One Blog |November 13, 2018 | POS Performance

Measuring Point-of-Sale Marketing Performance

Mark Fullerton

Determining the Results of POS Marketing Campaigns

How effective the Point-of-Sale (POS) Marketing campaigns you place at your customers isn’t a straightforward cause and effect proposition.

Because of this, it is difficult to know what POS style and content has the greatest impact.

You want to stay at least one step ahead of your competition at-retail, but simply getting your POS to the trade first often may not be enough.

Spending marketing dollars without understanding what works best means you’re guessing — which can be costly if you don’t know what POS initiatives were more or less effective based on correlation of POS to sales orders.

Because of the lack of data, you probably have caught yourself saying:

“I want to know the impact of a POS campaign on my customer’s sales and therefore the orders they place; I want to know which POS placements are followed by increased demand.”
“I’m not sure if I’m placing the wrong POS type or the wrong POS content in my customers.”

Too often distributors aren’t sure if the time and money being spent on POS marketing are actually even working.

Many distributors — due to their years of experience — know POS marketing works, but beyond that, they’re simply guessing.

Take the Guesswork Out of POS Marketing Results

When you guess about the results your POS marketing programs provide, you really aren’t analyzing what happened, you are basing your conclusions on a hunch, pure speculation.

You’re essentially placing POS in your customer’s aisle and hoping for the best. Without analytics you can’t measure the impact of one POS campaign vs. another.

You really have no idea what influences shoppers to become buyers.

Employing POS marketing measurement (i.e., analytics) starts by accessing and combining data from your POS Tracking system and from your Order Management system for every single customer for given periods of time — thirteen months allows the impact of seasonality to be taken into account, for example.

Then once a positive correlation (this POS type and content is followed by a change in demand for the items featured via the POS) is discovered using specialized analytical software to create “dashboards” showing your POS’ key performance indicators (“KPIs”) you will be able to develop a plan to help you create optimal campaigns for future POS marketing initiatives.

Measuring Point-of-Sale Marketing Performance

Without Reporting and Analytics, You’re Flying Blind

Without reporting and analytics utilizing dashboards, your sales teams will have a difficult time knowing what POS is actually the most effective at increasing demand for the beverage-alcohol brands they sell to your retail customers.

As a result, distributor’s sales reps sometimes miss opportunities to increase sales, simply because they didn’t have an efficient and effective way of knowing what POS types, placement, and content works best.

Although starting with POS tracking is a very important first-step, as you and your sales reps become adept at using such systems, the next level is to be able to use the POS data collected to analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of your POS marketing.

Enhancements to OnTrak Products to Make Measuring POS Performance Possible

OnTrak’s latest software updates, starting with PermaTrak 2019â„¢, have incorporated the embedded analytics platform from Tableau. This platform allows us to provide our customers with state-of-the-art interrogation of one or many POS tracking data-bases in order to see and understand the relationship between POS placements and sales.

Since many of our customers sell beer for a living and are creators of large amounts of data, we believe you should use that data to make your POS more productive.

We urge you, as a beverage-alcohol distributor to ask about “tools” to provide you with the analysis to make you as successful as possible.

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