How to Personalize Retail Media Advertising

The retail media advertising experience is changing rapidly. Today’s customers have more access to relevant ads, contextual sales, and promotions from their favorite brands. Retailers also have a new tool to utilize, that being retail media networks (RMN), which allow them to facilitate these types of highly personalized advertisements. How do brand marketers fit into this conversation? By designing advertising that takes advantage of the technology and deeply personalized insights that RMNs are offering. Brand marketers need to understand what personalization means when it comes to retail online advertising, as well as the reasons why it’s so important in 2022, to successfully utilize RMNs to grow alongside a burgeoning online shopping sector. Successfully leveraging these RMNs could be the difference between brands that do and don’t survive the economic recession that experts warn could be looming. Let’s cover all of these subjects and suggest some easy ways your brand can begin making better personalized ads today.

What is Retail Media Advertising?

Retail media advertising is advertising designed websites, checkout screens, search results, and other online media assets that are owned and managed by retail media companies. Think of products that are pushed to consumers via recommended search results on Amazon. This is a key example of retail media advertising.

What is Personalization in Retail Advertising?

When advertisers refer to personalization, they are referring to the act of creating ads that are specifically targeted to unique buyers. These buyers can be individuals shopping for themselves or fellow businesses with whom the advertiser hopes to establish a relationship.

Personalization Is

• Targeted: Personalized ads are intentionally produced for unique buyers from the outset.
• Data Driven: Who to target, and when, is a key problem that is solved with quality data and high-level analytics.
• Relevant: Ads are produced for every step of the customer journey to ensure potential sales can be nurtured regardless of their readiness to purchase.
• Contextual: Advertisers know that customers are more open to advertising when they’re already shopping, and design advertisements and platforms around this.

Personalization Is Not

• One-size-fits-all: Copy & pasting customers’ names on a mass email is technically personalization, but it falls below the standards customers expect.
• Overbearing: Great personalization can even be off-putting in the wrong context. Customers want to feel as though you’re anticipating their needs without being obtrusive.

Why Personalization Is More Important Than Ever Before

Personalizing advertisements is the best way to compete with the growing number of problems facing brands in 2022.

Inflation Is Restricting Consumer Spending

Inflation is rapidly becoming a major problem that some experts believe could lead to a recession soon.  An NCS Consumer Sentiment Survey from June 2022 revealed some eye-popping stats when it comes to online grocery shoppers:

• 76% are changing the way they buy groceries
• 71% are straining their savings
• 43% are actively searching for sales and promotions for their favorite brands

Contrary to what you might think, this doesn’t mean you should stop advertising. In fact, research has shown that advertising in a recession is more beneficial than pausing ads. In the event of an economic downturn, brands and retailers should expect customers to shop around to find the best deals they can for products they need.

Growing Private Label Competition

A recent eMarketer report found that private-label grocery brands were exceeding 20% market penetration in some online grocery buying categories like home, meat, and deli. Even in a great economy, these private labels enjoy a distinct advantage thanks to their relation to the retailer. Their products, which are often cheaper, can be advertised directly alongside their brand competitors. Grocery retailers also have first-hand access to prices and demand information which allows them to design sales and promotions around these products that non-retailer brands traditionally have been unable to compete with.  Non-private label brands have to adjust to this increasing private label competition with better, more personalized retail media advertising, sales, and promotions.

Rising Consumer Expectations

Customers have grown used to the feeling of companies keeping track of their information. Why is this the case? To put it simply, technology has evolved, and this level of personalization is easier to achieve than ever before. Customers don’t need to take time to look around and find multiple competing brands when there are already several who have access to their information and have designed personalized, relevant, and contextual advertising for them.  Customers enjoy this deep personalization because it adds value to their lives. On the contrary, shoppers definitively dislike feeling like just another customer. Receiving mass emails with no relevant information or context is not only not valuable, but it can also feel obtrusive and annoying compared to the organic feel of personalized advertisements.

How to Personalize Retail Media Advertising for Retail Media Networks in 2022

Cookies are dead. The best way to generate high-quality consumer data after this loss is through voluntary programs that consumers sign up for. The entities best positioned to achieve this are retailers. Specifically, retailers with strong online presences that facilitate rewards programs and require customers to provide certain information.  In essence, customers pay for rewards with their information. Brands should use this information to produce contextually relevant and efficiently targeted advertising.  Here are four ways to personalize retail media advertising for retail media networks.

1. Plan

The planning stage should start with a comprehensive review of all available data. Ask yourself these key questions and you’ll find that your plan emerges naturally from the answers:

• Who are your most valuable customers?
• What products do they buy most?
• How can you speak to these customers?

2. Focus on All Channels

Effective retail digital advertising means meeting customers where they are. You should have content available for any channel a consumer prefers. This includes social media, video, blogs, banners, images, and paid search results.

