5 Reasons to Partner with Shopper Marketing
By Shari Steinbach, MS RDN, RDBA Contributing Editor
With more competition and more retail channels seeking customers, the role of shopper marketing departments is increasingly becoming an important, efficient and measurable way to support business success. Indeed, shopper marketers hold a lot of power. Using insights-driven marketing and merchandising initiatives, their goal is to satisfy the needs of targeted shoppers. Retail dietitians would benefit from partnering with internal shopper marketing teams to advance health and wellness programming. Here are 5 reasons to pursue this connection.
- Create more efficient, targeted programs – By understanding the shopping experience from customer’s point of view, and knowing how consumers make decisions, shopper marketing can help you create a more direct and effective approach to your programming and outreach. For example, if you are trying to drive sales of new better-for-you, private brands, shopper marketing may let you know that they discovered couponing and demos are no longer as effective for promoting product trial, but recipes are winning out. Consider the power of their insights showing that in fact, recipes are the number one reason that shoppers decide to try new products. This supports your direction to provide more Pinterest posts, food blogs or cooking videos for your retailer.
- Discover when and how to influence shoppers – By identifying the key moments when consumers make decisions in stores, shopper marketing can help you identify opportune times and locations for educational activation. Being at the right place at the right time will help you reach more customers, communicate messages that will resonate, and drive increased sales for your retailer.
- Maximize return on investment – Shopper marketing can help you quickly and cost-effectively test and optimize merchandising programs, signage initiatives, wellness communications, health promotions and more. Maximizing and reporting a return on investment is a task every retail dietitian must accomplish to justify current roles and department expansion.
- Reach shoppers online - Shopper teams need to remain in the local mindset to do their work. Consider this for online shopping. They think about how young families will get their groceries as the pandemic subsides. Will they continue to use click and collect rather than head back into the store regularly? If so, where will they turn for meal inspiration? Are they using digital recipes to plan grocery trips? When are they thinking about ideas for this week’s dinners? It’s this level of insight that can help your team decide the best way to provide nutrition information and meal ideas to online shoppers.
- Plan for the future – As you plan future wellness strategies, touching base with shopper marketing can be very beneficial. Not only can you obtain key information about the behaviors of your key target shoppers, but they can help you look ahead at trends, specific category growth, and provide an overview of the total retail landscape moving forward.
