I am working on a mobile platform that will offer highly targeted advertising opportunities for fashion brands and retailers. I don't have a ton of experience selling to them though. How do you price/structure this? Who's buying (what role) digital ad packages in these industry verticals? How many users would we need on our platform, to even make a compelling offer? Trying to understand how to sell an ad offering to a large company. Thank you!
According to a recent study conducted by Mine What, 60% of people begin shopping by using a search engine to find the products they want, and 81% of shoppers conduct online research before they make a purchase. Whenever I am shopping in a store, I find myself hopping on Google to compare prices and read product reviews. A huge component of succeeding in retail is being able to effectively advertise on Google using the Search Network, as well as Shopping Ads.
1. The Challenges Retailers Face: Standing out against competition must be the number one battle retailers face when advertising and marketing their products. Retailers spent 47% more on Google’s shopping ads than they did a year ago, according to Adobe’s Digital Index of online advertising. Shopping ads make it easy to compare prices and products right from the SERPs. Shopping ads are the natural focus for retail advertisers looking to gain quick and easy ROI. As you can see in the image above, shopping ads give you all the information up-front including an image of the product, the brand, price, and even reviews.
2. Separate Shopping Campaigns by Priority: As opposed to search, where you spend hours upon hours strategizing and building out an account, Google does a thorough job of pumping out product categories for shopping campaigns automatically. However, relying solely on Google to set up and run your shopping campaigns will not work. Search for your ads through Google’s Ad Preview tool to see how your price points align with your competition, because with shopping ads having the price so clearly displayed, not having the best price or a unique selling point can make or break your chances of gaining a sale.
3. Product Ratings: Unfortunately, with shopping you can’t just hop in and hand-pick your best reviews from various sources. Rather you need to gain at least 50 reviews on one of Google’s third-party approved sites.
4. Google Merchant Promotions: Lastly, you should 100% be using Google Merchant Promotions to create a sense of urgency and spur your users to choose you over the ad next to yours. As you can see in the image below, the second shopping ad is tagged with a “Special offer” sign to show free shipping is available for a limited time.
5. Structure Search Campaigns Based on Site Navigation and Product Groupings: But for retailers, if your site is well-structured, then it is recommended to structure your campaigns based off how your website is built. The main reason you should organize search campaigns around your website is due to the ease of updating and optimizing. For instance, if the stock of your red t-shirts goes down, you can hop into your t-shirts campaigns, go to the red t-shirt ad group and pause that group until they’re back in stock.
6. Increase the Credibility of Your Ad Copy with Numbers: You should not limit numbers and prices to being displayed just in shopping ads.
7. Understand Your Seasonal Peaks and Plan Accordingly: Build ads for seasonal peaks and label them using Google’s label system to easily turn them on and off when in and out of season. From Jaclyn’s experience working with retailers of all sizes, Q4 tends to be the biggest quarter for most advertisers. Jaclyn spends time readjusting budgets to ensure her clients are being competitive, getting promotions aligned, and automating ad schedules ahead of time. Retailers are often selling hundreds or even thousands of products, many of which they are promoting through Google.
8. Take Advantage of Automation: If you have 1,000 products you do not have time to A/B test an ad for every product. Relying more on automation becomes important for most retailers.
9. Create Returning Buyers through Smart Remarketing: They might forget how positive their online transactional experience was with your brand if you do not remind them. Think about the lifespan of your product. Another remarketing tactic to create returning buyers is by upselling them based on products they have previously purchased. Be aware of what products complement the one your customers have previously purchased and remarket to gain more sales through the same customers. It is time to start prepping and stepping up your search and shopping game to out-sell your neighbours and create loyal customers.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
