Improving the Return-on-Investment of Your Point-of-Sale Marketing

Recently I saw a demonstration of a software product that seems to fill a gap when it comes to ‘measuring’ point-of-sale (POS) marketing campaigns. That gap, when it relates to POS Markteting is — The verification of placement.

Are Your POS Marketing Materials Being Placed?

Or when asked as a question: Did that costly marketing campaign you ordered and produced actually get placed? Where? When? And by Whom? In the consumer goods industry this is sometimes called placement compliance.

For over five years, we have been implementing point-of-sale marketing management solutions for companies and brands that rely heavily on POS marketing to increase sales and improve profitability. It has always been assumed — both by our customers and by us — that most of the POS marketing materials are placed where and when they were supposed to be placed.

What we’ve learned as we viewed this POS compliance product is that quite often POS marketing materials that have been ordered, produced and delivered are not placed. In fact, they sometimes end up in someone’s trunk. According to industry studies, it is not uncommon that “about 50%” of all POS materials are never placed!

POS Marketing Management + Verification

There is very little being done to assure placement verification and compliance. Some large consumer goods companies hire thousands of temporary workers who go to the retailers and check up on supplier’s and distributor’s poiint-of-sale marketing placements. This is often a manual, time-consuming and tedious process. The costs of these manual verification efforts are very high and the results are often unknown for days or longer.

In previous Blog postings we have noted that OnTrak’s products do track the ordering, production and costs of POS initiatives; and measure the ”before and after” impact of POS marketing campaigns. In addition, the products provide both fixed format and ad hoc management reports.

After seeing a demonstration of the verification software, I realized that providing a photograph of the POS materials at the retailer’s store improves our ability to measure the impact of POS marketing campaigns. You no longer have to “assume” the POS materials that were produced are where their supposed to be! You can see visual verification.

Conclusion

It seems to me that if you have access to a system that allows you to track, measure, manage and visually verify POS placement compliance, the measurement of your POS impact will be much more accurate. With this verification, our management reporting tools may now be able to provide more actionable information to improve your POS marketing ROI, and increase your chances of success.

We welcome your comments. Please share your thoughts below. Thanks.

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