Making the Most of Point-of-Sale Marketing - Track, Measure, Manage

TRACK — Configure, Produce and Place POS

MEASURE — Where, When, How Much Spent and the Sales Impact?

MANAGE — Analyze and Report on Supplier Bill-Backs, Profitability and ROI

Perhaps no ‘place’ is more important to the sales of most consumer goods than the last point of contact between shopper and product.

For most consumer goods companies, the growth of marketing spend continues to sharpen focus on turning shoppers into buyers at the so-called ‘moment of truth’ — The point-of-selection, aka, the point-of-sale. POS spending is on the rise, often displacing some of traditional marketing’s budget.

The US POS marketing spend is now approaching $21 billion. Despite its growing share of the marketing budget, POS is often challenged with respect to its effectiveness. We believe this is because POS activities are often not tracked, measured and managed, and unfortunately not always aligned with the brand’s overall marketing plans.

We’ve noted here in our blogs that POS marketing is often defensive or reactive. Many times a brand or product’s POS initiatives are influenced by competitors. The result of this defensive approach is what we call “…a failure to communicate.” (See Note 1)

When this happens there is little or no connection between overall brand marketing and the brand’s POS marketing.  Until POS marketing initiatives are synchronized with the overall brand marketing plan this disconnect will remain. Based on our experience with our customers, it is our opinion that the POS marketing initiatives should be developed before the rest of the marketing plan, and then linked together.  

Of course this approach assumes one of your goals of a marketing campaign is to sell more of the product!

10 Steps to Managing Your POS Marketing Process

If you agree, then here is a high level overview of the steps you can take to make the most of your POS marketing:

1. Define your sales objectives for the brand
2. Develop your POS campaigns and then create your traditional marketing initiatives
3. Determine your budget and allocate spend to correspond to your sales objectives (See #1)
4. Develop the criteria for POS placement (Remember the costs to create and place POS marketing materials is virtually identical for high and low traffic volume retailers)
5. Track the orders and placement of your POS
6. Measure the impact by correlating the sales change (up or down) to POS placement dates
7. Compare POS spend to sales increases to determine the ROI of a POS campaign by customer, territory, region
8. Compare the outcome to objectives (See #1)
9. Manage expectations and if needed develop and implement changes to campaigns, or modify your objectives
10. Repeat as needed

OnTrak provides a set of standardized business systems to manage this POS marketing process, as well as a set of analysis and reporting tools to help you measure the effectiveness and ROI of the process.

To learn more about OnTrak products, please click this button:

Note 1 - Quote from the 1967 movie classic, “Cool Hand Luke” — attributed to the prison warden played by Strother Martin