At GroundTruth, we’re on marketers’ side. We make it easier to attribute performance results to marketing efforts. That’s in part because we want our customers to reach their goals, but also because foot traffic and in-store visits have value beyond just purchases. 

Here are some of the most surprising ways companies use foot traffic to improve their products, services, and real business results.

1. Foot Traffic Makes Audience Targeting More Precise

Foot traffic data provides companies with information about who their customers are, what their buying habits are and how they like to move throughout the store. But that’s just when they are inside the store. Understanding who showed up to your location based on the ads they were shown can offer a deeper well of information on your target customer. 

For example, if one audience segment shows up to your stores more often than others, you can start to test what makes that audience segment work. Is it messaging? The channel they see your ad on? Or, if an audience segment visits your store less frequently, but spends more money, what learnings can you apply to increase the average check of other segments? 

2. In-Store Visits Improves the Customer Journey 

The touchpoints required for a comprehensive customer journey will always change. As you bring new people into your stores, you will learn which channels will turn them from a first-time visitor to a lifetime customer. 

Companies that combine in-store engagements with digital advertising, and other touchpoints, can build a more effective customer journey much more quickly than those who keep the data siloed. 

In-store visits to learn more about what customers enjoy about their experience. Use that to inform your retargeting messaging as well as any specials you might offer. Those small, but critical, personalizations give you an edge against competitors and mean a lot to your customer base. 

3. Optimize Products and Services with Foot Traffic

Another surprising way foot traffic can support digital ad campaigns is by clarifying what products or services your team should highlight in your ads. Companies that offer a variety of products tend to focus on their most popular ones. Of course that helps for your most general audience, but after a person has visited your store, you can show ads with products more specific to their needs and interests. 

Variety in creative and messaging helps reduce ad fatigue in audiences, plus it helps your marketing reach audiences more efficiently. Both are results you need to create a marketing machine that gets real business results for your company. 

4. Gain More Insights on Competitors with In-Store Visits

Finally, ad campaigns built to drive foot traffic can teach you about your competitors, particularly if you use hyper-local targeting. GroundTruth customers use features like Blueprints to target people right at the moment of decision making. When those ads successfully earn an in-store visit, our customers have a new understanding of what messaging or creative is more compelling compared to their competitors’ offerings. 

Of course, you can ask your customers these questions using surveys, but the real-world behavior that is captured in the moment is vital for optimizing your strategy, reducing excess spend, and driving the real business results you want. 

Increase Foot Traffic and Other Real Business Results with GroundTruth

To learn more about how GroundTruth can help your business drive more in-store traffic, watch our recent webinar with Adweek, Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic? You’ll hear from experts across the industry about how to build successful campaigns that drive real business results. 

The post Surprising Reasons Marketers Need Real-World Behavior for Digital Ad Campaigns appeared first on GroundTruth.

Last week, we partnered with Adweek to have that exact discussion. Hosted by GroundTruth CMO, Brandon Rhoten, the webinar included four esteemed professionals to discuss how they built their media plans to drive foot traffic and make an impact on their bottom line. The panelists included Brad Haley, CMO at Dave’s Hot Chicken, Gregg Spiegel, SVP Strategic Planning & Analytics at Source, George Ellis, Owner & Creative Director at Bandolier Media, and Francisca Moliere, Integrated Media Supervisor at DNA Creates.

If you missed Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic, we pulled together the top three learnings you can use right now to increase in-store visits and conversions. 

1. Think About the Entire Funnel 

Because our panelists represented experience in huge brands like Dave’s Hot Chicken, Ulta, and TikTok, just to name a few, one of the greatest takeaways they offered was how to push people through the funnel with media. 

Often, brands who are well known do not execute their performance media layer well. Their connected TV (CTV) ads, for example, helps to differentiate themselves from competitors, but lacks the right messaging to bring people in-store. As Rhoten said, companies need to “close the loop to know who you’re advertising to and then measure if it’s working.” 

