It's no secret that Amazon Advertising, the retailer’s retail media arm, has become a large and fast-growing revenue stream for the company. Other retailers are following suit so this heats up the competition in the ecommerce game. However, this creates a broken retail media world that is fragmented into branded awareness, customer acquisition, and conversion media campaigns that do not speak to each other, each operating in its own silo.
Brands have the highest level of success when working with a team that creates visibility in one voice to the consumer wherever they are and convert on the highest profitable retailer using data tied directly to sales.
When it comes to ecommerce advertising we’ve found that if a key word isn’t working for you, spending more money isn’t necessarily the solution. Most important is how fluid your budget is across multiple retailers and especially when new keywords or competitors enter your categories.
“We don’t just spend their money because we can,” says Sr. Advertising Lead, Cole Walker, “If something is too expensive for our clients our first reaction isn’t ‘give us more money’. It’s ‘let’s find a new area to get ahead in – a new keyword or category.” Brands need to find their hero keywords and make sure they have access and transparency to all data. “We tell our brands everything and we don’t hide anything so when we present our recommendations they feel confident in the data to make a decision.”
Many brands believe that you can only get ahead if you have a big budget. There’s a myth out there that in order to own the majority of the page or a space you have to spend a ton to get there. The truth is you can find really niche key words and still own a piece of Amazon. Big companies tend to own broad terms (think Cheez-It owning “snacks”) but that doesn’t mean you can’t own space like “school snacks” that can be profitable and move volume.
Cole's advice for smaller brands trying to break through – find your corner! You want to eventually to break into the big keyword. If it’s “dog treats” you want to find what your product does differently – like gluten free dog treats. Highlight what you do well if you don’t have the budget to compete with the big dogs. (no pun intended)
Don't forget about having amazing content. If you're spending advertising money for sub-par content, you might as well be burning it.
OneStone's Director of Content, Heather Paul, says to make your pages convert better you need to focus on one word: Trust.
“You can drive all the traffic in the world to your product pages, but if the consumer doesn’t have enough trust to hit buy, it doesn’t really matter,” says Heather. “We want to make sure we build trust with the words we are using, images, and the descriptions. As we move down the page we want to build consistency. Consistency builds trust and trust builds conversion.”
Once content is aligned, through our partnership with retail media ad tech leader, Pacvue, we optimize campaigns across retailers to increase profitability & predictability of your ads.