Catalina Delivers Marketing Automation Solutions to Measure, Optimize Shrinking Ad Budgets

It’s been a minute since I sat on the CPG brand side of the table, but one of my fondest memories was when my boss would say, “Jessica, we need to cut our ad budget. Slash 50% of this year’s remaining funds while keeping revenue and market share the same.”

Wait, did I say fondest memories? I meant worst nightmare.

Since then, things have only gotten tougher. External factors like inflation, supply chain issues, and higher media costs in addition to internal factors like zero-based budgeting and margin pressure are putting extra strain on marketing managers and media buyers.

Thankfully, relief is on its way from new omni-channel tools that can help marketers make the most of their shrinking budgets.

Responsive Marketing Helps Stop Media Waste, Prevents Wasted Ad Dollars

A partner that offers unified, real-time responsive media and unified measurement, can help you discover who is purchasing your products and personalize your media mix to maximize a campaign’s efficiency and efficacy.

Responsive marketing solutions are fueled by a specific campaign objective –such as acquiring new consumers, maximizing purchases with loyal clients, or retaining shoppers who show signs of churn. You can use them to deliver personalized experiences along the consumer's path to purchase.

This approach is no longer limited to ecommerce or digitally native brands. How many times have you clicked on an article about these capabilities only to think, “Welp, that’s great, but it’s still not applicable for my brand.” With Catalina as your partner, your point-of-sale access provides traditional CPG marketers immediate visibility to purchase activity and quicker reaction time versus competitive products. Responsive marketing solutions include:

Sequential Marketing maximizes media efficacy by sequencing ads to enhance the brand story and prompt purchase. The media follows the marketer’s desired order of exposure to orchestrate a path to purchase rather than delivering media in siloed vehicles that don’t react to each other. What does that mean for you? YOU get to orchestrate touchpoints how you want them over the course of a campaign based on user behavior.

For example, we helped a healthy frozen pizza brand design a sequential marketing campaign to educate consumers and drive product trial. They wanted to build product benefit awareness with connected TV (CTV) ads served three times before target audiences received a high-value, in-store trial incentive. With this approach, the brand benefitted from CTV ads reinforcing the product’s point of difference and saved money by only delivering the offer to consumers who they knew understood their product benefits and brand promise. This sequential marketing campaign attracted 74K new buyers, with 9% making a repeat purchase. ROAS totaled $2.80 with $59K in cost savings through redemption from buyers who converted from the CTV ads alone.

With Retargeting, you can increase personalization to bring a consumer back into the brand conversation. Retargeting has garnered tons of press recently, and using click-based retargeting is fine, but actual purchasing has been the golden goose that seems just out of reach if you sell most of your product in brick-and-mortar stores. However, our real-time access to purchase data allows you to segment audiences based on their actual buying behavior so you can hone messaging and drive conversion or repeat purchase.

A convenience meal brand used retargeting to increase the number of products shoppers bought on each store visit and shorten the purchase cycle of their most loyal customers. A geo-targeted, omni-channel overlay efficiently tripled the reach of in-store media while digital advertising, updated at regular intervals, reflected the shopper’s most recent purchases. Escalating discount promotions based on past purchase volumes were designed to encourage shoppers to buy more items on their next trip. The campaign delivered incremental household sales of $5.76 and a 17% lift in ROAS versus an in-store only campaign.

Suppression keeps specific people from receiving an ad if they have already purchased your brand or recently bought a competitor’s brand. Like retargeting, it works in real time to see how consumers are responding to your messaging and offers, except rather than adding an engagement, it eliminates one. Suppression works specifically to maximize media reach and ensure efficiency given limited budgets.

For example, Catalina partnered with Cadent to deliver three CTV ads from Applegate Natural & Organic Meats to shoppers who received an in-store incentive to try new items. That offer was suppressed for those who had already purchased it. They instead were delivered an incentive to come back and buy more Applegate cross-category items. The 27MM CTV ad impressions and in-store sequential offers delivered an incremental ROAS of $2.13, boosted the dollars per trip of existing buyers by 42%, and created a sales lift of 25%.

To get the full benefit of a responsive marketing campaign, add measurement with real-time multi-touch attribution. Work with a partner that can give you a complete picture by integrating performance across all the channels your brand needs. By executing and analyzing campaigns holistically, you can find and engage your most valuable audiences across the purchase funnel, adjusting channels and messaging as needed in real time. In short, focus on what’s driving purchase conversion now—then optimize as you go.

These responsive marketing solutions create ways to make your dollars stretch farther and to avoid taking a machete to your already tightening ad budget. Learn more about how Catalina can help you create, measure, and optimize your next omni-channel campaign by contacting us at results@catalina.com.