How do you do this? Moliere suggested leaning into audience segmentation to develop the audience personas. Ask yourself who are the people that are engaging with your brand and what do they value about your products. Use that information to build performance marketing creative and messaging to convert awareness to foot traffic. 

2. Get Creative About What You Say and When

The panelists then discussed how to execute and improve performance once you’ve launched your campaign. Rhoten started the conversation by saying that companies can often take for granted that people forget. They need reminders about your products, your offers, and services. 

Ellis added that partnering with creative agencies can help create a variety of reminders when your team lacks the bandwidth. He said, “Give your marketing team and your agency team something to work with, something new to say, they can find new ways to connect.” 

Moliere also mentioned that it’s important to avoid ad fatigue when the goal is to get people in-store. She suggested companies find the sweet spot between reminding your loyal audiences and ad fatigue. She said, “There has to be a sense of urgency in your marketing if your goal is foot traffic and it keeps the messaging fresh.” 

3. Make Sure You’re Measuring and Testing for the Right Metrics

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the panelists discussed the importance of marketers being the bridge between their team’s efforts and the real business results that their company is looking to achieve. 

Spiegel said, “Make sure to bridge media KPIs with business KPIs.” He mentioned that using GroundTruth helps his team show a line from viewed media to in-store visit. Before, his team would have to rely on disconnected marketing metrics and traffic numbers. Now, they can show exactly how many observed visits happened because of the media they saw. 

Haley concurred, mentioning that as new locations open for Dave’s Hot Chicken, the team relies heavily on the metrics GroundTruth provides to measure both their awareness campaigns as well as their campaigns for foot traffic. Those numbers helped, in part, for DHC to become one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America. 

Watch the Entire Webinar On-Demand

If you want more strategies and insights from our expert panel, you can watch the entire webinar on-demand. Just click here! Or if you’d like to get started with GroundTruth, schedule a demo with our team. We’d love to help you drive real business results, like in-store visits. 

The post 3 Things We Learned from Our Newest Webinar with Adweek appeared first on GroundTruth.

The post Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic with Adweek appeared first on GroundTruth.

I’ve built my career on strong customer relationships. Part of this is because I love people. I want to know about our customers’ successes, their strategies, and the personal milestones they accomplish along the way. But, more importantly, keeping an open line of communication means our team can focus on the insights and product features that matter most to our customers. 

While having those conversations, one truth became clear to me: real world behavior is the foundation for the real business results advertisers need, like in-store visits and increased ROAS. While the tools and channels continue to evolve in the digital landscape, real world behavior still remains the most important driver for success. 

Let’s talk about why. 

Demands on Marketers Continue to Increase while Precision Decreases for Digital Audience Segments

The appeal of digital advertising was in how easy it is to reach the right audiences at scale, and the ease with which performance can be measured. Up until now, it’s been faster to report how many people visited your website from a mobile ad than those who visited after seeing a billboard on their way to work, a television ad, or any other traditional advertising. 

And because clear attribution matters to everyone from CFOs to board members to marketers themselves, focus has been on digital metrics—especially when advertising is more expensive than ever. But in that time, audience segmentation based on digital behavior is getting less and less precise. As a result, it costs advertisers more to get the same results they used to get. Not ideal. 

I can hear the stress in conversations I have with colleagues and customers old and new. Marketers want to know where to invest their budget to reach their goals. They don’t have time to waste guessing on audience segments or mediums without measurement. They need proven targeting and real, verifiable business results. 

And my answer is always the same: don’t focus on what’s easiest to measure. Follow where the biggest return is: inside your locations, where the majority of transactions still happen.

Real World Behavior Proves Instrumental for Long Term Success

Digital behavior may be easier to measure, but it is not the most valuable behavior to understand. In-store visits are still the most important in terms of purchases and lifetime customer value. And still, companies largely leave it out of the media plans. 

