Introducing New Software for Shopper Marketing Planning
The average shopper marketer is overworked and underequipped. They typically plan 20 to 50 marketing programs per year. For every program, the shopper marketer must develop a budget and, in the end, capture data that shows the program was effective. Brand managers are accountable, too, but they have information systems to help them manage their programs and budgets. And what do shopper marketers have? Typically, their main tool is a spreadsheet.
“Shopper marketers have many stakeholders, deal with constant changes, and have the least amount of tools.” — Rick Abens, CEO, Foresight ROI
Most shopper marketing teams use spreadsheets and email to plan and track programs. Manually configuring and updating spreadsheets—with changes occurring all the time—is a tedious and error-prone process. With team members maintaining their own spreadsheets, literally no one is on the same page and inconsistencies abound. When, at the end of an event, there’s difficulty rolling up multiple spreadsheets into a report for stakeholders, a shopper marketer like yourself may question the way things have always been done. “There’s got to be a better way,” you tell yourself while wrangling with rows and columns.
A Collaborative Planning and Budgeting Platform
Now, there is a better way. Forget old-school spreadsheets. Spend less time on data entry and documentation and more time on marketing. Foresight ROI introduces Shopper Planner, a collaborative platform for planning and budgeting. This cloud-based software helps your entire team plan and execute shopper marketing events, and, if used in conjunction with our Shopper Foresight solution, you can also measure those events and forecast the results of future events. As a standalone solution, Shopper Planner enables your team to seamlessly plan events, working with the same data accessible from any browser and updated in real time.
With Shopper Planner, you can create budgets and plans in a matter of minutes. Manage all your work from a dashboard that integrates all your data and shopper marketing events, allowing you to plan right down to the UPC level. Because it’s collaborative software with one dashboard, Shopper Planner improves communication and keeps everyone up to date on the status of every budget and planned event. Shopper marketing plans are always evolving, and Shopper Planner provides all stakeholders with real-time visibility to changes as they occur. Finally, everyone’s on the same page.
- Shopper Planner enables you to make changes and communicate them across the enterprise with the click of a button.
Save Time Planning and Reporting
Planning multiple shopper marketing programs is complicated because each must integrate with brand marketing and trade promotion plans. Any changes to the brand marketing and trade promotion plans necessitates changes to the shopper marketing programs, but not the other way around. At any stage of development, a shopper marketer’s program plans and budget allocations are subject to change. Unlike spreadsheets, which aren’t meant to present information visually, Shopper Planner’s graphical representations make it fast and simple to plan programs and make frequent changes while keeping track of every budget.
The finance department requires shopper marketers to track spending, and stakeholders want to see results. Using spreadsheets, financial reporting takes shopper marketing teams several hours, and spreadsheets offer poor visuals of program plans and results. Now, you can generate on-demand financial reports. Shopper Planner’s report generation tools save time and effort, presenting event results to executives, shopper marketing managers, and retail customers with configurable formats and clear, intuitive graphics.
- Shopper Planner takes complex information and displays it in a clear, visual, and useful format.
Foresight ROI’s Integrated Solution
Shopper Planner integrates with Foresight ROI’s Shopper Foresight solution. Shopper Planner is your day-to-day planning tool that captures data for analytics. Shopper Foresight performs the analytics so you can measure a program’s return on investment and build a case for getting a fair share of the overall marketing budget. Using predictive analytics, Shopper Foresight supports decision making, analyzing historical data to forecast the financial performance and overall effectiveness of shopper marketing events in the planning stages. The goal is to repeat what is working and revise where there are improvement opportunities as part of an ongoing measure-learn-improve process.
- Consistent, frequent use of Shopper Foresight typically results in a 10% or more increase on shopper marketing ROI each year.
Though both are standalone solutions, Shopper Planner and Shopper Foresight are most powerful when used together. Shopper Foresight on its own often uses data extracted from spreadsheets, and it takes time to get data from the event, brand, customer, and tactic levels. Shopper Planner makes the process more efficient by capturing data, which is then run through Shopper Foresight to measure ROI, make forecasts, and inform decisions. Shopper Planner has an intelligence capability that reports Shopper Foresight’s findings, so the information is at hand each time you create a budget and plan a program.
Shopper marketers in the past have lacked tools, but with Shopper Planner and Shopper Foresight, used separately or together, they’ll have the technology needed to make their jobs easier and to save valuable time.
Foresight ROI is the leader in shopper marketing measurement, decision support, and software solutions for CPG companies and retailers. To learn more about our measurement, software or industry ROI benchmark solutions, contact us at: contact@ForesightROI.com or 312-575-0024