Priceline has overhauled the way it provides local area marketing support to its network of franchised pharmacies as well as to owned stores that want to avail themselves of the services.
The retailer runs a “lean” local area marketing team of two-to-three people, led by marketing manager for local area and B2B Jes Chalmers.
Local area marketing typically covers promotional activities, assets or campaigns designed to ‘speak’ directly to a store’s local community, encouraging patronage and sales.
This could include the creation of customised posters for windows or other promotional materials.
Chalmers told Digital Nation that despite the size of the local area marketing team, it typically received “70 to 90 requests per month” for support.
It traditionally received requests for support to a shared email inbox. Jobs would be assigned to a person, and then be run entirely from that person’s inbox, with no central visibility of job status or progress.
There were process and people issues with this approach.
“We had huge issues with relationships with our franchise partners, because things kept going missing or we weren’t responding,” Chalmers said.
“How do you actually work in an environment where everything is [done via] email, and how do you remember to pick something up and to do it? It’s not viable in a volume-based environment.”
The company elected to replace the email-based system with a work management platform based on monday.com.
Stores seeking support can request it via a LAM portal. The nature of the request is then succinctly summarised for the local area marketing team, and all activities on fulfilling the request can be centrally managed and tracked through the monday.com platform.
The project kicked off in October last year and was ready internally around December. The store-facing LAM portal was then launched in March of this year.
“Every store in the network, whether it’s a Priceline or a Priceline Pharmacy, have access to be able to use this,” Chalmers said.
“It’s mostly the pharmacies who use it because … they absolutely need to stay local to their community.”
A store may look to increase its use of local area marketing in certain circumstances, such as if a competitor opens nearby.
Chalmers said that one of the advantages of monday.com is that it allows Priceline to track how local area marketing support is utilised, and to determine if it is in response to any issue facing the store such as “leasing issues” or “competitors moving in” to an adjacent space in a shopping centre.
“The reporting we’re getting out of it is just fantastic. That’s how I know there’s between 70-to-90 jobs per month. I can do resource management and categorise the jobs as well,” she said.
“I can also go to the business and say, ‘We seem to be receiving a high [number of marketing support] requests in this category. Not sure why this is happening, but maybe we could look at this.’”
Chalmers said one of the biggest benefits is also quantifying how much work the local area marketing team gets through.
Prior to monday.com, the only measure of work volume was the number of emails being sent and received.
“If we’re looking at what is the value that we’re adding to the business, it’s not number of emails that we send and receive per year,” Chalmers said.
“Everyone knew local area marketing was important, and stores needed it. Now, we’re able to show the volume of work that we’re delivering and we’re having conversations using data rather than saying, ‘Okay, we think we did this many jobs this year’.”
“It’s that visibility and transparency that’s probably been the greatest benefit. It also means that we can hand on heart say to a store, ‘We know where your job is at’,” Chalmers said.
In the future, Priceline hopes to offer more automated, self-service methods to request and receive local area marketing support through the store-facing portal.
“We want to try and service our stores better by giving them automated solutions so that they can just go in and order a poster or some sort of campaign,” she said.
“We’re actually using the data from monday.com as well to build templates: ‘Oh, I’ve got a lot of requests for this. Let’s put that template into the portal’.
“So, there’s this whole business flow that is actually coming out of just the monday.com tool.”