Grocery Chain Outsources Ad Planning, Improves Merchandising Efforts | Retail
7/10/2023
RRD’s comprehensive retail merchandising planner bolsters advertising efforts, optimizes personnel hours for leading grocer
CHALLENGE
A U.S.-based grocery retailer with 100+ locations faced inefficiencies in designing and deploying its advertising materials in-house. Their existing process for creating digital circulars, newspaper circulars, and coupons to advertise merchandise sales and promotions required extensive personnel resources and was yielding mediocre results.
Additionally, the stores faced staffing shortages amidst a national surge of resignations. They desired a way to redirect advertising responsibilities away from unskilled staff in order to better compete with other chains.
As it stood, the grocer couldn’t quickly respond to competitors’ promotions or sales due to a cumbersome data collection and execution process. Ultimately, the grocer sought an external creative partner to remove the burden of this time-consuming, complex internal process and optimize marketing efforts.
SOLUTION
Already working with RRD to meet its commercial print needs, the grocer turned over ad planning efforts to a familiar partner. They trusted RRD’s high-quality, consistent, and accurate work.
RRD designed and deployed a retail merchandising planner portal enabling the grocer to develop a detailed outline for monthly advertising. The solution allows for departmental input and variation by region — all within a flexible workflow. Utilizing this portal, the grocer is able to manage targeted print and digital advertisements, including:
- Circulars
- Signage
- Direct mail
- Emails
- Social media
- Web ads
- Mobile ads
Identifying and pairing the right customer data within the RRD solution allows the grocer to market as efficiently and effectively as possible, with the ability to manage scale and complexity with ease. RRD handles grocer data collection, management, and analysis based on promotions or “rules” set at the individual grocer level. The tools allow the stores to use complex data — including customer purchasing habits — to personalize content for items like loyalty cards and targeted offers, making the marketing content more relevant to the end user.
RRD’s implementation of the planner toolset aimed to provide greater advertising efficiency by utilizing outsourced skilled personnel — removing the grocer’s burden of store-level ad planning. A proven start-to-finish process powered by best-in-class built-in technology, the turnkey solution does the heavy lifting related to data, design, and production, and provides advantages unattainable with traditional in-house ad efforts.
RESULTS
The deployment of RRD’s retail merchandising planner tool led to time savings and more efficient advertising efforts, allowing employees to focus on their core job responsibilities. The solution also provided:
- Extensive labor savings due to the elimination of redundant manual data entry
- Additional labor savings by creating an API to automate item setup for UPCs and offers
- Reduction in print costs
- Reduction in creative and content costs
- Elimination of software costs and agency fees
- Extensive cycle time reduction