Retailers can use their digital investments to generate significant additional revenue as advertising spending shifts more and more to the digital space. If you know how to compete, turning your digital platform into a media network opens up a world of opportunities.
Retailers are gaining access to a new revenue stream with great profitability and rapid growth rates by combining adverts on their e-commerce sites with classic marketing strategies like in-store placements and catalog promotions. With a digital advertising platform, you can get knowledge of consumer preferences and behavior that can be used to improve marketing strategy. Below are the best strategies for a successful retail media network.
#1. Evaluate your customer relationships
Industry frameworks for merchants with direct consumer contacts are evolving away from an overreliance on data obtained from other businesses and toward privacy by design. The most significant information will be proprietary data and practical insights that may be gained through a retailer’s close connections with customers.
By using POS systems and purchase transactions, retailers should gauge the scope and worth of their private data. The network will be powered by this pair of data sources based on the variety of audience purchase patterns. Additional information on specifics such as detailed price changes, promotional tendencies, and store locations might improve the data points that advertisers find to be pertinent.
With the aid of this information, advertisers may better analyze the factors that influence consumer decisions and target them at strategic points before they make a purchase. Then, advertisers will be able to develop more effective multichannel campaign strategies that produce worthwhile outcomes. Optimized data utilization can result in long-lasting, powerful brand partnerships, from brand awareness to targeted promotions.
#2. Know which technology is best for you
Without being usable, the first-party data that drives the retail network will have little value. Large amounts of data must be measured and evaluated to determine performance, duplicate what was successful, and continuously improve new and developing campaigns. To do this, merchants can assess the sustainability of current technologies and how they can be updated to a next-generation technology stack by looking at their current infrastructure and consumer touch points. Retailers should consider what makes sense for their customer experience and business strategy because there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint.
Retailers should assess their capacity to measure KPIs like return on ad spend (ROAS) to calculate revenue earned for money spent, multi-touch attribution to determine the value of each customer touch point along the customer journey that leads to conversion, and incremental sales, or purchases made during a given campaign above and beyond typical sales metrics.
#3. Identify talent gaps
When building a retail media network, talent is frequently disregarded, yet data need a workforce to be put into action and produce value. Retailers will probably need to add jobs and skill sets across departments like engineering, analytics, strategy, and media to see if the necessary people are in place to operate the media network.
Developers will be required to create, implement, and maintain the underlying technology enabling the media network once the network’s technical requirements have been identified. Analytics teams will need to create and optimize segments of preferred audiences and track performance over time once data capabilities and metrics are clearly defined. A committed staff must create and sustain demand while also creating materials to draw in the right audience if relationships with advertisers are to be maintained. The whole omnichannel media campaign throughout the network will be planned and optimized by media buyers.
Retailers can turn their digital investments into a network that generates new streams of ad revenue as third-party cookies fall by the wayside and eventually disappear. But certain difficulties continue. To arm retail players with the knowledge, they need to make educated decisions and show the entire advertising impact of retail media networks, analytics, reporting tools, testing methodologies, and a next-generation workforce are required.
