Intelligent Systems Elements Recaptures Market Share for Regional Retail

The Challenge

With over 30 locations serving local pet owners, the brand was losing customers to national online companies’ e-commerce. With fragmented brand awareness, no e-commerce solution, and no infrastructure for capturing customer data, the brand had few competitive resources or customer knowledge upon which to act. The brand needed to reverse the trend and quickly recapture market share.

Insights

Arcalea conducted an assessment to understand the brand and competitors’ relative positions in the market, analyzing the landscape across dozens of variables. Additionally, a strategic marketing assessment was conducted to structure a responsive goal, build supporting strategies, then translate to the most impactful tactics given the brand’s current market position.

In comparison to the competitors who were acquiring market share with focused national e-commerce, the brand’s core business was local in nature. As a result, an immediate goal was to own the local contextual market presence in key dimensions. To increase local search visibility and organic ranking, Arcalea recommended local SEO that included unifying identity across business listings for all store locations, and correcting and enhancing information to provide unified brand messaging. Search reputation management would increase trust signals, solidifying the brand’s local presence. Following best practices, adding structured data would help pages rank for organic, local search terms and increase awareness.

Online advertising campaigns were constructed from the competitive audit findings, including analysis of hundreds of contextual keywords. Local search campaigns were used to interrupt or fortify the customers’ path at different phases of the customer journey, while display and social remarketing kept brand awareness high for customers who had already visited the website or store.

Lack of digital infrastructure prohibited the brand from capturing customer online interactions, learning from the customer journey, and purposefully connecting with customers to enhance and improve their experience. Arcalea recommended the introduction of “click and collect” e-commerce functionality allowing the brand to recapture customers while acquiring primary customer data. Prior to the implementation and connection of ad platforms and e-commerce systems, customers engaged by visiting the website, finding a product, and proceeding to purchase through brick and mortar, or on third-party platforms. Now, the brand can gain consumer data, building intelligence for the target segment, customer journeys, and marketing efficacy.

To grow market share, the brand had partnered with leading vendors in the growing health-focused and premium-pricing pet food markets. Through this co-op arrangement, vendor coupons placed on the brand’s website were redeemed at local stores; however, partners were unsure of the program’s value without data. Arcalea analyzed and developed an analytics configuration plan to capture coupon use for partner reporting. Expanding this approach, analytics could be used to set up all goals, creating micro-conversions throughout the customer journeys which would provide actionable customer data to improve path to purchase, and recapture market share.