We live in an age where online shopping has become part of our everyday lives. Want a new pair of trainers? Looking for travel deals? Or simply doing your weekly shopping? You can now do all this online, much faster and more efficiently than going to the shops. Retailing has entered a new era where online shopping seems to be catching up with, and in some cases overtaking, traditional channels. New solutions are needed, such as retail media. Learn all about retail media advertising in this blog post. Read on!
Retail media offers brands the opportunity to reach consumers more effectively in an increasingly crowded online space, and retailers can generate additional revenue by selling their respective platforms to brands. Brands can then target consumers at the point of purchase, which will make them more willing to buy.
Imagine someone going camping. In an online shop selling outdoor products (various brands), you search for sleeping bags and find out about the products. As they browse the results page, they also see ads for padded sweaters, which can be useful on cold evenings.
Thanks to retail media, consumers get useful content, tailored to their needs. This is achieved by the retailer allowing brands to appear in prominent locations and also providing data on consumer behaviour to the brands offering the products. This gives them access to very important information about their customers and consumer behaviour, which they can use to fine-tune their messages and advertising. To continue with the example above, why is there an ad for a polo sweater? Because the data shows that consumers who are looking for a sleeping bag that can be used in cold weather typically add a sweater for warmth.
Retail media has huge potential. Here's a look at why this new way of doing things is worth paying attention to!
The importance of retail media
The significance of retail media networks is that it takes online advertising to a new level, changing the relationship between brand and user, opening a new chapter in the relationship. Let's see how this is possible!
Retail media networks, such as an online store, collect data about the activity on the site, what is happening on the site, where shoppers click, what they buy with what products, which brands they prefer in which categories, when they are active shoppers, what basket value they buy, whether they abandon the process and so on. This is internal data that brands don't have, because at best, if they have a branded webshop, they can only collect information on those who click and buy there.
Such valuable data was also provided by third-party cookies to a certain extent, but these are no longer used, not to mention that data directly from the retailer is much more reliable.
Data is therefore one of the main reasons why big brands have already opted for retail media. Just as importantly, it allows brands to personalise their offers. This makes it much easier for them to attract new followers, and for those who already know and like the brand to discover new products. This requires the retailer to give insight into the data and access to the audience.
It is very important that the effectiveness of retail media can be measured very well. Ads are displayed and sales are made on the same page, so you can track the customer journey precisely.
But what do these retail media ads look like? Where can they appear? Let's take a look at the most popular solutions!
What types of retail media advertising exist?
Retail media advertising can appear offline, for example in shops, and online. There are two main types of offline advertising: physical advertising, such as leaflets, and digital, such as in-store display advertising. In this blog post, we will write about online advertising and present the most common types.
Retail media advertising can take many forms. What they have in common is that they are relevant, useful and fit perfectly into their context. They do not appear to be useless advertisements that the visitor is trying to avoid, but rather content that the consumer values. In most cases, they are distinguished from other ads by a sponsorship label, but there are of course also solutions where the ad stands out more, for example by being framed or having some striking visual element.
Ads can appear on the home page, category page, results page and product page. Brands can decide and set where they want their ads to appear in the dedicated interface. This is because the setting of retail media advertising is self-service.
Inhabitad provides a retail media solution that retailers can integrate for free. Brands are given access to this system and can configure their ads. This makes it easy for the retailer to generate extra revenue and for brands to reach their audience.
