CPG Client Seeks New Learnings and Finds Them
Our client was launching a new product in stores and needed help testing & measuring lift across markets
Industry: B2C - Consumer packaged goods (CPG)
Solutions: Paid search, Paid social, Marketplace ads management (Instacart and others)
About our Client
Our client is a dairy-free beverages company that sells its plant-based milks and creamers in nearly 5,000 grocery stores across the United States as well as on their website and Amazon. The company’s core line of products consist of almond milk, oat milk, banana milk and various creamer options.
The Challenge
The company approached Eyeful for a marketing plan to capitalize on the increased health trends at the start of the New Year to drive people to stores to purchase a new product and measure the impact of the marketing dollars. They sought a marketing plan beyond Facebook/Instagram where they had historically solely advertised.
The Solution
The Eyeful team developed an approach to bring the ad spend closer to the point of conversion and invest in channels that can be more closely correlated to an in-store purchase including Google Paid Search, YouTube, and Pinterest. Additionally, Eyeful proposed testing relatively new Online Grocery ad platforms like Instacart that provided real-time sales data.
Understanding that the Client’s team received in-store sales reports that had a lag time of ~4 weeks, the marketing plan involved grouping the thousands of stores into 7 regions to test various media mixes to determine which channels and mixes generated the best lift in sales through a pre-post analysis while segmenting out holdout markets to account for the baseline sales growth of the New Year. The goals of the campaign were to:
Accurately measure the impact of marketing spend, establish a baseline incremental ROAS
Test and validate the performance of new channels and ad platforms
Findings and Results
The Eyeful team implemented the campaign plan: testing 4 ad platforms to drive in-store sales and testing 3 ad platforms to generate online sales while testing 7 media mixes across the 7 regions.
The approach led to the ability to accurately measure the incremental sales from the ad spend from each media mix and ad platform while accounting for the general seasonality per the holdout markets’ performance.
Beyond establishing a baseline incremental ROAS for a multi-channel 6-week campaign initiative, the New Year campaign produced significant learnings and marketing opportunities for future initiatives including:
Online Sales campaigns (ex. Instacart) generated a +333% higher incremental ROAS than In-Store Sales campaigns, leading to always-on advertising for these ad platforms
Google Ads Paid Search product a +248% higher incremental ROAS than all other In-Store Sales ad platforms including Facebook/Instagram, validating to continue investing in this new channel
YouTube paired with Paid Search generated a 10.75x higher incremental ROAS than YouTube by itself, indicating the need to be combined with a lower funnel channel