3 Ways OneTouchPoint Simplifies Alcohol and Beverage Marketing
by Hannah Cox-Schroeder
3 Ways to Improve Your Coupon Marketing Strategy
by Scott Mollahan
Hannah Cox-Schroeder
- Jun 09, 2022
3 Ways OneTouchPoint Simplifies Alcohol and Beverage Marketing
For brands in the alcohol and beverage industry, the challenge of catching—and keeping—consumers’ attention is heightened by the explosive growth of innovative new concepts, federal and state-by-state regulations, and the juggling act of creating both national and locally tailored marketing campaigns. For brand leaders and representatives, the stakes are high and the to-do lists are long. In such a crowded marketplace, driving awareness, loyalty and brand affinity—while maintaining brand integrity and regulatory compliance, managing the marketing supply chain, and supporting local marketing representatives, for starters—is simply unsustainable without the right support systems in place.
To get to market quickly and efficiently, alcohol and beverage brands need an easy way to manage everything from creative to budgets to national campaign buying windows and rollouts. From integrated marketing campaigns to easily managing coupons (and compliance) to capturing customers and influencing buyer’s attention through in-store marketing displays, OneTouchPoint is here to help. Let us show you how.
Streamline Asset Management
Let’s start with the production of marketing materials, from social media graphics to printed postcards, POS flyers, and branded swag. All of these items, whether they’re produced for global campaigns or for a single retail location, have to uphold your brand standards through consistent messaging, visuals, and production quality. So, as a brand leader, how can you ensure every marketer is producing assets that preserve brand integrity without having to spend hours micromanaging or, worse, just doing it yourself?
The key is to establish an online hub as an easily accessible repository of all the latest, approved marketing assets (and none of the outdated versions). With OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect platform local marketers can instantly download digital assets and order printed materials and swag from an approved printer. No more emailing reps the PDF of the latest POS signage and then wondering if they’ll actually use it. No more worrying about local marketers grabbing outdated promotional information or the old version of the company logos. No more cleaning up messes when the wrong assets get produced and mailed.
The right asset hub also enables customization for seasonal programs or local offers through modular (or templated) content: content that’s been divided into the smallest possible pre-approved components that can be remixed into any number of assets for any number of channels. (Think text blocks like disclaimers, value statements, or product descriptions, and visuals like product shots, videos, or infographics.) This way, anybody with a hand in marketing campaign creation can create relevant assets for seasonal promotions or local markets without having to reinvent the wheel or risk compromising brand integrity.
Leverage Tech-Enabled Controls
From rights to budget management to localized messaging and even coupon compliance, U.Connect provides alcohol and beverage companies with full control, compliance, and oversight capabilities.
Let’s start with budget management, a challenge marketing leaders face in every industry. Empowering local marketers to create and execute their own print campaigns eases the corporate marketing team’s burden, but it may also lead to less visibility into how much your reps are spending, how much stock is on hand, and what’s working and what’s not. OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect platform includes tracking capabilities for expenses, inventory, and other critical stats, taking the reporting burden off local reps’ shoulders and making it easy get a clear picture of status and progress—by location or overall—at any moment.
Unique to the alcohol and beverage industry are challenges around compliance with state-by-state messaging regulations. While the pre-approved modular content capabilities outlined above go a long way in ensuring every asset is up to legal snuff, the automated approval workflows built into the platform—not to mention the rigorous accuracy and quality control processes in place at OneTouchPoint’s production facilities—ensure compliance with the right regulations on every asset, every time.
Believe it or not, the tech-enabled controls U.Connect offers can even alleviate the bane of alcohol and beverage marketers’ existence: coupon management. For example, consider the pressure of tracking redemption to prevent fraud and counterfeit—often a big enough hurdle to tempt marketing teams to scrap coupons altogether. With OneTouchPoint’s sophisticated redemption tracking, brands can see right away when something is amiss and nip it in the bud. If the typical redemption rate in a particular area is around 5 percent, but your dashboard suddenly shows it’s jumped up to 20 percent, you know it’s time to investigate. That visibility allows the business to catch potential fraud quickly and prevent it from siphoning off critical revenue.
