How Shopper Marketers Can Develop Campaigns that Appeal to Retail Partners

With a large portion of CPG marketing budgets now dedicated to account-specific promotions, one of the biggest challenges for shopper marketers when developing campaigns is ensuring that it serves their CPG brands, as well as appealing to their retail partners. When shopper marketers design activations and establish KPIs, they’re concerned with driving sales, their category share, and appealing to new brand users. However, retailers are often concerned about different metrics like total category growth and increasing store traffic. Here, shopper marketers and retailers often find that they have different objectives, and that the campaign will not effectively achieve both parties’ goals.

In order to foster healthy relationships with retailer partners, shopper marketers need to make sure that they are developing campaigns that both drive campaign performance for the CPG brand, but also drive sales for retailers and appeal to the retail customer. 

Here are a few building blocks that give shopper marketers common ground with retailers and the opportunity to achieve objectives for both parties.

Use Contextual Commerce to Influence Shoppers Pre-Retailer

The path to purchase is no longer linear and consumers pass through and interact with a multitude of environments, both digital and physical, before making a purchase. Often, consumers already make up their minds about the product they want to purchase before they even enter the retail environment. As such, shopper marketers and retailers need to reach consumers pre-shop, and contextual commerce, or commerce enablement in relevant contexts, gives them the opportunity to do so. 

Align media with the context of the content, such as digital recipes, Instagram stories, Pinterest pins and YouTube videos, that consumers regularly browse to make their purchase decisions before entering the retail environment. Further, make that media shoppable at a partner retailer in order to drive high-purchase-intent shoppers directly to the partner and achieve measurable results that benefit both the retailer and CPG brand. Pre-retailer, off-platform media can often drive new and lapsed users for both the retailer and brand by introducing shoppers to new products in relevant contexts and new retailers in their area. 

Execute Omnichannel Campaigns at a Partner Retailer

It’s clear that shoppers are more omnichannel than ever before, moving fluidly between in-store and digital environments pre-, during and post-shop. As a result, retailers are creating more seamless experiences across their digital (online and app) and in-store environments. By solely focusing on one channel over the other or thinking of digital and in-store as separate environments, shopper marketers do a disservice to both their retailer partner and their customers. 

Albertsons and Unilever partner annually to run a multichannel campaign to incentivize ice cream sales using a reward in exchange for purchases over a certain dollar amount threshold. A dedicated microsite allows customers to redeem their rewards, but in 2019, the duo added a more comprehensive digital approach by distributing virtual coupons via email directing shoppers to the microsite. The coupons were further promoted in Albertsons’ chains’ websites and apps. To support digital efforts, the duo used violators, floor clings and wobblers in-store. 

By aligning campaigns across in-store and digital environments, shopper marketers ensure that they’re appealing to today’s retail customers, who have more omnichannel shopping habits, and also gain more opportunities to appeal to a wider audience.

Amplify Retailer Promotional Events

While multi-brand retailer campaigns may dilute brand awareness within the campaign, there’s no doubt that aligning with retailer-executed promotional events are effective. Kroger’s “Family Fun Night” brought together a number of brands, including Hasbro, Ferrero, Big K and Stacy’s, with brands leveraging floorstands and pallet displays in-store, along with a dedicated web page featuring coupons, recipes and activity ideas. 

While many of these brands primarily focus on impulse purchasers and certain holiday occasions, aligning with a secondary priority occasion may be just as effective in order to provide the 360 context that shoppers need to actually make a purchase. And in this way, shopper marketers can achieve retailer buy-in from the start, by aligning with a campaign that directly appeals to the retail customer. 

Obtaining retailer support and appealing to both the retailer partner as well as the CPG brand’s objectives is one of the most crucial shopper marketing tasks. But it can also be one of the most difficult. By using these tactics, shoppers marketers can ensure that they’re nurturing relationships with their retailer partners, gaining needed support for their proposed execution and also ensuring their own campaign performance. 

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Nick Minnick is the Director of Strategic Partnerships here at Chicory, the contextual commerce advertising platform.

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