This is the second blog in our weekly series on retail media and it provides you with proven strategies to be successful with retail media advertising. If you missed the first blog where we talked about the retail media landscape, don’t worry — we’ve got your back. Check it out here: The Rise of Retail Media.
Strategies for Retail Media Success
It’s no secret that competition is on the rise. To stand out, you need to cut through the noise and build a targeted advertising strategy.
But where do you start? Let’s dive in and unfold five proven strategies for your retail media success.
1. Explore Different Options
With so many channel choices and other brands shouting for attention, a standard listing strategy is no longer enough to give your brand visibility.
Have an investment plan in the short term and explore different options for all retail channels you sell on.
If the majority of your advertising budget currently goes to Amazon, develop strategies to test other marketplaces like Target or eBay where you could gain greater traction and revenue with a smaller investment. You may even explore local or niche options as well.
2. Control How Your Brand Is Showcased
Brand identity, tone of voice and information about your products play a crucial role when it comes to acquiring new customers and nurturing existing ones.
Previously, the brand’s website was the only place where a brand could get across its identity whereas now, thanks to brand stores, marketplaces allow brands to encompass all of these elements without limiting sales performance and losing potential customers along the way.
The most developed marketplace among all is the Amazon Storefront so we will use this one to explain what a brand store is and what benefits it can bring to your brand.
- Improve your organic product ranking and Sponsored Brand Campaign performance
- Expand coverage across Amazon with keyword and product targeting for Sponsored Brands
- Gain organic sales from users coming from the byline in Amazon product detail pages
Yet, simply having a brand store isn’t enough.
To win in the long term, continually update and optimize your store pages so the marketplace can increase its relevance in customer searches. According to Amazon, stores updated in the past 90 days report 21% more repeat visits and 35% higher attributed sales per visitor.
Tips to Improve Your Brand Store
- Curate your catalog and identify an optimal collection (home, clothing, etc.)
- Leverage menus to segment the store
- Include lifestyle content and creatives (use video where possible)
- Insert product titles or categories where possible
- Drive traffic using Sponsored Brands
- Add only the descriptive keywords for which you’d like to improve your rankings
3. Ensure Placements Are Not a Blind Spot
In a world where visibility is key and relevancy essential, showing your ad in the right spot can have a significant impact on performance.
Marketers tend to overlook ad placement positions, but defining your preferences can fine-tune your performance on marketplaces. Where you choose to place your ad lets the system know how aggressive you want to be. Choose from:
- Top of search — Ad appears at the top of the first page of search results
- Rest of search — Ad appears in search results below the first fold/page
- Product pages on Amazon — Ad appears on product detail pages
This is not set in stone so it’s important to keep a flexible approach. For example, sometimes top of search works very well — but other times it underperforms. For each ad placement, it all depends on your product’s characteristics and the marketplace on which you are trading.
Test your placements and adjust your bids regularly based on the data you collect.
4. Automate Ad Management
If you’re managing ads manually, you’re most likely missing out on sales opportunities.
Automation allows you to have control over performance by simply following predetermined rules. And at any time. But how does automation help? Let’s look into a few benefits:
- Smart seller rank: Drives sales for products that are almost out of stock
- Effective bidding: Adjusts bidding strategies to prioritize what drives the best results on a granular level
- Budget wastage control: Highlights components that are slowing down your accounts to help you evaluate if you are selling on the wrong marketplace or if the products aren’t in line with goal expectations
- Strategic focus: Frees you from time-consuming and repetitive (but necessary) tasks and unlock time for you to focus on growth strategies to drive expansions
Moreover, automated ad management is especially helpful for brands with a larger catalog that implement a high number of campaigns and find it difficult to keep up with performance.
5. Win Against Competitors
Considering marketplaces’ global presence and hundreds of millions of products, your competitors may not always be who you think. You may go up against big names, but you’re more likely to face non-branded products at competitive prices. To win:
Don’t market your full catalog.
Instead, target your strategy with products that differentiate you from the competition in various categories like review scores, price and quality. Select only the products that put you at an advantage.
Keep competitive campaigns separate.
Don’t add competitive targets to your branded and non-branded campaigns. Keep them in their dedicated campaigns.
Don’t add all competitors in one campaign.
Choose to advertise your products with the best reviews or best price point. This allows you to tailor your messaging and enables higher performance.
We recently hosted a webinar with Link Walls, ChannelAdvisor’s vice president of digital marketing strategy: Retail Media Advertising: Key Strategies to Boost Sales and Product Visibility. Watch the on demand recording here. And stay tuned for the third blog in this series coming next week!
