This week, many brands are making the decision to change up their marketing mix to reflect their brand’s values, and reallocating their digital investments away from Facebook and Instagram. Successful marketing teams use a multi-channel strategy, and as a result, are well positioned to make such a move. In fact, over 86% of MikMak’s partner brands are leveraging our Where-To-Buy software across multiple media platforms. More than ever, it is important to understand your eCommerce consumers and how they behave across channels.
So if your brand is thinking about reallocating your digital dollars toward a new marketing mix, here are some of the latest eCommerce traffic trends that drive results and provide deeper channel insights into your consumers’ shopping preference.
Programmatic and publisher ads are top sources of brand traffic
The top source of traffic for many of MikMak’s partner brands is actually programmatic advertising. Ad types that are commonly leveraged in programmatic and publisher ads include static banner, rich media, and video ad units. This is an opportunity for brands to cater tailored creative and messaging for highly targeted audiences, allowing brands to engage the users at the right time with the right content in nearly real-time.This power of this traffic source makes it an invaluable place to catch customers in their moment of purchase intent, capture their engagement data, and ensure effective retargeting in future campaigns.
Explore other channels such as Pinterest, Snap, YouTube, TikTok, email and paid search
Other media channels can also be powerful drivers of purchase intent. Snap and Pinterest are the most popular media platforms outside Facebook and Instagram that brands are choosing to invest in to drive purchase intent. The type of Snap ads most often used include Single Image/Video, Collection, and Story ads. Meanwhile, popular Pinterest ad types include Promoted Pins, Carousels, and Videos.
Our industry benchmark report also shows that CPG brands during COVID-19 saw the highest growth in purchase intent come from Snap (over 150%) and YouTube (over 200%). TikTok, although newer to the game as a social media player, has also become a popular channel for brands to invest in authentic and creator-led product discovery.
No matter what media mix you choose to implement to engage your consumers, it is important to maintain a consistent shopping experience for the consumer. Other channels, such as Search, Twitter, and Email are also effective platforms to add to your media mix, and should drive to a branded shopping experience.
Explore direct integration with your brand.com
Reallocating media investments should not preclude enhancing the shopping experience on your brand.com. A good amount of traffic your brand experiences is on your website, and that’s an impactful place to invest your digital dollars. When product discovery occurs on your brand’s website, consider integrating a premium Where-to-Buy experience so that consumer traffic can be driven toward both online and in-store retailers. This type of solution is scalable and can be used for your entire product catalog.
Here's an example of how this may be implemented:
Use purchase intent as a KPI across the board
One important aspect to not overlook is the continuation of standardized reporting across your channels when measuring their effectiveness. Purchase intent is the key metric to leverage as your brand makes changes to its media strategy. Calculated as the percent of consumers that add a product to cart after viewing one of your consumer facing Where-To-Buy technologies, purchase intent measures how ready that set of audience was to make a purchase, and how effective your targeting was to make a purchase. Is your new media mix working? How does it compare to the previous mix? How can it be optimized? Brands can continue to drive successful eCommerce results -- and measure them --while reallocating digital dollars toward different media mixes.
While you do so, make sure that you continue to gather first party data and consumer insights, and continue to leverage them to optimize your new media mix. This deep understanding of your consumers, together with your multichannel strategy, can continue to deliver a premium experience to your consumers and help your brand achieve results.
MikMak runs anywhere brands are running media to drive consumer friendly shopping experiences. To receive more information on the latest eCommerce traffic trends we're seeing and how you can be successful in all these other platforms, contact us!