Reduce Waste
Finally, environmental considerations—not to mention consumer demands—have put significant pressure on brands in every industry to find ways to reduce waste without compromising their print marketing effectiveness. For many marketing teams, the additional financial and logistics burdens of sustainability make it a tall order. But with OneTouchPoint, it’s easy being green. Here are just a few of the capabilities our production facilities offer to help alcohol and beverage companies reduce their environmental impact—without watering down their audience impact.
- Print-on-demand production to avoid the waste that comes from overprinting materials (whether that’s based on a printer’s high minimums or long lead times that mean needing to print extras “just in case”).
- Marketing premiums, on demand. Our low MOQ (minimum order quantities) enables you – and your approved users – to order just the quantities you need, while still taking advantage of economies of scale that ensures competitive pricing.
- Inventory management to ensure marketers know what’s in their warehouse at all times. Lack of clear insights into inventory can lead to waste as you continue printing assets that aren’t being used or that you already have excess of. But access to real-time inventory levels, production status, and ordering patterns, empowers informed decisions that reduce waste and minimize your carbon footprint.
- Strategic production and shipping capabilities. At OneTouchPoint, we have printing and fulfillment centers located across the country, so we can promise consistent production quality while ensuring your marketing products’ distribution journey is efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly.
OneTouchPoint helps marketers in the alcohol and beverage industry get new products to market, manage coupons in compliance with state laws, produce marketing assets, and launch national and localized campaigns. Our integrated marketing services platform is a purpose-built solution that empowers national and local marketing teams to ensure campaigns are on time, on message, and on brand. When you’re ready to learn more, we invite you to contact us, and one of our experts will talk with you about how to achieve dramatic results at a great price.
Asset Management
Even if your brand doesn’t have physical stores, it’s likely there are multiple cooks in the marketing kitchen. Perhaps, for example, you’re a franchise in an area like home repair or home healthcare, with franchisees working from home offices (and from their vehicles) across the country. Every brand representative will need access to the latest approved brand and content, as well as easy to use, marketing campaigns, in order to connect with their own customer bases in a way that both maintains brand integrity and speaks to those local audiences’ unique needs.
Empowering those reps with customizable marketing resources is easy with a centralized content hub like OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect platform. Making the latest, corporate-approved collateral accessible twenty-four-seven on a centralized platform—instead of sending files via emails that are liable to get deleted or buried, or dropping them into Google Drive folders that users may or may not keep sync’d up and organized—means local reps have everything they need at their fingertips and national leaders don’t have to worry about outdated collateral or inaccurate messaging circulating among potential customers.
An added advantage of a content hub like U.Connect is support for modular content, which enables franchisees or other (approved) brand representatives to easily update collateral with information specific to their own audiences—contact information, landing page URLs, or QR codes leading buyers to local order forms, for example. This way, every marketer can take advantage of the power of personalized local marketing without running the risk of interfering with corporate-approved design and messaging.
The best part? The system is built to support franchisee owners with little to no marketing experience. Easily find then download or order the marketing content and assets that support their business and leverage the pre-built marketing campaigns.
Digital Marketing
- Paid Search
- Display Advertising & Retargeting
- Email Marketing
- Microsites & Landing Pages
- Social Media Content
- Reputation & Social Media Management
- Data Analytics & Tracking
All of these components ensure that, wherever they are online, your audience is able to engage with you in a way that is consistent, authentic, and supportive of your brand and its reputation. And yet, managing every moving piece adds up to multiple full-time jobs.
Fortunately, OneTouchPoint has added support for all of these digital marketing activities to our suite of end-to-end marketing management services. This means your marketing teams and brand reps have all the support they need to create and implement robust digital marketing campaigns—and track and analyze their success. (Learn more in our digital marketing services data sheet.)
