Three reasons you need retail media in your omnichannel marketing strategies

Today’s retail environment and consumer behaviour is constantly evolving. With an increasingly competitive landscape, CPG brands need to think beyond traditional marketing strategies to build the customer loyalty they need for continued success.

Including retail media in your marketing strategy is a powerful way to reach and engage customers throughout their entire purchase journey, from awareness to purchase. It allows you to meet the right customers where they are, with the right message at the right time. Omnichannel strategies also unlock massive ROI potential for businesses that embrace them strategically.

There are three main reasons you should be thinking of including retail media tactics in your next campaign:

1. It helps the right customers discover your products

2. It motivates customers to choose your products

3. It incentivizes customers to stay with your product

Let's break down each and explore the retail media solutions that can help.

If customers don’t know about your product, they won’t buy it. It’s as simple as that. It’s important for brands that are looking to increase their brand awareness or attract new buyers to tell their brand story to the right customers.

Traditional types of video advertising such as TV commercials are highly effective at creating an emotional connection or conveying brand values. With the right creative, brands can differentiate themselves from other brands and inspire a purchase. As a long-trusted tool to convey brand messaging to large audiences, it’s been supercharged by the internet and streaming through Connected TV. While the viewership is accelerating, advertisers can now also leverage intelligent audience targeting with the power of retail media.

Another way you can increase your discoverability is through investing in Onsite Display Ads, which allows you to place ad creative right on the very website customers are shopping on. It’s an engaging way to get your products in front of consumers while they’re in an active shopping or pre-shop research mindset. We know that over half of customers visit one of our online platforms (like PC Express^®, the Shoppers Drug Mart^® website, or PC Optimum^TM) before even heading to one of our stores¹, making it a prime place to encourage discovery of your products.

Lastly, retail media has unlocked some exciting new ways to tell visual stories, most notably through In-Store Digital Screens. Placed in high-traffic areas and in close proximity to products, customers are exposed to ads while they’re shopping the aisles. It’s a great place to highlight products with a seasonal timeframe, promote new product launches, share brand purpose messaging, or promote an offer.

With all these trusted high-reach tactics in mind, the key differentiator of retail media is around the ability to leverage purchase pattern insights and audience targeting to advertise in a more effective way.

It’s no secret that driving sales and increasing market penetration is a key factor in any brand’s success. It involves both understanding customers’ needs and showcasing your product’s value. Customers are faced with many choices – whether it’s in a store or on a digital shelf, and retail media provides tons of opportunities to influence a purchase decision.

Sponsored products (or Sponsored search) is one of the original retail media tactics that involved boosting product tiles to premium placements. It still proves to be highly effective today. While the basis of sponsored products is around increasing your product visibility, it’s become quite intelligent over the past few years. Features like Automatic Targeting allow your sponsored products to appear in search results for both direct and complimentary searches, which captures more customer interactions than before. Platforms like MediaAisle^TM Sponsored Products are also becoming more intelligent with built-in optimization by ranking products based on relevancy and cost-per-click.

One of the best ways to win over new customers is by getting your product directly into their hands. Tactics like Sampling do just that, offering a free trial that's easily added to their cart. This provides a compelling sensory experience that can spark future purchases.

It also allows for the breaking of habitual purchases by encouraging customers to try something new. The future involves both targeting the right audiences and measuring its effectiveness.

Once your brand has been discovered and chosen by customers, turning those buyers into repeat customers can build long-term sales and brand love. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring customers is generally more expensive than retaining existing ones, so building long term brand loyalty is critical for success.

Loyalty offers like point promotions or special pricing for members are a powerful way to enhance customer satisfaction, encourage repeat purchases, and increase retention by making customers feel valued and understood. While competitors may offer tempting deals to lure your customers away, providing loyalty incentives gives customers a reason to stay in the face of competitive pressure.

Tracking the effectiveness of loyalty offers will give you valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences which can be used to further refine your strategies. Loyalty offers can be customizable to different segments such as a general audience, or extremely targeted to new category or new brand buyers.

To create a truly omnichannel experience for your customers, having the right blend of tactics and audience targeting in your overall marketing strategy is critical. As you build a complete marketing funnel that guides customers seamlessly from awareness to advocacy, retail media can be the missing puzzle piece that layers in intelligence to reach the right customers at every stage.

Whether you’re encouraging customers to try your product for the first time or nurturing them on their way to becoming a brand advocate, you can create a more powerful and efficient funnel that drives both acquisition and retention.

To learn more about how retail media can help you achieve your marketing goals, get in touch with us today.

¹ Source: Loblaw Companies Limited.