As Marketing Director at Blackman Oil, Kelsey Blackmon oversees operations for "Neighborly" - the company's convenience store brand across multiple rural locations. Blackman Oil is a family company that has been around for four generations, providing fuel and convenience store services to communities throughout the region. When shoppers visit a Neighborly convenience store, they're experiencing the brand that Kelsey has helped build from the ground up.
With 11 stores and more under development, tracking customer engagement, store performance, and security across different locations presents significant challenges. But Kelsey's path to becoming a marketing analytics pioneer was shaped by her extensive experience in the agency world.
"I started my career in marketing and worked really hard to get an internship at the biggest agency in the state," Kelsey reflects. "I never left. I started in content creation, went all the way up into SEO, some account management, working with clients, and then ultimately ended up in strategy development, which is really what I'm passionate about."
The Challenge: Data-Driven Marketing in Rural Locations
After years in agency life, Kelsey was looking to build something with more creative control. When Blackman Oil needed someone to develop their first-ever marketing department, she initially tried to help them hire for the position—but eventually realized she wanted to take on the challenge herself.
"I was looking to do something different. I really care about this brand. I want this to be built correctly. I'll just do it myself," Kelsey explains. "We spent last year building a brand."
The convenience store side of the business had been around since 1990, but all marketing was "100% DIY" by the previous generation of leadership. Coming from a data-driven marketing agency, Kelsey needed robust analytics to make and validate marketing decisions—a particular challenge given the rural locations of many Neighborly stores.
"Most of our convenience stores are in very rural areas. It's a different beast altogether," she notes. "I needed some good analytics for marketing decisions and to then be able to prove that the campaigns that I'm pitching to the board to let me invest in are working."
Embracing AI for Marketing: Beyond Security Cameras
When exploring solutions, Kelsey discovered that Spot AI could transform their existing camera systems into powerful analytics tools—what she calls "the brain behind the eyes we already had."
"Being able to gather foot traffic, look at people presence, show the direct if-then result of this billboard or this marketing initiative to literal store presence—that's where Spot AI became the secret ingredient," Kelsey explains.
Unlike traditional door counters or infrared systems, Spot AI provides granular data about customer behavior while allowing visual verification of the data's accuracy.
"When you do the research on door swing counters, infrareds, things like that, the ability to know that what you're looking at is in fact what it's supposed to be, to know that actually is a real door swing or to be able to say, 'there were four people in that group, so we got one door swing, but that's actually four people'—you can't do that with traditional door swing counters and infrared systems. You need a camera."
The Solution: AI-Powered Marketing Analytics
Since implementing Spot AI, Kelsey's team has transformed how they analyze customer behavior and store operations:
- People Counting: "We've done people counting in each store, which is the modern-day version of counting a door swing. It's great for just having that verification, being able to tell what kind of customers we have coming in at different times of the day, which is fantastic for advertising, day-parting, etc."
- Store Heat Mapping: "We've got people presence set up in the stores, which allows us to heat map the store down to the aisle. In some cases where our camera angle is good, down to the product level almost. So that helps us from a merchandising perspective and from just general store layout and design perspective."
- Customer Service Monitoring: "We spent last year building a new brand called the Neighborly. Having that southern hospitality to our service is a core piece of this brand. So we set up an unattended checkout agent. If a person shows up to the register and our person doesn't get to the register within a couple of seconds, we get a ping."
- Security and Safety: Beyond marketing, the system also helps with security and safety concerns, including parking lot monitoring and slip-and-fall detection.
- Future Applications: "One thing I'm playing with that I really want to make work is how often somebody just drives by our store versus when they opt to literally peel off into the parking lot and come to the pump."
Results and Impact
The implementation has delivered several key benefits across marketing, operations, and customer experience:
- Data-Driven Decision Making: "Your decisions are only going to be as good as your data. What's nice about Spot is we can directly compare insights, reports, agents to the actual footage it was pulled from. So you can know for a fact that the data you think you're looking at is really what happened."
- Marketing ROI Validation: "Being able to put sales data here, foot traffic here, marketing initiatives here, all on a timeline, you start to get a beautiful spark line that really shows results."
- Service Quality Improvement: The system provides clear evidence of service levels, helping identify training opportunities. "Having the unattended checkout agent set up for us allows us to just have an awareness of how often we are fulfilling that expectation to our customers."
- Operational Efficiency: "My intention is to cross-reference the reporting from Spot with our scheduling platform so that we can adjust labor costs according to store presence and customer engagement seasonally, day-parting throughout the day."
Looking Forward
Kelsey sees AI technology as an essential partner in modern retail marketing: "I think of Spot AI as our AI operations manager. It allows us to have that extra eye in the sky at all times, observing, collecting information, doing fact-finding, and then it's serving up those insights to us as we've asked it, on a silver platter for us to just review at our leisure and apply to decision-making at a director level."
As Blackman Oil continues to grow its Neighborly brand, Kelsey plans to use the data gathered to make even more targeted decisions about marketing investments, store layouts, and staffing.
"I had no other way of tracking foot traffic before I found Spot," Kelsey summarizes. "When you're doing things like placing billboards, sponsoring the T-ball team, getting your logo on the t-shirts of the local festival—those are a lot of little disparate traditional tactics that give people warm fuzzies, but beyond that, how do you actually prove ROI? You have to have footfall."
With Spot AI, Kelsey now has the tools to not just build a brand, but to prove its effectiveness with hard data.
Watch Kelsey's Story
See highlights from Kelsey's experience with Spot AI in this brief customer testimonial:
Watch Kelsey Blackmon's Spot AI Success Story
This 5-minute video features key moments from Kelsey's journey, showcasing how Spot AI has become her "secret ingredient" for marketing analytics at Blackman Oil's rural convenience stores.
