When footfalls dwindle, the shutters come down and you need a different strategy
Data shows that store closings in the U.S. will nearly triple to 25,000 this year from 9,300 last year, challenging brands to reach consumers directly through digital channels.
(“Brand Disruption 2021” findings, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB))
The need for retailers to have a digital foothold is becoming more and more necessary for their survival. Apart from having an easy-to-use website for customers to shop, a strong weapon in the hand of a retailer is the new disrupter, the shoppable ad.
A shoppable ad is nothing but an image or a video, illustrating products with tags (or markups) and checkout capabilities. So customers can check out a product, know how much it costs and then go on to buy it. Google’s Image Ad feature launched in 2019, is a great example.
Shoppable ads are easily trackable, attributable, and should be a part of retailers’ media mix for higher Return on Advertising Spends (ROAS).
Here are four main reasons why shoppable ads are important for retailers.
They can reach a Large Audience for New Products. Shoppable ads allow you to not just create awareness about your new products but also helps you provide price disclosure and facilitate instant purchases where possible
They Increase Average Order Value. Many shoppable ads allow you to showcase multiple complementing products in a single sponsored ad thereby helping you increase the Average Order Value of every transaction.
You can Promote Limited Time Offers. When you have limited-time offers, it is good to extend their reach beyond conventional media channels by leveraging shoppable ads. These ads will help you break geographical barriers while making the checkout seamless.
You can Leverage Influencer Reach: Influencer marketing is quickly becoming a key ingredient of the media mix. This is especially true of fashion and lifestyle brands that can use Livestream Shoppable Ads.
While Shoppable Ads are a great way to seamlessly take the customer from exposure to purchase, to attribution for an advertiser, this whole thing is just a fraction of the true value that these ads can give brands.
For instance, if you used Google ads (a great kind of shoppable ad) Google will ensure that all your products will appear right on top – even above the organic search results that they display. This kind of thing will easily and effectively expand your brand’s online visibility. These ads are very effective primarily because the products that are listed, are done based on keywords that the shoppers use to search. In other words, these ads match the brand with its prospective customers – the people who are already interested in or looking for what you sell.
Shoppable ads go a long way in aiding interactive product discovery and help brands acquire prospects through various ways such as signups and downloads. It doesn’t stop here. Shoppable ads help in increasing customer engagement – especially when brands augment their product offering with other activity that calls for audience involvement, such as recipes or native content, and special branded offers.
You can find many shoppable ads particularly in the various social media platforms where the ads are a great tool in the hands of influencers. They not only help in amplifying what influencers do on social media, but they also give customers the opportunity to act instantly on all that they hear from these influencers in the first place – the messages of the influencers.
And while the customer moves from interest all the way down to purchase, these shoppable ads give brands a chance to really engage with and interact with their customers, and get to know them. They can gather all kinds of new information, data, and insights about each of their customers’ preferences and wants or desires.
Livestreams with directly “shoppable media,” is poised to be one of the fastest-growing advertising categories, more so with a pandemic for a backdrop. Retail brands are aggressively seeking customers who do their shopping online. In fact, according to the IAB, Livestream-generated sales are expected to double to $120 billion worldwide this year.
And the percentage of marketers who use shoppable video ads grew to 40% in 2020 from 33% in 2019 and is only on the rise. Analysis commissioned by Visa, which tracked shopping habits until October 2020, found that ‘one in four online purchases in the UK are now made as a result of interacting with a social media platform’. They also found that a fifth (17%) of consumers deliberately turn to social apps for shopping – 35% of whom cited convenience as a key purchase driver. 26% said that they liked how quick it was to buy something and check out.
So why are shoppable ads so effective? Watch this space as we talk about the disruptions that shoppable ads have quietly brought into the marketing landscape.
Have you used Shoppable Ads? Tell us what you think. Write to us at marketingfolks@xerago.com
