Author: Monica Herschelman

MediaPost – How to Make the Customer the Hero of Your Brand Story

Posted on by Monica Herschelman

The world of CPG marketing is both exciting and challenging. This category presents broad audiences that present major revenue opportunities for brands. But the competition is heavy, especially when you are competing with mega brands with mega budgets.

Establishing a marketing strategy that captures consumer attention in this crowded space can feel like an exhausting mountain to climb, especially for newer brands trying to make a name for themselves. But, with a focused approach that places the consumer at the center, CPG brands can break through the clutter and take market share.

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How to Drive In-Store Sales With Digital Advertising

Posted on by Monica Herschelman

CPG brands operate in a highly competitive industry which requires marketing efforts across various media channels to ultimately drive in-store sales. While in-store activations are important in driving purchases, digital touchpoints ahead of store visits are critical in the customer journey. In the article, you’ll learn how to use digital advertising to directly impact sales revenue by answering three key questions:

  1. How can CPG brands use digital advertising to stand out?
  2. How can brands prime audiences to make in-store purchases? 
  3. How can you measure the impact of digital media on in-store sales?

How Can CPG Brands Use Digital Advertising To Stand Out?

Consumers are inundated with ads every day. It’s important to be strategic with your creative messaging and media placements to ensure your ads are impactful and not disruptive. By carefully curating a strategy focused on the consumer experience, you have the ability to drive meaningful moments rather than creating noise.

  • Be discovered. Get in front of potential customers early in the discovery phase. Use search and commerce channels to show up where consumers are actively looking for products.
  • Be memorable. Create intriguing story lines of what the product or brand can do for users beyond basic utility.
  • Be different. Showcase your unique value proposition to stand out among competitor products. 
  • Be loyal. Re-engage your current customers and nurture them to, in turn, stay loyal to your brand. Use follow up offers, new product suggestions, and special promotions to show your appreciation and build up that relationship. 

How Can Brands Prime Audiences To Make In-Store Purchases?

To drive in-store sales, you need to establish awareness and consideration before that shopping trip. However, crossing the boundary from ad impression to ‘add to cart’ can be challenging. Use targeted messaging and effective frequency exposure across channels to make sure your product is included on the shopping list. 

  • Reach users across various media touch points from social to display to CTV with an omnichannel strategy.
  • Use loyalty card data to understand frequency and cadence of purchase to serve your ads in the right place at the right time. 
  • Understand how many interactions are needed before a new customer will remember and purchase once in store. 
  • Keep previous customers engaged with relevant messaging and offers to maintain brand loyalty. 

How Can You Measure The Impact Of Digital Media On In-Store Sales?

It can be complicated measuring online and offline channels and tying media spend back to brick and mortar purchases. Thankfully, there are measurement tactics and tools we can use to showcase ROI. 

Here’s how we approach measurement at Coegi:

  • Use advanced measurement tactics to uncover sales lift from your media.
    • Measurement partners like Catalina, IRI or Ibotta help connect the dots of ad exposure to in-store sales.
  • Look at success through the lens of incrementality. Test how product sales change year over year when an ad is in market versus out of market. 
  • Consider external factors like seasonality to make decisions based on non-media data.

In essence, shift the conversation from vanity metrics and click through rates because those don’t equal sales. 

Want to learn more about how to create a best-in-class media strategy for your CPG brand?

We’ve got you covered. View the complete CPG Digital Marketing Playbook here.

 

Retail Media Advertising Explained: Connected Commerce

Posted on by Monica Herschelman

What Is Retail Media Advertising?

Retailers are becoming ad publishers. They’re transforming their data and online platforms to sell valuable audience data along with advertising spots. Retail media advertising buys can be executed on retailer sites or programmatically on social and display channels. This data enables consumer brands to reach online shoppers. It can be activated by targeting ads based upon keyword searches, purchase history and other data collected via SKUs, purchase scans, and loyalty programs. 

The recent growth of retail media advertising has been astronomical. Amazon Ads alone is expected to reach $32 billion in revenue by 2023. Although many players are entering the market (Best Buy, Target, Kroger, Walmart etc.), Amazon still dominates with an estimated 76.2% of US ecommerce channel ad spending in 2021. Brands are leaning into this trend with 76% of marketers planning to frequently utilize point of sale data in 2022. With the CPG clients I’ve worked with at Coegi, we recognized the emerging trend of retail media and made sure we were incorporating this must-have tactic into our connected commerce strategies.

