Shopper Insights

How to Gain the Most from Mobile Crowdsourcing

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When it comes to retail auditing, there are a plethora of benefits that can be derived from mobile crowdsourcing and the tactic of using smartphone-enabled shoppers to gather brick-and-mortar data.

While these benefits grow, however, an air of mystery remains over all that mobile crowdsourcing has to offer. There’s a large variety of question types that can provide you with more diverse and interesting data. The question though, is how can you unlock all of the benefits of mobile crowdsourcing for your retail auditing needs?

Traditional Uses of Mobile Crowdsourcing

Tried and true, the traditional uses of mobile crowdsourcing, like customer sentiment questions, continue to offer astonishing benefits to businesses. Learning the value of certain products to consumers, brand perception, and seeing your displays inside of stores nationwide can offer unparalleled insights. These insights can give you unknown information that consumers often neglect to share with businesses through branded surveys.

Now, there’s more to mobile crowdsourcing than meets the eye. The data you can collect is endless, from share of shelf to competitive analysis. Taking advantage of each facet available to you will only improve upon the value mobile crowdsourcing has to offer.

Share of Shelf

The expectation of your product’s share of shelf may not always be exactly what you find in-store. Between consumers moving products around, display and shelving compliance issues, and more, your share of shelf could be much more limited than you need for your business. Crowdsourced shoppers can capture and share that information with you to ensure your products are located where you want.

You can see your share of shelf using a variety of question types and understand the impact it has on sales. Photos often give a great representation of where your products are on the shelf. You can also ask multi-choice questions via mobile crowdsourcing, where shoppers can select more than one answer about product location so you can see those results laid out on a heat map. This will give you a full visual view of where your products are on shelves in comparison to your expectations. Knowing your share of shelf is important because the more visibility you have in-store, the more likely your products are to be sold.

Female shopper participating in mobile crowdsourcing on smartphone.

Product Availability

Product availability can be difficult to track in real time in order to make better restocking decisions. Smartphone-enabled shoppers can scan product barcodes and answer questions about product availability, facings, and more. Out-of-stock products can often cause consumers to purchase different brands which can sway their loyalty. Staying ahead of this and understanding your stocking needs by retailer, region, and other metrics will give you a leg up on the competition.

Smartphone-enabled shoppers can scan product barcodes and answer questions about product availability, facings, and more.

Assessing your product stock levels in near-real-time will give you a better understanding of which stores and products need to be restocked faster. Ensuring product availability in-store will help protect consumer brand loyalty and set you up for sales success. Understanding when your products need to be restocked will help optimize your shipping and supply chain methods. As a result, this use of mobile crowdsourcing can be greatly beneficial.

Display Compliance

All too often, we find that brick-and-mortar displays are not set up the way we expect. With issues like broken, torn, or damaged display cases, missing products, missing or broken technology—like marketing video or photo content—and more, the impact on brand perception could be negative. The biggest issue with display compliance is that it’s not easily tracked without solutions like mobile crowdsourcing.

Display compliance can heavily impact consumer perception and purchase decisions. Ensuring your displays are set up the way you expect can make a big difference in your overall business metrics. Our shoppers can find your displays in store and give you the information you need to verify that they’re set up properly and working. From photos to questions about display features, learning more about display compliance will set you up for success in your stores nationwide.

Bookstore shelf with three books displayed.

Competitive Analysis

We’re all interested in learning more about our competition. It’s important to understand your competition and consumer needs to be competitive in the current retail landscape. Our shoppers can share pictures of your products and signage in comparison to your competitors, provide insights on why they would choose one brand over another, and more.

Competitors are a good place to start when it comes to making business decisions. Being aware of competitor signage, product placement, and share of shelf in comparison to your products will help you determine where you stand in the market. These insights can also help you make business decisions that will heavily impact sales.

Closing Thoughts

The greatest way to unlock all that mobile crowdsourcing has to offer those in need of retail auditing is by utilizing a variety of questions to gather a more complete set of data. Smartphone-enabled shoppers can help you learn more about a variety of topics that may be impacting your in-store traction. Tracking the data over a longer period of time will also provide you with historical information that will allow you to see how changes you’ve made have impacted shoppers. This can help you determine which steps to take to set your business and brand up for success in the future.

The key to mobile crowdsourcing is determining what information you need to make the best decision for your business needs. Utilizing all that Wiser’s smartphone-enabled shoppers can do for you can give you impactful and critical information that wouldn’t have been easily gathered elsewhere.

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Better decisions can only come from better data.

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