Graham Tricker, LiveRamp’s VP of Sales, says winning backing for new initiatives means showing the C-suite the results they should deliver in terms they understand. In this penultimate post in our series on data collaboration, he discusses two case studies that show how it can deliver increased revenue and business growth.
There’s one piece of advice that always comes up when digital marketers are looking for senior management support for new initiatives: explain it in language the C-suite understands. And the two words that mean more to them than any other are ‘revenue’ and ‘growth’.
Throughout this series of posts, I’ve talked about the benefits data collaboration can deliver, but these don’t come for free. To make it work, you’ll need new tools, skills, and a new way of thinking about your data (as discussed in our ‘Data Collaboration Explainer‘). And for all that, you’ll need C-suite backing.
Other metrics are acceptable when you’re talking within the marketing department. However, show the CEO your new approach will increase revenue and grow the business, and you’ll get their attention.
Helping Barilla take a bigger bite of the cookie market
Our work with Italian pasta giant Barilla is an excellent example of how data collaboration can drive sales. The company wanted to boost the performance of its Gocciole cookie brand. This meant creating buzz around the new ‘special edition’, increasing existing customers’ average spend, and generating incremental sales across the entire Gocciole range.
We helped Barilla set up a data collaboration with Carrefour to build three target audiences using the supermarket giant’s loyalty card data. These were people who had bought Gocciole products in the last 12 months, people who bought ‘indulgence’ cookies in the previous 24 months, and finally, people who bought biscuits in the last 24 months but never Gocciole products. There was also a control audience that wasn’t exposed to any Gocciole advertising.
The campaign ran across Facebook and Instagram for four weeks, using creative targeted at each of the three groups. Purchasers who had seen the advertising spent 6.2% more than those who hadn’t. Global brand revenue increased by 7.1%, and the campaign saw a 7.8x return on investment.
Attracting and upselling high-value holiday makers
A well-known UK holiday park brand worked with LiveRamp to drive sales in its peak holiday booking period. Once again, the primary objective was to increase incremental revenue by attracting existing and new, high-value customers, promoting higher-end accommodation, and identifying customers likely to spend more on-site, such as on spa experiences or family activities.
The campaign focused on two key audiences, both created using our Data Collaboration Platform. The first involved onboarding the brand’s existing CRM audiences and then creating lookalikes of those people across social media and connected TV. The second brought Experian data sets via Clean Room to understand and target the ‘top most likely customers’ across media, using pre-set audience definitions.
Overall, the nine-week campaign, in which privacy-sensitive data insights were given to the advertising agency, achieved an incremental customer spend of £3.4 million and an incremental return on advertising spend of £19.87. Total sales increased by 13.55%, with 4.36% coming from new customers and 8.81% from upselling existing customers.
The future belongs to those who work together.
Both of the above examples show how better, more complete data leads to better targeting and, therefore, better results—not just in terms of online marketing vanity metrics but also in terms of business performance.
They also show how brands can continue to achieve better targeting without using data collected via third-party cookies, which is currently the biggest concern around online advertising.
Finally, they clearly show that the future of online marketing lies in data collaboration between brands, even in our increasingly privacy-conscious world.
If you’re thinking about the possibilities data collaboration could open up for your business by now, my final post in this series will discuss how to get started.