater propensity to purchase than people who are not in the customer loyalty programme.

How can they optimise marketing investments?

One of the main challenges for brands is to understand the consumer funnel and optimise marketing investments so that they are carried out at the right level. Thanks to the brand-distributor partnerships, if marketing investments are made at the beginning of the funnel, and if at some point blockages occur, it is possible to identify these blockages and use Precision Marketing to streamline the customer journey.

American businessman John Wanamaker said, “half the money I spend on advertising is lost, the problem is which half”.

So far, a lot of metrics are used to understand the effect of ad media activation, but in the end, it’s just clicks rates, traffic figures … while with partnerships it is possible to clearly link marketing activations with performance and sales. This novelty makes it possible to make optimisations truly based on sales and allows to better calibrate and measure investments.

How do brand-retailers partnerships access Precision Marketing?

With the partnerships mentioned above, brands no longer advance on hypotheses. Sales are measured to confirm if activations are effective and if so, which ones. We are at the beginning of this journey to Precision Marketing.

To understand the performance measurement of activations, it is necessary to go beyond a model of attribution and calculation to the CPA, which is biased. If you want to optimize the CPA, you must communicate to people who have already visited the site, because the probability is higher that people go to buy on the site. Is this really the incremental business? Would these not be customers who would not have come back to the site to consume? That’s where the bias is.

The alternative proposal to achieve Precision Marketing and optimize marketing activations is a control group logic: we expose a group of identified individuals to stimulus. However, a small portion of these individuals will not be exposed. The behaviour of these unexposed people will be measured: what is the level of sales generated by this small group of individuals? A difference is then made between these groups. It is the difference between the two that makes it possible to measure the increment generated by the marketing activations.

Focus on establishing a brand-distributor partnership

This kind of partnership is possible because it is win-win in terms of marketing strategy:

• For distributors: this strengthens ties with the brand. Distributors want to change their relationship with brands because it is a source of growth and a source of customer knowledge.
• For brands, this allows them to optimise their media investments through better customer knowledge and sales measurement.

It is very important not to forget the consumer: the data is based on the consumer, so he must find his account. Consumers will be happy to share their data as long as they are interested. We must ensure that, at each stage, there is a contribution of value. For example, Precision Marketing exerts less commercial pressure, a more appropriate tone, less intrusion...  

Speaker:

Antoine Grégoire, Senior Web Marketing Operations Manager - Numberly – Groupe 1000 Mercis