Reach Your Customers Wherever They Are With Retail Media

Retail media advertising empowers brands to be exactly where your customers are and deliver personalized experiences on and offline. 

  • How can you reach customers in-store? 
  • Where can you reach them when shopping online? 
  • How can you reach audiences when they’re scrolling through socials? 

Retail media lets advertisers be more data-driven and provides a reliable targeting solution. Targeting these shopper audiences creates the opportunity to deliver an efficient, personalized experience. The icing on the cake (or should I say cookie?) is that most retail data is cookieless. So, we are able to utilize it not only now, but into the future. 

With the landscape becoming increasingly cluttered, most CPG brands won’t have the budget to be present on every retail media platform, nor is that in their best interest. To make the most impact, brands need to research and test where their audiences are spending time. After making your selections, it’s also important to have unique strategies for each retailer. Your messaging and execution should look different on a Best Buy audience dataset versus a Wal-Mart audience. 

Connected Commerce Strategy

Connected commerce strategy is a concept developed by Skai. It means thinking about how you can connect all points of the customer commerce journey together. As retail media networks become more sophisticated, we are seeing more full-funnel implications. The Trade Desk reported that 39% of marketers surveyed use retail media advertising to drive brand equity scores and 44% use it to track sales growth. Take advantage of ecommerce site and programmatic placements to find prospecting audiences and track them through the funnel. 

For example, you could target an upper funnel retail media audience on social and display and then serve them a retargeted ad when they are actively shopping. Or, you could use Facebook conversion ads to drive to your Amazon product page and then develop a retargeting audience. For best results, I recommend strategically flighting media together and not having a standalone retail media strategy. Having supportive media across channels improves results for our clients at Coegi compared to solely running onsite retail media buys. 

Additionally, we recommend utilizing Amazon as a point of discovery along with Google Paid Search. When people start researching products, almost 75% start with Amazon. They are exploring, reading reviews, and connecting information to make a purchase decision. It’s important to look at the whole ecosystem of commerce and make sure all those puzzle pieces are connected. Understand what channels can help each other to incorporate a true connected commerce strategy. 

“Retail media presents retailers with an opportunity to better personalize their e-commerce sites, improve discoverability of products, and better monetize their first-party data. Likewise, it offers brands an opportunity to better reach their end customer and access more granular insights into marketing performance and effectiveness..”

– Forrester Now Tech: Retail Media Solutions Q2 2021, Colin Colburn

How To Measure Retail Media Advertising Success

The primary drawback to retail media, currently, is the segmentation from publisher to publisher. Wal-Mart data lives in one silo, Target data lives in another, and so on. Marketers have to be very mindful of where to invest for maximum impact. Using a trial and error method to test and learn is necessary. This allows you to see where your customers are responding because we do not see integration across channels with retail media. 

Look to outside partners who can aggregate data sets from multiple publishers and measure the big picture impact. Coegi works with partners so we can directly tag our in-market media and measure the direct impact of media on sales. These partners feed back real-time information so we can make optimizations and improve business outcomes. 

“For marketers wanting to take full advantage of retail media’s potential for reshaping attribution, and their overarching strategies for guiding consumers through the purchase funnel — or true “closed-loop marketing” — managing across retail data environments will be key”  – The Trade Desk

A more sophisticated approach is needed to ensure every dollar is spent wisely and effectively. This advanced insight from provides the competitive edge needed to maintain efficiency in this competitive market with rising costs and influx of demand. 

Key Takeaways

Retail media allows brands to: 

  • Utilize 1st party shopper data to reach customers wherever they are
  • Consider and understand the full shopper experience from discovery to purchase
  • Be data-driven and track closed-loop measurement, prioritizing cookieless solutions whenever available
  • Clearly understand the impact of ads on consumer behavior and sales 

At the end of the day, retail media is a must-have tactic for CPG brands, especially for challenger brands looking to break through. Explore connected commerce strategies for your brand to maximize the impact of your media spend and efficiently drive customers through the purchase funnel. 

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