Print Marketing
Whether you need to produce and distribute brand kits for ten new reps, postcards for 25,000 potential buyers, or swag bags for 200 holiday party attendees, our full-scale commercial printing facilities, matched with our national partner network and mailing capabilities, enable us to produce and distribute world-class print marketing material—in no shortage of volumes, shapes, sizes, or formats—for our clients.
Bring Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy to Life
Learn more about OneTouchPoint’s end-to-end marketing management services here; then, when you’re ready, we invite you to contact us to talk with our experts about how OneTouchPoint can deliver phenomenal results at a great price.
Scott Mollahan
- Aug 26, 2021
3 Ways to Improve Your Coupon Marketing Strategy
For many companies, giving out coupons is low on the list of favorite marketing activities. Between the decreased margins, production costs, logistics, compliance, redemptions and the management headache, the potential return just doesn’t seem worth the effort.
However, writing off coupons altogether is a short-sighted move for most brands. For one, customers love them. Research shows 37 percent of customers will purchase more items than normal if they have a coupon, 38 percent say they’ll treat themselves to something they don’t need if they have a coupon, and 48 percent say they’ll buy sooner with a special offer. Additionally, many retailers all but require the brands they sell in store to provide coupons alongside prominent displays. In short, if you’re looking to get your products into customers’ shopping carts, whether by appealing to them directly or through top retailers, a coupon is a powerful tool for the marketing toolbelt.
Fortunately, a few key tools and adjustments can make coupon marketing easy and…dare we say it? Fun. Here are three ways companies can improve their coupon marketing strategy.
Take the Headaches Out Coupon Marketing
Let’s start with the biggest obstacle: the logistics. From the expense of production to the headaches of managing distribution and tracking redemption, for some heavily regulated industries, the pressure of staying compliant with state-by-state laws is critical. With the right marketing execution partner, companies can streamline all of these processes to make coupon production and management a breeze.
This might start with shifting to print-on-demand in order to avoid overproduction and the wasted money and materials that come with it. While, traditionally, businesses required large, national-scale orders to justify the cost of production, the right partner can offer low quantities at reasonable costs. This enables businesses to run small-scale or even hyperlocal offers and to select quantities based on predicted redemption rates rather than arbitrary printer minimums.
For highly regulated industries like adult beverage, the next challenge is ensuring coupons meet regulations for every state (and don’t get sent to states that prohibit certain coupons altogether). Print-on-demand allows for smaller batches of differentiated print runs, but there’s also the problem of ensuring the right coupons are distributed to the right areas. Again, a savvy marketing execution partner will not only be able to help brands keep track of these changing regulations but will also be able to both provide expert advice, as well as leverage sophisticated printing, mailing and distribution systems to ensure every coupon gets exactly where it needs to go — whether they’re headed to retailers or distributors.
Finally, it’s important to ensure those coupons aren’t being abused — counterfeited, reused, etc. — as that just cuts into profit. And that very risk often deters businesses from producing coupons at all. But with sophisticated redemption tracking, it’s possible to see right away when something is amiss and, ideally, nip it in the bud. For example, if the typical redemption rate in a particular area is around 5 percent, but it suddenly jumps up to 20 percent, you know it’s time to investigate what might be going on. That visibility allows the business to catch potential fraud quickly and prevent it from siphoning off critical revenue.
Once these frustrating logistics are out of the way, it’s time to have a little fun, making your company’s coupons attractive and exciting to customers in order to drive up ROI enough to more than make up for diminished margins.
Tailor Coupons to Local and Regional Markets
Today’s customers are looking for personalized communications from the brands they support, and coupons are no exception! McKinsey has found that personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as half, lift revenues by up to 15 percent and increase marketing spend efficiency by up to 30 percent.
Why not take advantage of those capabilities that enable customization based on local opportunities and create coupons that are more personal? For retailers, coupons could be customized based on location, with team colors, local lingo, etc.
