Compared to organizations in other industries, CPG companies spend a colossal amount of money on marketing and advertising spend. In fact, in a report by the CMO Survey, it was discovered that CPG companies allocate the highest percentage of the total company budget for marketing. And this spend is divided among various channels across both traditional (banners, print, radio, TV etc.) and digital media (social, search etc.).
However, most of this advertising spend doesn’t fully enable sales and marketing decision-makers to assess if they are realizing the maximum ROI for every dollar spent. We’ve encountered several CPG clients who’ve been forced to waste budget and resources on ad campaigns which have little to no impact on sales.
Learn More: The Secret Solutions That Increased The Marketing ROI of Fortune 100 FMCG Companies By Over 3%
This is primarily because CPG marketers run advertisement campaigns based on gut or partial intelligence or past experiences, resulting in several lost opportunities.
The fact of the matter is that the 5 P’s of marketing – Product, Price, People, Place and Promotion for any CPG business are incredibly diverse. There are numerous factors that influence consumer behaviours and there are several channels to advertise and reach consumers. This overwhelms decision-makers as they can’t accurately spot which type of ad campaign yields the most ROI and delivers the highest sales uplift.
As a result, they go back to their old ways of running campaigns based on what past experiences teach them – but what worked in the past may not be equally effective for a different product or location or time period.
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A major CPG company headquartered in the UK spent heavily on various advertising campaigns with a primary objective – driving sales of its health products. As the decisions on the type of ad campaigns to be run are based on gut, advertisements were run for the entire season without analysing the impact on sales uplift. This resulted in a huge and unoptimized ad budget.
This significantly increased the advertising spend with little to no impact on the sales uplift. In addition, the marketing team was not able to predict future sales accurately.
Acuvate’s approach to solving the company’s challenges included 3 steps.
1. Gather Important Data
The first step of the solution was to collect data from key sources which have the highest impact on the sales of health products.
- Social media (Twitter feeds)
- Weather (past, current and future)
- Disease outbreak data
- Past sales data of the products
2. Transforming Data Into Insights With AI-Powered Analytics
Once the raw data was collected, the next step was to derive actionable intelligence from it. Most of the data was very unstructured. Acuvate used AI-Powered analytics and machine learning algorithms to effectively harness and transform it into a structured format and meaningful insights recommending which specific weeks the advertisements should be run for which product and in which region.
3. Build Interactive Dashboards and Reports
Birst, a BI software and analytics platform was leveraged to build flexible dashboards and reports. Users can customize and change several parameters within the dashboards according to their needs without depending on MIS or IT teams and make decisions on when to run an ad campaign for a specific region and product.
What Users Can Do With the Solution
- Get crisp recommendations on running the right advertisement at the right location at the right time in the right channel.
- Receive real-time alerts for disease outbreaks or occurrence of rain etc.
- Get campaign ROI for each media type – Radio, TV, Social media, Print Media, Banners etc.
- Forecast sales for each campaign
- Compare actual sales with predicted sales
- Understand sales uplift for every advertisement run.
Maximize Advertising ROI With Compass’ Advertising Analytics
Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine – Gartner
Consumer and buying behaviour is dependent on several influencing factors in the CPG business. Even though most companies are enthusiastic to make data-driven marketing decisions, many are unsure of the roadmap to be followed.
Learn more: CPG Marketing & Sales: Harnessing Big Data & AI to Boost Revenue
Acuvate’s Compass provides advertising analytics solutions for CPG marketers to profitably optimize advertising spend on different types of media, brands, locations, etc. Our solution helps you integrate and harmonize data from various influential market and consumer touch points like
- Weather
- Events
- POS Data
- Digital Media
- Social Media
- Search Analytics
- Market research data etc.
Our solution then harnesses the data feed by using advanced analytics and transforms the raw data into meaningful insights and recommendations for running the right campaigns. This helps decision-makers spend less time analyzing data and more time gaining insights from it. You can also build what-if scenarios with defined budget constraints and goal parameters like maximizing revenue or volume or profitability etc. If you’d like to explore more about Compass and its capabilities, feel free to sign up for a quick demo with one of our experts.
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