• by Erik Sass , June 24, 2015

Long a dominant force in national media ratings and research for big clients in categories like consumer packaged goods, Nielsen is looking to expand its business with new offerings targeting middle-market clients with lower-priced data analytics.

Nielsen said the two new services, called Marketing ROI Snapshot and Revenue Management and Optimization (RMO), will be priced to attract mid-sized companies that previously could not afford its other services.

The services will become available beginning in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Nielsen’s new Marketing ROI Snapshot serves as an alternative to its established Marketing Mix analysis, and is based on thousands of benchmark studies conducted by Nielsen. Clients using Snapshot can provide details -- including their marketing spending, campaign timing, and copy quality -- with the Nielsen benchmark analytics in order to forecast how their particular marketing mix will perform.

The service should allow middle-market companies to evaluate various marketing strategies in terms of ROI at a reasonable cost.

The second new offering -- revenue management optimization -- applies strategic analytics to the rest of the sales environment in order to help clients find optimal pricing and promotional strategies, down to the level of specific retail business plans.

The RMO service is calibrated with four levels of customization that allow clients to choose the degree of detail and analytical depth their organization needs.

Nielsen isn’t the only company to bolster its strategic marketing services for retail clients in areas like pricing and promotional strategies.

Back in December, Information Resources Inc. struck a deal with Datalogix, giving it access to the latter’s retail shopper transaction data, to improve its analytics in areas like pricing and trade promotion, predictive analytics delivered by its Henry Market Structure products, and marketing mix modeling.