How To Get A Better Return From Your POS Marketing Investment

Place Your Bets

What if you could go into a casino, walk up to the roulette table and put down a winning bet? What if you could repeat this behavior? And, what if there was no cheating or other illegal activity involved in making this bit of good luck happen? 

Well, one thing is for certain, if we all could win every time we placed a bet, we would put the casinos out of business in no time. 

Since it isn’t possible to know the winning bet, most folks who play these games of chance, tend to limit how much they’ll lose before they quit playing. Of course, not knowing the winning number, hand, horse or football team doesn’t stop people from betting. However, serious gamblers do everything they can to increase their chances of winning. Perhaps this is why serious gamblers don’t play slot machines.

POS Marketing — Place a Winning Bet

Yet many — probably nearly all — beverage alcohol distributors don’t have any clue about what marketing works to help them “win” with retail shoppers. Most distributors create and place point-of-sale (POS) marketing materials with the basic understanding that they can’t win if they don’t play. 

What has historically not been available to them is what it takes to “place a winning bet” at the point-of-sale.

POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ for tracking, measuring and managing POS Marketing attempt to take chance out of the point-of-sale marketing game by measuring and reporting on the efficiency and effectiveness of various types, sizes and placements of POS. Unfortunately, most distributor methods for developing and utilizing POS haven’t kept up with the analytical tools that have come to the market over the past decade. 

Considering the ever rising costs associated with POS, this is confusing.

After payroll, the second largest expense for beverage alcohol distributors is POS marketing; yet most distributors don’t employ POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ to enable the tracking, measuring and managing of their POS initiatives. Indeed, some distributors often use nothing more than pre-printed paper or tablet PC forms for ordering POS — and they stop there.

Perhaps they are unaware that there are purpose-built POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ that will do for POS marketing what knowing the winning bet would do for them when playing roulette. 

What POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ Can Do For You

These types of tools can correlate your POS marketing campaigns to sales for your entire territory and can also be sharply focused on the impact of a POS marketing campaign on sales at an individual retail customer within campaign start and stop dates. 

As the saying goes, “knowledge is power.” 

At this point it should be pointed out that product seasonality, special or external promotional events (e.g., the Super Bowl or the 4th of July), and even the state of the economy can all affect the ROI of your POS campaigns. It is also important to keep in mind the differences between established beverage alcohol brands and the new craft beers, wines and spirits few have even heard of. 

This is why it is important to invest in POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ that will keep at least 25 months’ worth of POS campaign history, and to make sure your back-office (order entry) system is set to save data at least for the same period of time as your POS tracking system.

It should be noted that a POS tracking system will only deliver the benefits described above if your sales, marketing and promotions people who are involved in your POS initiatives also participate in the measurement and management of your POS marketing programs. 

In some cases, our customers purchase two or more of our Digital Toolsâ„¢ and only use them for their POS ordering and permanent POS inventory control functions. 

But they’re missing out on the real power of POS tracking. Unless you get involved with the analytical capabilities of our software tools you will lose most of the ability of knowing where, when and how much to “bet.” 

Take Action

Ready to see a demo of our unique POS Digital Toolsâ„¢ for tracking, measuring and managing your investment in POS marketing and your draught line cleaning activities, please click the following link: Request a Demo, or call our product experts at (513) 936-4041.

It may well be the best 30-45 minutes you’ve spent in a long time.