The Problem: How to help multichannel brands take control of the shopper journey

To understand what makes MikMak really tick, you need to first understand how the company’s e-commerce solution works at a basic level. So, let’s start with a quick example. 

Let’s say you are browsing a CPG brand’s website and then decide to click on a specific product that you are interested in purchasing. Once you land on the product detail pages (PDPs), you’ll likely see a number of “Buy Now” buttons scattered about. Clicking on those buttons is where MikMak’s magic really happens. Those buttons operate more or less as a redirect to a choice of either online retailers like Walmart, Instacart, and Amazon or brick-and-mortar retailers (based on a user’s location) where shoppers can buy the goods they’re interested in. 

There are a lot of benefits here for multichannel—grocery, alcohol/spirits, and CPG—brands. For starters, it provides deep insight into who shoppers are, what their path to purchase looks like, where they’re located, and what their preferences are at any step along their journey. This helps brands optimize the shopper journey by creating repeatable shopping experiences that are more likely to drive positive outcomes (purchases). It also enables them to be much more efficient with marketing spend, so they can meet shoppers wherever they are on their journey.

In short, brands today want to have a greater understanding of how their online investments can drive both online and offline outcomes. While pushing shoppers to purchase through online retailers is a fairly seamless process, moving shoppers from the online to the offline world is more complicated. “Giving consumers the option between digital and brick and mortar shopping experiences will accelerate the path to purchase for brand manufacturers,” explained Christian Trapp, MikMak’s Lead Product Manager. “Having access to the most accurate, global location-based data is a critical ingredient for determining where the best retailers are, in order to accelerate the performance of a brand’s where-to-buy campaigns.” 

The Problem-Solver: MikMak

Simply put, MikMak enables brands to grow at the speed of commerce. As the leading global eCommerce acceleration platform for multichannel brands, MikMak provides analytics and eCommerce enablement solutions for understanding their consumers' online behavior, determining the best use of marketing dollars, and driving omnichannel sales. By making a brand’s owned-and-operated media inherently shoppable, they are well-positioned to measure the online shopper journey, understand the touchpoints consumers go through to make purchases, and begin to trace how that experience extends into the offline world.  

The Solution: SafeGraph Places

“We looked at different options for location data, and SafeGraph was the only partner that gave us the flexibility and accuracy to add new retailers at the speed we need to operate,” added Trapp. “When you combine the quality and accuracy of the data with the SafeGraph team’s clear dedication to stellar customer support, you’ve got a winning recipe for success.”

“In addition to speed, SafeGraph’s dataset also provided us with enhanced data granularity, which we previously had to manage internally,” continued Trapp. This has freed up MikMak’s internal resources to focus on research and development in other areas of need.

“Working with SafeGraph has been seamless—and their data has provided tremendous value to MikMak,” emphasized Trapp. “We’re excited to continue exploring other opportunities available through our partnership, as we continue to optimize the shopper journey and create better customer experiences across both the online and offline worlds.”

The Result: Driving great confidence in the online-to-offline shopping experience

“If we had to think about life pre-SafeGraph versus post-SafeGraph, it really comes down to confidence,” summarized Trapp. “Not only do we feel 99.99999% confident about where we’re sending shoppers to in the real world, but we also have up to 20% greater POI coverage than we had before.” This alone has been a real game changer for MikMak, enabling them to go to market with solutions—at scale and with greater accuracy—than ever before.  

In addition to extracting even more value from the granularity of the sub-categories built into the SafeGraph Places dataset, as mentioned above, MikMak’s team is also keen to understand the different events that occur from when shoppers see a product online to when they eventually go and purchase it at a brick-and-mortar location. “What we can see already is where it looks like a consumer wants to shop based on things like clicking on a location’s address and checking out where it sits on a map,” added Trapp. “Now, the real challenge here is building out that attribution model that crystallizes that online-to-offline conversion.” 

Part of this attribution model will also explore customer journey extensions like the time of day shoppers are engaging with marketing communications online or the time of day they are thinking about making a purchase decision. “We’re really curious about understanding the thought process behind shoppers and why they make certain choices,” reiterated Trapp. “Honing in on what motivates shoppers to action at different times of day and at various points along their daily journeys—from home to the office and everything in between—can give us and our clients a deeper understanding of a shopper’s psyche. And that’s exciting!”

The Future: Taking the MikMak experience across borders 

Right now, MikMak’s use of SafeGraph data is only focused on the U.S. and U.K. markets, but they’ve already started to set their sights on adding the same rigor they’ve applied in these two markets to 1,500+ retailers around the world. “We are interested in unlocking this capability globally,” shared Trapp. “Shoppers may seem to be different in different geographies, but they actually share similar behavioral patterns—and by eventually tapping into the SafeGraph Places global dataset, we’ve got a viable opportunity to meet shoppers wherever they are in the world and however they continue to evolve their behaviors.” 

MikMak’s journey is just beginning—whether it’s a matter of cracking the code for online-to-offline attribution or finding new ways to make owned-and-operated media inherently shoppable all around the world.