Use Coupons to Show Off Your Branding
Make coupons a part of your multichannel marketing strategy. Whether you’re using them as digital lead magnets to grow your customer base, including them with in-store displays, coupons have the potential to be powerful extensions of your brand. As such, marketers would do well to use them as opportunities to leverage those carefully designed visuals and that meticulously crafted brand language, giving customers something that is not only useful, but engaging and delightful, whether they’re finding it on their phones or in a store. With a centralized marketing hub in place, every local marketer can easily access those fabulous templates, personalize them for their unique audiences (within the bounds of brand parameters), and produce high quality coupons that will catch customers’ attention and encourage them to make a purchase.
While coupons may have a bad rap among marketers, the reality is that they’re a critical piece of an effective, omnichannel marketing strategy. And the good news is, they don’t have to be the headache many companies perceive them to be. With the right marketing execution partner, they can integrate easily into every marketing campaign, catching eyes and capturing revenue at every touchpoint.
To learn more about how OneTouchPoint makes coupon marketing a breeze — not to mention powers brand engagement through on-demand marketing execution, supply chain management, and digital marketing support — for our clients, we invite you to contact us to learn more, or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.
Casey Rush
- Jul 30, 2021
Why Every Marketing Department Should Embrace On-Demand Production for Print & Promotional Materials
Today’s marketing leaders are facing two major sources of pressure that may make them think twice about the wisdom of creating physical marketing collateral — from printed brochures and flyers to displays, signage and other direct-to-consumer or POS/POP materials. The first is cost: with margins tighter than ever, the costs of producing, distributing, and storing inventory start to seem steeper than the returns. The second is environmental sustainability: the materials waste associated with print marketing often gives the more traditional approach a bad rap. Industry studies have shown that up to 30% of marketing collateral is thrown away, or sitting in a warehouse collecting dust and monthly fees.
But savvy marketers know that those tangible materials audiences can touch and feel and keep are critical drivers of brand awareness, reputation, and trust. And if done right, marketing materials production doesn’t have to bust the budget or create an outsized impact on the environment.
This is where on-demand production comes in. With the right marketing execution partner, companies can shift away from overly large print runs and collateral orders and save money, reduce waste, and increase ROI by producing exactly what they need, when they need it.
Reduced Materials Waste
A significant source of materials waste in print marketing comes from overprinting materials. Sometimes that’s because marketers are overestimating their quantity needs in order to provide a little buffer so they don’t have to wait around for a second production round. Often, it’s because printers have high minimums and/or production costs are so high that large, national-scale volumes are required to justify the pricing.
This is the first and most obvious reason to embrace on-demand production. When you work with a marketing execution partner (like OneTouchPoint) that offers flexible print runs and cost-effective on-demand and just-in-time production, you no longer need to deal with sky-high minimums or print extras “just in case.” Whether you need 2,500 pieces a month from now or 50 pieces next week, printing exactly what you need, when you need it means minimizing wasted materials and wasted money.
Storage Savings
Personalization
With bulk ordering, it’s almost impossible to customize material based on geography or any other criteria. But when you take advantage of print-on-demand, it’s much more feasible to tailor materials to recipients, both to increase engagement and to stay on top of local regulations and ordinances. For example, in heavily regulated industries like adult beverage, it’s important to tailor coupon content and functionality based on state-by-state promotional laws. Regionalized marketing speaks volumes to a consumer when you tailor your promotion to their lifestyle. Consider a football-themed case sleeves customized with the team colors for each region. While large-scale orders make this kind of customization cost-prohibitive, when you’re working with a marketing execution partner who can produce those materials in low quantities with reasonable per-unit prices — case sleeves in quantities as low as 25 per order, or coupons in batches of 500 — then personalization is an easy choice. (And we’re confident it will pay off: McKinsey reports that personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50 percent and increase marketing spend efficiency by up to 30 percent.)
The benefits — cost savings, sustainability, and ROI — of on-demand production are clear. Here at OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on supporting our customers as they make that shift. We provide businesses with easy, quality, cost-effective on-demand printing capabilities for mailing materials, signage, kits, and more — and with our recent acquisition of IRG, we’re thrilled to offer even more robust on-demand technology and execution support. If your company is ready to make the shift, we invite you to contact us to learn more, or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.