Changing consumer behaviors have unlocked the full-funnel impact of retail media. That’s because the purchasing journey has evolved, where consumers discover products, research competitors, consider reviews, and make purchases exclusively on eCommerce channels. Consumers are growing more accustomed to completing every stage of the buyer journey within select retail media networks (RMNs).
Amazon alone generated $31.2 billion in 2021 with ad sales in the U.S., becoming the third-biggest digital advertiser and influencing the launch of many emerging RMNs.
With high-profit margins, closed-loop attribution, and sophisticated targeting, retail media spend is going to garner a significant chunk of your advertising budget. Brands that can build strategies to drive sales while also increasing brand awareness will be the biggest winners in 2023.
With any omnichannel strategy, your goal is to prioritize investments that not only yield the maximum results but that you can measure. This blog covers retail media budgeting, the challenges that come along with it, and the solution to measure and maximize your brand awareness.
Budgeting for the Future
Brands today understand the need for dedicated teams focused on brand building and retail media. And while social media, eCommerce platforms, and brand websites all contribute to building a brand image, the shared goal is to turn your brand image into direct sales.
The problem marketing managers and brand teams face is maximizing budgets to allow for a holistic online presence, especially with so many options for advertising. Here, it’s important to note the two goals to strive for:
- Reach the right target customer personas.
- Drive more sales.
It sounds simple. But RMNs are becoming increasingly sophisticated at turning your budgets into targeted and personalized experiences for your key consumers that achieve both goals.
This may cause the line between brand spend and retail spend to become blurry, but key metrics can help teams see the full picture.
Tracking Important Metrics
Brand media is a non-linear challenge—and that makes it hard to track.
Based on your quarterly and/or yearly targets, specific metrics become more important to keep up with. With so many correlated variables always at play, you must know exactly which ones matter and why.
While there are ways to get a glimpse into the impact of your marketing dollars by, say, seeing how many people clicked on your ad, the full-funnel impact of your campaign is substantially more challenging to measure. Forrester expects U.S. online retail sales to reach $1.6 trillion by 2027, with fundamental growth drivers being greater product selection, faster delivery, and lower prices.
One of the main benefits of running a campaign is to analyze its data to improve future campaigns and learn which strategies and experiments are worth your money. Without that analysis, traditional media investments don’t inform you about the overall conversion impact.
To understand and measure the full-funnel influence, you have to monitor and measure your KPIs regularly while turning those reports into actionable advice for the team.
Driving Incremental Media Growth
Over 70% of advertisers find retail media network performance to be better than that of other channels, and smaller businesses rely on being able to leverage first-party data.
While retail media can be a complicated endeavor, there are platforms and software that let brands collect, store, and examine marketing campaigns. Here are 5 ways you can measure the impact of your sales and brand awareness:
- Purchase behavior: Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, gives you access to retail sales data with your consumers’ purchase behavior. Compare the shopping habits of your ad-exposed consumers with those not exposed to your ads. This difference will tell you how effective your advertising efforts are, and if you need to make any changes.
- The downstream impact of upper funnel media: For upper funnel or branding media impact analysis, you can measure if brand awareness resulted in revenue across all your live campaigns using AMC’s platform. This way, you can directly compare which campaigns performed better and also understand the reasons for their success.
- Incremental reach to new buyers: For a specific campaign, you can also calculate if you were able to reach new buyers by measuring your incremental reach. This is very useful to not only gain new customers but also see if you were able to retain your existing customers in the face of competitors in the market.
- Ad-exposed consumer data: With AMC insights, you can learn a ton of relevant information about your target audience. The key demographic and geographic characteristics of your ad-exposed consumers form the basis of your future campaigns. Your overlapping audiences are the ones most likely to buy from you, and creating better media targeting personalized to them can significantly improve conversion rates.
- Retail brand persona: Your brand’s personality traits make up its persona, and it’s the guiding light to all audience strategies that target your ideal buyers. The combination of Amazon persona builder and its Marketing Cloud comes together to help you target your brand persona with thematic consistency across all channels to build trust with your consumers, all within your budget.
Online retail has allowed today’s shoppers to make informed decisions based on their lifestyles, but retail media has also given brands the chance to reach out to a bigger audience than ever before.
By emphasizing the channels that grow your brands and measurably hit your sales objectives, you can overcome shrinking budgets and create successful strategies that drive sales and build your brand all in one.
To see how you can win the online marketplace with intelligent sales, see Pacvue in action.
