Planning a national drive-to-store campaign should be done with a store-centric strategy in place to increase visits. Although bringing a national campaign with a store-centric strategy together might be a bit more complex, you already have all the knowledge you need from regional or local activities. You’ll just need to apply that perspective to a wider campaign to ensure that you maximize your performance per store, and you’ll be able to see a consistent uplift across all your points of sale.
These are the four key areas to include in your plan for an effective store-centric strategy:
1. The location of your store
If you use the same strategy for metropolitan stores and the ones in less populated or frequented areas, you’ll find that they don’t respond the same to your advertising efforts. For example, the catchment area – the maximum distance from your store where it’s most likely to find your customers – around metropolitan stores tends to be fairly small, but rural areas attract customers that live or work further away.
With Fusio, our drive-to-store platform, you can use a proprietary location targeting tool that takes into account true travel distance and brand affinity, so that you can easily find the dynamic catchment area of each of your stores.
2. Personalizing your ads with DCO
Having a strategy per store also gives you the opportunity to use DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimization to show directions or the address of the closest store for each consumer who sees your ad. Or even specific discounts that are only available at selected stores.
Using our studio service and proprietary creatives, we can work together to ensure your campaign has the right message for each store and helps consumers find their way to you more easily.
3. Setting a budget per store
If you set a budget for your campaign but don’t specify it for individual stores, advertising platforms will optimize to increase your overall visitation uplift, without taking into account that certain stores might need more support to achieve the same results as others. This means stores that don’t register as many incremental visits at the start of the campaign, or that are in less populated areas (and thus cannot generate absolute values for visits as high as others), are left further and further behind by optimizing towards your best performing stores.
This can be manually corrected, but it’s easily avoided by setting a budget per store that takes into account the store characteristics and priority for your business. That way you can ensure that all your stores are evenly benefiting from your advertising activity.
4. Discover trends and insights at the store level to feedback your strategy
Finally, by thinking about your campaign at the store level, you’ll be able to easily generate insights that are particular to each store and feed them back to your campaign tactics in real time. When you are already thinking about how to increase your visitation across all POS, you’ll be more likely to search for and see trends that could have been missed with a national approach.
Having a strategy and a budget set per store allows you more ease and flexibility on your optimizations and to increase your performance across the board. If you want to know how that would look for your brand, please get in touch.