How to Succeed in Ecommerce in 2021 - Episode 173

DESCRIPTION

Where should a brand look for growth in 2021? This is the question I am trying to answer in today’s podcast episode. In 2020 we had record-breaking growth of 48% and another 11% in 2021 seems like a pretty phenomenal projection. It is a challenge for eCommerce teams and brand marketers to understand where growth is coming from. How should we be allocating spend across marketplaces knowing that more marketplaces are coming online?


Make sure you tune in to find out more!

“You can’t afford to be standing still using the same channels, media strategy, etc., that you’ve relied in the past if you expect to grow.”
— Kiri Masters

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Halo effect in retail media

The Digital Shelf Institute recently published a study from their member companies called “The Full Revenue Impact of Retailer Ad Platforms” and this study vindicated brand marketers for the first time finding that $7 to $10 are spent in-store for every dollar spent in online media campaigns. This is been calculated through media mix analysis and the brands that participated in this study found that retail and media spend drives other incremental benefits, like improving repeat purchases, the goodwill of those retail partners, and also social validation as well.

How do we want to be allocating our marketing dollars to retail online media? We need to think beyond that and how do these retail media campaigns impact those other factors that are important (goodwill of partners, social validation, in-store validations, repeat purchases...). Those are all important factors that unfortunately are a bit harder to measure but should be taken seriously.

2. Allocating budget for innovation


Our most successful clients at Bobsled allocate 10% of their businesses as usual budget to more speculative investments. In year one, you might be allocating 10% of your marketing budget to Instacart and it's a new platform for you. So allocating that in and whatever return that ultimately generates for you in circuit channel advertising and that gets absorbed into your business as usual budget for next year. And then you've got a new sort of ten percent budget to work from the following year.

3. Being the way your customer wants to transact

We are evidencing new sorts of multi-channel touchpoints. Your product content and media strategy need to cover more use cases off. We need to be aware of the fact that today we are not just selling the product but also selling a lifestyle message. All of these assets that you have across different channels need to be doing double or even triple duty in terms of what they all are accomplishing. That makes creating digital content and media much more challenging because everything has to serve multi-purposes.

Another important thing is the availability and this is not something new for people who are familiar with Amazon. If you run out of stock on Amazon your search ranking is getting lower or they don’t even show your product in search anymore. 

4. Underline infrastructure and which marketplace to prioritize


Another important thing is which channels to prioritize. Being where customers are looking for you, both in a physical sense and then also showing up with media and product content is going to help address every stage of customer life cycle. 

-Instacart is a very fascinating channel to look at, they are not only for groceries anymore, they have 500 retailer partners. I have a book coming out in March called “Instacart for CMOs” that I wrote with the Director of Marketplace Strategy and Insights at Bobsled, our colleague Stefan Jordev.

- Amazon that's worth 50% of eCommerce and that is a channel where you should be spending most of your time.

- Walmart is still quite limited and it is being universally pretty disappointing. Especially for the SMB Brands the fact that Walmart doesn't have a native fulfillment center capability is really holding a lot of brands back from being able to offer fast and free delivery, which is what customers want. So all said I see I think Walmart could be so much better than it is. 

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Season 3Kiri MastersComment