Secrets to Growing Your Brand’s Top Line in Tough Economic Times

Despite needing to attract new consumers, many commerce marketers are going all-in on retail media. eMarketer expects retail media ad spending to surpass $165 billion by 2025, which is more than triple the amount spent in 2019. To make this investment, they’re shifting money away from national media investments.

Source: Insider Intelligence, eMarketer Forecast, Dec. 2023

So, what’s the problem?

Retail media can be an excellent tool for protecting market share with existing customers. It’s not as effective at drawing in net new consumers, a fact that actually seems to be well-known by brand marketers. For example, a recent ANA study found just 12 percent of marketers said that their most important objective when investing in retail media was to encourage “future brand growth.” As a comparison, two-thirds of the survey’s respondents said their top retail media investment objective was to drive conversions.

At the same time, many brand marketers are investing less in channels that are designed to bring in new consumers, such as national media. According to eMarketer, total media spending growth is expected to tumble 14 percent from its 2021 pace by 2026. 

Source: eMarketer, Oct. 2022

To improve top-line growth, brand marketers need to find a better mix of growth-focused and conversion-focused ad channels. 

Lewis Broadnax of Sazerac on reducing friction for consumers to drive eCommerce growth   "The consumer doesn't care how you are structured internally. As a brand, you have to make sure the consumer is able to be taken care of through every channel they want to purchase in."

To grow at every layer of the funnel, brands need to strike a smarter balance between national media and retail media. Here are a few secrets to developing a more effective commerce marketing and media strategy:

Draw in insights at all stages of the buyer’s journey
Here are some simple and proven ways to get more value out of investments across the buyer’s journey:

1. Make every touchpoint a conversion opportunity: To avoid wasting any marketing spend, provide conversion opportunities and gain consumer insights across all media, and ensure all of your consumer touchpoints enable seamless, in stock product locator and overall where to buy technology. This helps ensure your brand doesn’t leave any money on the table.
   
   

   Here are just a few examples of how global brands leverage MikMak to enable commerce across every consumer touchpoint and measure the omnichannel outcome.
   
   

   Brand Website
   
   

   
   

   Social Media
   
   

   CTV 
   
   

   Search 
   
   

   Shoppable Recipes
   
   
   
   

2. Use insights to make optimizations: It’s also important to gain insights into your shoppers’ experiences. If you’re investing in ads based on guesses or intuition, it’s easy to waste money and resources on ineffective campaigns. That’s why it’s important to track insights from across online and offline channels, creative ads, campaigns, and audiences. 
   
   

   Once all your consumer touchpoints are shoppable, you can gain a wealth of omnichannel retailer, platform, and consumer insights on the backend to quickly and easily identify what’s working, compare ad performance, and build better campaigns that increase sales. Proprietary analytics like MikMak’s Benchmark Insights also highlight opportunities to capitalize on trends that competitors may not see.
   
   

   Commerce Media: Revolutionizing Consumer Engagement   “It’s understanding what tools are out there to be able to get insights around intentionality. So tools like MikMak, where you can look at add-to-cart numbers, and percentages, and breakouts between retailers, So it’s understanding that you’re not going to have that DTC luxury of all the transactions. But being comfortable putting together different pieces of data that tell the story. Combined with what’s happening in social and other places where consumers are having dialogue and creating content in order to build what you want for next week, next month, and the next quarter.” -Kevin Shapiro, COTY

    

3. Streamline and action data globally: Brands can also improve their media investments by creating more efficient campaigns and acting on data. Here are a few best practices we use at MikMak to help our brand partners reduce costs and drive profitability:
   
   

   1. Unify key performance indicators (KPIs): National media strategies may turn out differently in different markets, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep measurements consistent. To help your back-end teams take action faster, be sure to align your entire global data strategy and use the same KPI language across every department and location. 

   2. Keep consumer data in a single dashboard: The faster you can access data and the clearer it is, the easier it will be to spot trends, improve ad performance, and lower costs. That’s why it’s important to not just gather consumer data but also consolidate it in a single, easy-to-use platform.

   3. Partner with a single vendor you trust: By teaming up with a sole global vendor that you trust, you can reduce the costs of multiple vendors and avoid inefficient processes that sap time and resources. 

Chief Digital Officer Ryu Yokoi of Unilever on digital transformation in the CPG industry   “We want to be thinking full funnel and how we meet and reach the people that we serve with the right message at the right time understanding how to move them from building awareness to really bringing them to convert and building that loyalty and and advocacy for our products. For that to work the critical leaps that we’ve had to make have involved building the right data signals to help us understand how that journey is taking shape and how to move within that. Obviously Rachel you’re a huge partner for us in that regard in terms of the work that we do with MikMak on that front.”

Here are a few examples of what happens when brands focus on maximizing sales at every stage of their funnels:

DUDE Wipes
DUDE Wipes wanted to drive down costs and accelerate sales nationally. It used MikMak’s BI tool to draw in valuable shopping insights. With those insights, it was able to identify shopping behaviors and launch campaigns that:

• Decreased total cost per purchase intent click by 73 percent.

• Increased media purchase intent rate by 1.5x.

• Boosted Facebook and Instagram purchase intent rates by 1.2x.

Garrison Brothers Distillery
As a smaller operation, Garrison Brothers wanted to grow their consumer base to compete on the national scene. They teamed up with MikMak to add shoppable media across all of their platforms and channels. They also kicked off multi-platform campaigns, analyzed performance data, and upped their investments in high-ROI channels. Here are some insights that helped them compete on the national scene:

• Facebook and Instagram were performing 9 percent better than the Spirits category average

• Paid search resulted in a 2.3 times higher Purchase Intent Rate than on social

• Email campaigns were leading to 3.3 times higher Purchase Intent Rate than on social

With those insights in hand, they shifted their time and money to platforms that drove more traffic to their products, widened brand recognition, and increased sales.