In last week’s article we outlined 10 ways to streamline your store reorders. This week we would like to share some best practices around improving your planning process to push marketing to your retail locations. The process of planning and execution of in-store marketing activities is complex, prolonged, and prone to several errors. Additionally, these marketing campaigns require a sizeable budget to execute. Nevertheless, they are proven to be traffic and sales drivers so the investment is justified however you still need to maximize your ROI.
To maximize your ROI, you need to streamline the planning and execution of your campaigns and here are ten ways visual marketing or production teams can do that.
1. Utilize An Enterprise Visual Marketing Platform
A visual marketing platform will allow you to plan your campaigns by leveraging store profile data. This is essential as it is an end-to-end platform that integrates the planning, execution, fulfillment and reorder processes.
2. Consolidate Your Store Shipments
The more you can combine your printing, kitting and shipping activities the more you will save on your visual programs. In order to achieve such sophisticated planning, you will need an in-store marketing platform that can help your plan out several campaigns and have the intelligence to combine campaigns producing consolidated kits for multiple programs. This feature can save Millions for companies with multiple brands or departments.
3. Centralize Your Asset Repository
Maintain a centralized asset repository that manages all visual elements, categorizing evergreen and seasonal items with imagery and their store profiles. Easily reuse the visual elements across multiple programs. Extend to incorporate fixtures and props creating a one-stop shop for your visual marketing programs.
4. Leverage Store Profile Data To Estimate Production Costs
The store profile database is crucial for accuracy of your planning and production activities. Plan your campaigns in a platform that estimates production quantities through leveraging a store profile database. Accurately estimating your production quantities along with identifying which location receives how many units of a visual element is the foundation of an optimized distribution plan.
5. Integrate Your Supplier Partners
Bringing in your print and distribution partners within the planning process provides them with the advanced visibility of the jobs they’re quoting, items they’re producing and packages they’re shipping. Rather than being an intermediary and exporting or emailing the campaign information and distro lists, having your partners engaged in the process through an in-store marketing platform makes your team efficient.
6. Apply A Kitting Algorithm For Savings On Production & Shipment
A kitting algorithm is vital to ensuring your locations are only receiving items that pertain to their profile. An intelligent kitting algorithm will recommend the variations of your kits outlining package contents with the number of units per item and the store locations receiving that package.
7. Get Visibility To Your Inventory & Shipment
Integrate your warehousing supplier along with carriers like FedEx and UPS providing full visibility of quantity on-hand and shipment status. Additionally, providing stores visibility to this information will reduce the constant need to respond to queries from stores on the status of their shipments and reorders.
8. Provide Stores Advance Visibility Of Campaigns
Much like corporate, stores would prefer some advance visibility so they can prepare for the setup of a new campaign. Providing your store associates with information on approximate setup time will ensure they have the staffing and allocate sufficient time to complete the setup prior to customer visits.
9. Approve & Automate Your Reorders & Replenishment
Automate the process as much as possible especially with the reorders. If the reorder elements are not expensive and the request is to ship by Ground, the orders should be automatically approved and routed to the warehousing supplier. Only require manual approvals for large expensive items this way the corporate team is not a bottle-neck in the process. Also setup high and low watermark levels so the system can automatically places orders to replenish items that need to be on inventory.
10. Share Guides & Videos With Your Stores
Lastly share guides and videos with your stores to simplify the process around the setup of your floor-sets or campaigns. This will reduce the number of support requests directed to the corporate office and allow stores to be more efficient.
Streamlining the process of planning and execution of your visual marketing programs will allow production teams to focus more on planning rather than fixing issues. An enterprise visual marketing platform will address opportunities to automate and make the end-to-end process more efficient.
To understand more about how CrossCap’s Enterprise Visual Marketing Platform helps streamline your visual marketing process, request a demo.
