How Retail Media works w Shopper Marketing
2-min read
But first: If you are a startup that uses Carta as a cap table management service, your investors might be asking to switch to another service. That’s because Carta was caught misusing client info, contacting private investors for their secondary trading business. Although Carta has quickly responded by exiting this business, trust remains an issue.
If you or your investors don’t trust Carta anymore, there are alternatives. Small businesses and startups also use LTSE and Mantle.
Back to the topic:
Shopper marketing includes retail media advertising, and has the ability to influence what is happening in stores though digital ads.
Before you execute on any shopper marketing, you’ve got to be actively monitoring your shelf placement, number of facings (and SKU assortment), and that your price tags are correct. This is the job of merchandisers and if you do not have merchandisers, run don’t walk and hire a team. These are the boots-on-the-ground that will report the store by store happenings and fix problems for you. I recommend Dirty Hands and Basemakers
Why do I need merchandisers if I have brokers?
If your brokers go to each of your store locations once a week and report back to you complete with shelf pics then you’re right, you don’t need merchandisers.
I am going to focus on the retail media aspect of shopper marketing. But remember it is important to align the in-store efforts with the online.
Instacart
Advertising on Instacart should be at the top of your retail media plan. Once you start showing up on Instacart, you can go into your Ad Manager account and optimize your listings and add products. Instacart has been removing restrictions for brands so you have more control. Other great things:
· ROAS on ads is very good (like 7 or 8 good)
· Sponsored Search results are good
· Self-service Display offering is good – (these are the banner ads that require you to upload creative. It’s upper funnel marketing which typically start-ups don’t do, however Instacart has opened up a new bidding structure that makes this cheap and effective).
Remember, consumer purchases on Instacart are running through the register at the retailer. This counts towards your velocity at that retailer. You want your product listings to show up when consumers type in certain keywords or competitor keywords – the first 3 placements perform the highest.
Retail Platform ecommerce advertising
Find out who runs the ads on your retailer websites and coordinate campaigns. Reach out to 3rd parties such as Criteo and CitrusAd. You can run ads on individual retailers and get reporting broken down to the retailer level.
Digital Coupons
Once you’re winning the bid on paid search, you’ll want to offer deals to drive trial. Retailers usually don’t upload TPRs onto ecomm platforms so you’ll want to run coupons. Inmar and Quotient offer solutions but you can run coupons more inexpensively. Look at Mandlik & Rhodes.
Ibotta
If you are distributed at Walmart, or nationally with a top 10 Ibotta retailer, you’ll want an Ibotta program. Ibotta works as a loyalty program that uses verified consumer purchase data to target consumers and keep them coming back to re-purchase your products.
Management
If you have no experience with retail media advertising, you can hire help. For example, if you don’t know what an attribution window is, get help. Selecting keywords and monitoring your bids frequently (like daily in some cases), and analyzing campaigns by aligning attribution windows is part of the management required. Thanks to Hayden Consultancy for many of these tips and sign up for Shopper Marketing Bootcamp at Expo this year!
All my best,
Jennifer