Improving Holiday Media Planning for Retail and CPG Brands
We all know the holidays are a pivotal time for retail and CPG brands. It’s during this period that these categories tend to invest significant marketing dollars to reach their target audiences. However, these investments are often wasted, as consumers are already going to purchase products like stuffing mix or cranberry sauce for their holiday gatherings. As such, the need to market these products is minimal.
Yet CPG brands continue to invest in bottom-of-the-funnel marketing tactics such as discounts or BOGO offers to entice shoppers, thinking that not investing any money into the holiday season will lead to a decline in sales or that their competitors will take away their market share. What they fail to realize is actually that throwing dollars at bottom-of-the-funnel tactics leads to more damage to their brand and their bottom line. By investing in the wrong formats, their marketing dollars need to work harder to achieve return on investment.
Instead, these brands should invest in other tactics that meet the sweet spot between demand and spend. One way to do this is to use marketing mix models to optimize marketing budgets for a more balanced approach. Marketing mix models can use a brand’s existing dataset and historical data from overall retail marketing to analyze different spending scenarios, providing an optimal mix of channels and tactics to deliver the best ROI.
For example, a company selling pumpkin pie mix can determine that instead of investing 70 percent of its marketing budget towards the bottom of the funnel, it would be better off investing that 70 percent in the top of the funnel. This ensures that the brand is maximizing its marketing budget during the holiday months, helping boost revenue during a pivotal time for seasonal brands.
Should these brands be hesitant to shift away from their bottom-of-the-funnel tactics, they could also change the timing of their marketing efforts, ensuring that they’re making the most of the prime weeks for purchases of their product. For example, a stuffing brand with an always-on marketing strategy could choose to cut back during the summer months, when consumers aren’t often cooking meals in the oven, and instead allocate those dollars to the weeks before Thanksgiving and Christmas to help build momentum for shoppers who might be getting a head start on their holiday meal planning. As a result, the brand could increase its marketing contributed revenue while using the same amount of annual marketing dollars.
Overall, the holiday season represents a pivotal period for retail and CPG brands. While many of these brands throw their entire budgets towards this time of year, that doesn’t always guarantee the results they’re looking for. By creating a strategy that optimizes their marketing budgets, they’ll maximize their dollars and create a bottom line fit for the festivities.
Greg Dolan is the CEO and co-founder of Keen Decision Systems, a company that offers real-time marketing insights to help you learn from what you've spent, pivot based on your goals, and predict the best path to create value.