3. Try to Generate Engagement

A great way to tell if your personalized ads are working is if people relate to them. Are consumers engaging with your ads via comments, shares, likes, or clicks? Focusing on this metric may be simpler than just trying to increase conversions and may generate similar results.

4. Get Comfortable with Retail Media Networks

Retail media networks are rising because they facilitate every step of the retail media advertising operation.  From collecting and segmenting consumer data to offering digital product placement and even paid search results, retail media networks are quickly becoming a brand’s best option for digital customer experience management.

How Retail Media Networks are Making Personalization More Effective

Your digital customer experience strategy should make use of retail media networks.  The most important reason is the access to segmented, first-party consumer data that RMNs provide. The second most important reason is the personalized and relevant retail media advertising that brands can create using this data.

A Better and More Secure Customer Experience

More and better-secured data is a win-win-win for customers, retailers, and brands alike. RMN data is sourced from willing first-party contributors and segmented, secured, and disseminated by the retailer.  This means the data never changes hands without first being verified, anonymized, and secured first.  This not only improves security but ensures that brands have access to higher-quality information, it makes it easier to design advertising and even inform the direction of product development.

Offline Sales Attribution Is Key

Keeping track of sales data is the best way to design advertising. Knowing what customers desire, when, and whether they can afford it at full price, are all extremely insightful data points for brands to work with. In the past, this data simply wasn’t as available as it is today. The rise of retail media networks is to thank for this. Offline sales attribution can lead to a ten to twentyfold increase in sales attribution (eMarketer). Even if you assume that online advertising only plays a modest role in lifting in-store sales, a massive increase in the ability to attribute sales means brands can design more efficient ads. In short, even if you aren’t a fan of the digital shelves or other media products that RMN provides access to, the first-party consumer data from brands as large as Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart can be game changers when it comes to designing ads.

Shoppers Browse Online Assets Even While In-Store

Context is king. Consider a few points:

• Customers are more open to seeing advertising when it’s contextual and relevant. They are also likely to trust brands and retailers once they’ve had a positive buying experience with them.
• Consumers use their phones while shopping in-store to find sales and other information about products before they buy.

Customers should be able to find an item online and then easily complete their purchase in-store, or vice versa. Are your ads and promotions designed for, or even capable of, reaching consumers at this dynamic juncture? If not, a review of your retail media advertising strategy might be in order. If you find that your strategy isn’t properly managing the data and insights that it offers, you might consider hiring an agency like E29 to do it for you.

An Agency Like E29 Can Expertly Manage RMNs and Their Data

Customers don’t just shop online or offline anymore. Rather it’s usually some combination of online shopping and research combined with in-store browsing that leads to purchases.  Brands need to be able to read and accurately interpret the huge amount of data available from online shopping, then they need to have the creativity and expertise to design effective retail media advertising campaigns. The stress is managing potentially dozens of distinct RMNs with unique customer bases, products, and media formats may be enough for small or medium-sized brands to pause. If you’re concerned that the time and resources required to adequately manage RMN advertising are too much for your advertising operations, hiring an agency that focuses on digital customer experience services could be right for you. 

• An agency like ours has many experienced and dedicated professionals who are already familiar with RMNs and how to interact with them.
• E29 can design personalized and targeted ad campaigns by using sophisticated data analysis.
• E29 was founded on the principles that are making RMNs so popular today: personalization, data analysis, and creative ad targeting.

FAQs

Some common questions asked regarding this subject include:

What Is a Retail Media Network?

An RMN is a network of media assets like retail websites and other platforms owned and operated by retailers. Products that RMNs offer include banners, paid search results, and digital product placements.

What Are the Advantages of Retail Media for Brands?

Retailers use retail media networks to collect customer data through loyalty programs and at checkout. Brands can access these platforms and data to design personalized and relevant advertising for consumers.

What Is Retail Personalization?

Retail personalization is the process of designing advertising and products which are targeted at unique buyers. In other words, personalization is a company attempting to connect with and speak to customers on an individual level, instead of through advertising aimed at the masses.

What Are Retail Media Ads?

Retail media ads can include things like paid search results, strategic digital product placements, targeted email campaigns, and product recommendations.

Personalization Is Easier Now, But More Important

The age of information has placed a unique strain on brands and retailers: finding a way of personalizing their retail media advertising to individuals. In the past, deep personalization was unthinkable, because it was impossible to achieve on a mass scale. With improvements in data tracking technology and the rise of retail media networks, this is no longer the case. Retailers have taken advantage of this by establishing services that allow insight into customer data that makes designing personalized ads possible. The brands that take this data and use it to create the best advertising campaigns and product promotions will be the ones that stand out from the pack. If you’d like to learn more about how E29 can help you increase your advertising ROI, click here to talk to our team.