At GroundTruth, we make it impossible to overlook. Our only goal is to make our customers successful in tangible, meaningful ways—in other words, success reflected in your bottom line. Our platform builds audiences based on their habits and real world behaviors, and reaches them at the exact moment they are ready to make a decision. We don’t rely solely on predictions and estimated digital browsing history. We focus on what’s real. Because that’s what our customers are measured on. 

So far, focusing on real world behavior is the only way we know to not only withstand the changes in our industry, but grow through them. It’s why I’m such a big advocate for connected TV, and why we continue to evolve our platform to fit the new ways people live and shop. Because trends and predictions are valuable. But nothing matters more than what people do out in the real world.

The post The Real Business Results You Need Are Driven by the Real-World Behaviors You’re Ignoring appeared first on GroundTruth.

To simplify, marketers start to focus on digital performance metrics, such as click-through rates, because they are easier to understand and pull attribution from. Over time, media plans start to move away from the offline performance metrics that matter most to executives, like in-store visits and increased foot traffic. 

Those real business results are what GroundTruth obsesses over. We drive digital performance metrics too, but the reason customers continue to trust us with their campaigns is because we know how to deliver those results that impact the bottom line. 

Based on our customers’ recent success, we’ve put together a few media mixes that are proven to drive foot traffic that you can use right now. Let’s get into it!

Video Mobile Marketing and Retargeting Ads Build Trust with Research-Heavy Customers

For companies selling large ticket items, the obstacle they face for driving foot traffic is the research phase of the customer journey. Buying a car, for example, is likely the most expensive purchases a person will make. They want to make sure they know what’s available to them and which car fits their needs best before they ever step foot on a lot. 

Mobile video ads tend to work incredibly well for customers in the research phase. Not only do video ads capture attention quickly, they also demonstrate the value of the product in a way that is impossible with words alone. When combined with retargeting ads, companies ensure that their products stay top of mind throughout the research phase. Soon, their product becomes the standard against which the customer compares any new car. 
GroundTruth customer Alpha Media was able to leverage this media mix to drive 17 visits to one of their locations in just over two months, resulting a $24.68 cost per visit. To learn more about their strategy, read their full case study.

Hyper-Local Ad Targeting Helps Converts Ambivalent Customers

Another common obstacle companies face while trying to drive in-store visits is capturing customers before they choose the competition. For example, many customers will wait until the last minute to choose which restaurant they want to go to for lunch. If you’re a restaurant owner, how do you capture attention at the right moment so they choose your location? 

For GroundTruth customer Dave’s Hot Chicken, the strategy was a mix of hyper-local targeting along with an incredible brand marketing campaign. First, the team invested in national awareness campaigns that highlighted their incredible product and loyal customer base. Then, they set their sites on customers who weren’t yet loyal—people who were likely to go to the competition. 
By targeting those individuals when they entered the retail block for each location, Dave’s Hot Chicken was able to drive almost 1,400 visits during a month-long campaign. Because in-store visits also result in more purchases, the team was able to earn a 7.8% increase in sales.

Connected TV and Location-Based Campaigns Build Awareness while Driving Foot Traffic

Finally, if your company sells products that can be enjoyed by entire households, like a beverage, sometimes the most effective media is to get outside of mobile ads and onto bigger channels. A digital out-of-home ad or a connected TV (CTV) ad can go a long way to convince customers to visit stores that carry their products because they capture an entire household’s attention at once.

While mobile ads have a personal experience, CTV ads can get a whole household talking about what they should buy on their next visit to the store, for example. And when combined with on-premise targeting, not only can companies drive visits, but they can also convert customers while they’re in the store. 

That’s exactly what Yachak Organic Tea did to drive over 241,000 visits to retail stores during their campaign with GroundTruth. 

Drive More In-Store Visits with GroundTruth

If you need to get real business results, like in-store visits, you need GroundTruth. Contact us today and we can get you set up to launch the right media plan for your team.

The post Media Mixes Proven To Drive Foot Traffic appeared first on GroundTruth.