As the retail market continues to struggle with the effects of inflation, retailers are facing the challenge of maintaining profitability while striving to prove ROI and ROAS from effective marketing strategies. In times of rising costs and economic uncertainties, optimizing your media spend becomes crucial.
In this blog post, we will explore strategies to help retailers navigate the impact of inflation and make the most of their media budgets.
Data-Driven Insights:
Leveraging data is vital in optimizing media spend during inflation. By analyzing customer behavior, and omnichannel engagements retailers should discover risks and growth opportunities. Investing in robust, collaborative data analytics platforms can provide valuable insights to make informed decisions on media allocation. These kinds of platforms will allow you to measure the uplift of your offers and ad campaigns across all channels, ensuring that your budget is directed towards channels that deliver the highest ROAS for you and your brand partners.
Optimize Ad Creatives and Channels:
This new environment creates uncertainty around costs and customers’ demands. Advertisers are reducing spending and are more focused on loyalty-first strategies, looking for ways to optimize media investments. Now more than ever every ad dollar counts.
Not all channels or all campaigns offer the same ROI. Creative ads should have the exact right messaging, crafted for the right specific audience, powering ads that work for customers, retailers and brands. It’s also crucial to assess the performance of each channel and prioritize those that deliver the best results. Retailers should allocate budgets to ensure strong ROAS.
It is true that grocery baskets are not the first cut, but customers are relying more and more on ways to save money: best deal, lowest price, loyalty points usage, changing basket mix, switching to private labels etc1. Along with the risks this trend leads to, lays also an opportunity for retailers to craft and personalize their ad campaigns, securing growth.
Embrace Digital Strategies:
Digital advertising offers cost-effective options and flexibility. Retailers should aim to embrace digital strategies such as search engine marketing (SEM), social media advertising, and programmatic advertising. These platforms provide precise targeting capabilities, allowing you to reach the right audience at the right time where they shop, while often offering more affordable pricing options compared to traditional media channels.
Digital channels also allow you to easily monitor and measure the performance of your campaigns. However, having those measurement capabilities in one platform, taking retailers all the way from AI-based insights, to offers & ad activations, to ‘closed-loop’ measurement – is the pinnacle of efficiency. This way, you can continuously and automatically optimize your campaigns and adjust your media spend efficiently.
Collaborate with Partners:
Collaborating with your brand partners can help maximize your media spending while minimizing costs. Always look to empower your brand partners to rationalize their media spend and measure the impact of their content. This way, you can create a more optimized planning of supplier funded promotions, creating new monetization opportunities. By leveraging ML and AI, retailers and brands can predict what their customers need and discover growth potential for each brand.
Inflation creates unique challenges for retailers, but they also present opportunities for optimizing media spend. By making data-driven decision-making processes retailers can navigate the impact of inflation and ensure their advertising investments yield maximum returns. By taking a proactive approach, even in this challenging reality, retailers will be able to drive customer engagement and create new monetization streams
