Selling a product at Walmart can be a major win for any company, but keeping their skews on the shelves can be a challenge all on its own. The leaders at Keen Directive have the knowledge and experience to help boost a company’s sales and direct traffic to a particular retailer. The Keen Directive team worked with one client in particular on an extensive and comprehensive marketing campaign designed to boost sales and drive consumers to purchase their product at Walmart.
Walmart has a huge global client base and in order to ensure the volume necessary to drive a commitment from this major retailer, the client needed a product that sold quickly in a pilot release (that normally includes about 1,200 stores). If this failed, they wouldn’t get their product on the shelves of its 4,500 locations nationwide. Therefore, the client needed to create as broad an appeal as possible for its products which is one of many areas where Keen Directive could help.
As more brands competed for shelf space, the company also had to compete for consumer attention and brand recognition. The marketing communication challenges for this client involved driving a huge segment of consumers to Walmart and convincing them to buy their products once in store.
After a comprehensive consultation followed by an in-depth assessment, the Keen Directive team suggested a Walmart Launch using Google Ads, Display Ad Retargeting and a Social Media Campaign to support a series of targeted landing pages designed to drive people into Walmart stores by offering a promotion redeemable only when they bought.
Keen Directive launched a promotional website that included an easy-to-use sign-up call to action. After signing up, website visitors would receive an email that offered a mail-in rebate when they purchased the product at Walmart Stores. This facilitated the attaching of a cookie to their browser for retargeting messages, as well as capturing emails for future direct marketing initiatives. The website used both on-page and off-page SEO with a modern infrastructure that worked well on mobile devices and tablets (where Keen Directive identified the majority of their clients’ searches would be done). Next, Keen Directie used Google Search, Display and Youtube Video Ads to drive traffic, and Google Analytics to measure the success. Ads were delivered using a proprietary “micro-geo-targeting” code that the Keen Directive team developed to ensure that advertisements were only delivered to consumers within a 20-mile radius of a Walmart store that carried the clients’ products. Overall, these combined strategies spelled success for the client.
The client also wanted to run TV Ads at the same time, but was not certain if they would perform better than the Google Ads. The Keen Directive team established a campaign timeline that compared TV alone, TV with Google Ads, and Google Ads alone, to determine the success of each. Although the combined effort produced the most sales, when the TV campaign ended and Keen Directive ran only Google Ads, the client achieved over a 60% increase in traffic at the store. Bottom line is, the budget for Google Ads was less than 10% of the overall budget, but resulted in an ROI that was 12 x higher than normal.
By shifting their TV budget to Google Ads, the client was able to better measure the impact of their ad spend and recognize significant savings while maintaining increased in-store sales. The savings not only gave them better control over profits, but also significantly better insight into what sort of messaging worked, what demographics mattered, and what regions provided higher lift and conversion.
Ultimately the campaign continued to deliver positive results, the clients’ product was kept in Walmart successfully and they secured long term shelf space.
If you have challenges similar to this client, or would like to boost your ROI, the cutting-edge marketing and consulting services offered by Keen Directive can help you.
