About three years ago, dairy and food manufacturer Land O’Leaks tested a Consumer Data Platform (CDP) to assist in site optimization.
People who have visited horse management pages, for example, or how to set up a home chicken coop, were targeted with relevant ads. Land O’Leaks sells farm feeds and equipment, not just the products you see in supermarkets.
“Surprisingly, site conversions have jumped,” said Steve Rudd, Land O’Leaks’ personalization and analytics manager, and the company has decided to take a closer look at the CDP market.
Rudd, whose work focuses on business intelligence rather than ad analytics, joined Land O’Leaks the day it settled into latex as its CDP. “It was not a coincidence,” he said.
Now, with a few success stories under its belt, the brand is gathering more data from its business areas into the personalization program. Rudd’s team, for example, has recently merged with the email team, further aligning its corporate functions with marketing.
The move will help Land O’Leaks do more with its data.
Many executives at companies with first-party data access do not fully realize the usefulness of the data they are sitting on, Rudd said. One, because they do not have the instinct of a marketer, but because the data is only useful when combined.
Land O’Data
There is a challenge though: the advertising industry doesn’t usually define first-party data for food and beverage brands. This means they don’t run well-trafficked sites or apps and they don’t collect purchase data. But many still have valuable data sets.
Liquor company Beam Santori, which owns makers Mark, Jim Beam and many other alcohol brands, for example, has begun incorporating distillery visitor data into its digital media data – and it appears that this has created a very valuable potential retargeting and appearance-like seed audience. Yes, Jessica Spence, president of the Beam Santori brand, spoke at an ad exchanger conference earlier this year.
Berry brand Driscoll, meanwhile, has included data from its “cold chain” in its online advertising with good results. “Cold chain” is a term used in the perishable food industry to describe what happens once a product like raspberry is torn off … and the ticking of the clock ticks towards freshness. There is no point in advertising expensive berries if they are distributed warm and coarse.
Purina Feed distributor for Land O’Leaks, horses, cattle, poultry and other farm animals, first-party data collection begins with sign-ups for its own site and farm animal ownership newsletters. (Nestl পুর Purina manages the dog and cat food brands you’ve seen in stores, but Land O’Leaks has a feed business).
During the epidemic, there was a spike in setting up poultry farms in people’s homes as part of what you might call “hobby farms.”
“We started to build some audience around the visitors that came: they had other behavioral characteristics, what they were doing on the website,” he said. “A lot of people were new to us and it was a great opportunity to reveal more brands than just the content of our flock.”
Wait, FLOC? Hold your horse.
“A very different kind of sail,” Rudd said.
Considering the time was one way Land O’Leaks was able to back up more data in his newsletter strategy. After 15 to 18 weeks, the chicks are converted into adult food. Home farms, including dairy cows, also have deadlines for product and milk replacement.
Through an integrated first-party data set woven into its personalization program, Land O’Leaks has been able to retain more “hobby farm” subscribers and increase their overall number, partly due to improved cadence of people who subscribe to their newsletters or buy animal feed on the site. Educational resources for those who log in.
Another benefit is knowing when not to sell. “One of the great benefits to me of knowing our audience is that we can isolate them and stop telling them to convert,” Rudd said. Instead of constantly pushing the sales message, the marketing team may step back to consider its next step.
Land O’Leaks is now testing many of his estimates about the seasonal sales cycle, Rudd said. The company saw sales spikes in farm animal electrolyte products that it expected to be tied to drought conditions. But it turns out that is not the case. When the farmers themselves are thirsty, they give more animals to the animals.
“So now we’re going through a process to align distribution centers with potential spikes in demand,” Rudd said.
First party stack
Land O’Leaks’ first-party data sets contain two different types of customer data: aggregated and personal.
Includes reporting data from integrated audience wall garden platforms. FLoCs (at this time advertising technology FLOC) cannot be linked to a CRM profile or allow customers to retrieve online. Retailers carrying Land O’Leaks food brands (human food brands) provide similar data that is useful for analysis, but cannot be enabled in a programmatic or social media campaign, Rudd says.
Land O’Lakes works as a CRM cloud with Salesforce, partnering with Adobe Analytics and Snowflake to measure advertising.
CDP Litix serves as a personalization engine for other sets of Land O’Lax data: the kind that can be attached to a person (hence the focus on email sign-ups).
When Land O’Leaks has first-party data to anchor a profile, the information can be spread beyond the CRM function, which initially tracks purchases over time, says James McDermott, CEO and co-founder of Litix. CDP data is more behavioral and matches viewers encrypted elsewhere, so it can bridge with anonymous viewers, he said.
Land O’Leaks, for example, adds data based on customer engagement, such as whether they’ve bought maple-scented or pumpkin-scented products in the past, or whether they’ve searched for ham recipes. It’s not CRM data, McDermott said, but expanded profile information can be useful for alerting people about ad personalization, customer service or sales of certain products.
The key is to help brands do more with the data they have.
“It often starts as a process where the business turns profiles into smart audiences that can be used for a variety of purposes,” McDermott said.