Skai

Chris Costello

Online shopping has reached a point many experts did not think would be achievable for years, accelerated by the lockdowns and social distancing that were made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. While shoppers continued to gradually warm up to making purchases from their computers and their phones, 2020 forced the issue, and the changes to the ecommerce ecosystem will continue to ripple out into how brands and retailers adapt in the future.

That future includes 2021, now the first holiday season since the massive expansion of the ecommerce playing field. What has changed? What should brands expect from this “new normal” for this year’s holiday season?

1. The Rise of Retail Media

More people are shopping online than ever before. With more and more products being offered online, brands are realizing that they need to gain the attention of online shoppers the same way they need to stand out on physical store shelves. Retail media has emerged as both a publisher and an ad network channel, filling this need by offering brands advertising opportunities in the form of sponsored listings that are triggered by searching for and viewing similar products or searching for certain brands or product categories.

The advantages of these ad placements are many. The advertiser gets a bump in attention, and since all of the ad activity typically happens within the retailer’s website or app, all of the data associated with the shopper and the sale does not escape the virtual walls of that retailer easing the burden of modern privacy regulations.

Perhaps most important, investing in these marketing channels can also improve the customer experience. As online retailers proliferate and become more crowded with products, shoppers need shortcuts for navigating to the items they want and need. Retail media and paid search engine advertising are ways brands can help interested consumers find them quickly and easily amid a competitive online marketplace.

Multiply all of this by the increased shopping volume of the holiday season, and it’s no surprise that this is a key element for many consumer goods brands.

2. Be Where Your Customers Are

So, how does a brand capitalize on this rapidly expanding marketing channel? How do you choose which retailers are best for your advertising program? Similar to the basic rules of brick-and-mortar commerce, you simply want to be where your customers are. For retail media networks, this may be fairly straightforward. If you offer your products through that retailer, you will gain some benefit from buying ads on that retailer’s media network to shine a light on your products. We’ll get to just how much of a benefit in a moment.

Now, if you have a strong brand, you may ask yourself if retail media advertising is worth it because you are confident that shoppers know who you are and what you have to offer. This is where retail media can learn from paid search, which has always faced the same question, particularly around branded searches. Why pay extra for paid results when organic search results already put you high up on the page?

The answer for search, which is now the answer for retail media, is twofold. First, as a brand, the more space you take upon the results page is, the less space your competitors can take up. And second, paid results frequently offer you an opportunity to control your messaging in ways that organic results cannot. For the holidays, this can be especially important so that you can communicate shipping times and availability.

“With more and more products being offered online, brands are realizing that they need to gain the attention of online shoppers the same way they need to stand out on physical store shelves.”

3. Connected Commerce

Borrowing best practices from search bring up another important point, and that is that advertising in this new retail media channel alone is not enough. The brick-and-mortar analogy here is instructive. Promoting your brand once a shopper is in the store is great, but what about getting that shopper into the store in the first place?

Here, we can work our way back up the purchase funnel. Search ads are, as we said earlier, becoming more and more important as online retail proliferates, and that importance increases significantly when purchasing intent peaks for the holiday season. Some retailers may offer programs to sell through search shopping campaigns, and many search engines will now let you direct traffic directly to retailers in the event that you do not sell directly to your customers. Between these options, as well as more traditional search programs, it is in your best interest to make sure that when potential customers are looking for you, you can be found.

Zooming out further, display and video advertising via social media and other forms are still effective for broadcasting your message and your brand, despite recent changes to audience targeting. Even if these programs don’t result in direct sales, they can put you top-of-mind for consideration when it comes to holiday purchases. A video on social media leads to a search for your brand or your product which leads to a visit to a retailer’s site for purchase. It’s all connected.

4. Holistic Measurement

This notion of connected commerce raises the question, how can we measure the impact of all of these channels to see what is actually working? Digital marketers have worked on this problem since the first banner display ads, and now consumer brands who are finally getting into performance marketing via retail media networks are joining the effort.

For years, the promise of multi-touch attribution was to directly measure all of these touchpoints, and in doing so, enable us to give credit where it is due, all the way up and down the purchase journey. The reality has been a bit more challenging, and changes in privacy frameworks are making it even more so.

This doesn’t mean measurement is impossible, merely that it is evolving. First-party data solutions, clean data rooms, probabilistic measurement, and perhaps the most promising incrementality testing are all in the mix for marketers. Which path is right for you, and whether you build or buy a solution, depends on your available skills and resources, but solutions do exist.

This 2021 holiday season is giving retailers, brands, and shoppers more and more opportunities across the spectrum, particularly online. The savviest in all of these groups will be able to survey this evolving landscape to make the best use of their money, wherever they are. How do you stack up?