The Opportunity for Influencer Marketing within Retail Media Networks

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Blake Marts

As new headwinds and market conditions present themselves, marketers across the retail landscape often can be found reshaping growth strategies. Last year — the year that shall not be named — was a case study in on-the-fly strategizing thanks to how the pandemic upended elaborate plans and mainstay messaging. While becoming the largest news story in decades, it also forced most marketers to reassess priorities and reconsider how their brands and products fit into such strange and new consumer lifestyles.

Amid these frantic programming and messaging concerns, retail media networks (RMNs) continued to gain traction and territory as a viable investment channel. In fact, as more retailers, inventory, and capabilities enter the arena, spending on e-commerce sites and apps is expected to grow beyond the $22 billion mark in the U.S. in 2021, to represent 13.2 percent of the nation’s total digital advertising spend, eMarketer reports.

Several retailers erected new media networks in the past 12 months, while other more established networks refined their technology stack and expanded tactics and features. The rapid dilation of this field can largely be attributed to retailers’ recognition of potential media margins, which often significantly exceed typical retail net margins of 1.44 percent.

For brands, access to retail audiences and their data presents myriad opportunities. Marketers’ minds traditionally gravitate toward onsite and offsite media offerings, in addition to incentive programs utilizing retailers’ loyalty networks; however, there are a variety of additional advertising solutions and media on the brink of becoming staple RMN components. In particular, an increase is likely to occur in the use of influencers to advocate for branded products as part of retailers’ media networks.

As the market for solutions powered by retail data grows, influencer marketing can find its place within these ecosystems as a self-service or managed-service offering. This powerful option is inventory-rich, surgically targeted, and routinely measurable while also benefiting retailers’ owned-channel strategies. The retailers discovering why and how influencer content can become an essential element in their networks may develop a leg up on the competition.

The Demand for Influencers as Part of Retail Media Networks

According to a recent Business Insider report, influencer marketing is expected to be a $15 billion business globally by 2022. The industry’s rapid growth has occurred despite most brands relying heavily on influencers’ organic audiences to achieve reach, as well as very few brands reporting a consistent ability to quantify the impact content has on sales. Today, brands producing content through influencers primarily use the tactic as a top-funnel instrument to drive awareness and create engagement, with some conducting correlative analyses to uncover metrics such as sales lift.

Despite these efforts, a recent Inmar Intelligence study found that most brands continue to say they would push more funding into the influencer bucket if conversion-related outcomes were routinely and accurately measurable.

Of the more than 250 brand marketers and their agencies represented in the Inmar report, 44 percent say they are unable to quantify ROI from influencer investment due to a lack of data. Sixty percent of respondents said they would increase their influencer marketing budget by 11 to 25 percent if they could prove ROI by linking activations to retail sales data.

Organic influencer audiences, paired with the capabilities of paid social media placements, can remedy these common measurement deficiencies. Influencer content, when linked to retail data through reliable, retailer-endorsed partners, can be promoted directly in the social media feeds of known shoppers based on their purchase and browsing behaviors. That, in turn, can be measured for attributed sales when proper tracking mechanisms are in place.

This tactic allows retailers and their supplier partners to commission influencer content that presents shoppers with new usage occasions for products and categories, complete solutions that build larger baskets, and ideal messaging for reengagement tactics that increase relevancy and drive loyalty.

Curating the Right Creators

To appropriately arm suppliers with the proper tools for cobranded activations, retailers must first identify the influencers who best fit the personality of their stores and the communities in which they reside.

For larger retailers, there are obvious choices to spearhead brand-retailer partner activations. Influencers like @whoawaitwalmart and @targetdoesitagain may first come to mind, but, beyond accounts designed specifically to promote retail giants, there are thousands of qualified candidates whose content and audiences are ideal for retailers of any size or vertical. Identifying them simply requires the right search tools and necessary due diligence.

This discovery effort, often conducted by the retailer in partnership with a third-party provider, involves understanding influencer candidates’ personal shopping preferences and the proven affinities of their audiences. Here are some of the questions retailers need to consider when vetting potential influencers for their private communities:

•     Is the influencer a loyal shopper themselves?
•     Do they regularly promote other competitive retail chains?
•     Does their content niche/genre fit the retailer’s in-store and/or online selection?
•     Does a large portion of the influencer’s organic audience reside primarily in or near regions, municipalities, or zip codes where stores are located?
•     Does their audience show above-average interest in posts promoting certain items, categories, or retailers?
•     Does the influencer receive an ample amount of views and engagements on posts promoting certain products, categories, or retailers?

These questions, among others, need to be answered for each influencer being vetted to join a retailer’s exclusive community. The resulting selections should instill trust among the retailer’s supplier community, which will ultimately be investing in these influencers as part of their collaborative marketing efforts.

The Role of Shopper Data in Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, in its organic form, cannot escape the walled gardens of the platforms that own audience and performance data. This not only limits targeting capabilities but also restricts the ability to tag influencer-created content and reveal the number of directly attributable sales.

Until very recently, one of the only available avenues for measuring return on influencer investments has been affiliate marketing, which can be less appealing than traditional compensation methods for many influencers. This is especially true when these affiliates are promoting low-priced items and only earning a single-digit percentage of sales or when they know they likely won’t be credited for every sale they influence.

However, the pairing of influencer content and shopper data can allow retailers and opted-in brands to utilize paid social ads as the vehicle delivering user-generated content to shoppers whose purchase patterns are known and predictable. This is done by transferring audiences from a centralized data platform into platforms like Facebook and targeting those users with relevant influencer content based on their buying history.

Once marketers establish the ability to amplify influencer content more strategically, shopper data can also be utilized to provide closed-loop attribution reporting for participating retailers and brands. This can include multitouch attribution modeling that assigns fair credit to user-generated content as one of many influential factors in each customer’s path to purchase.

This “holy grail” suite of targeting and attribution capabilities means brands can, for the first time, ensure their influencer campaigns are reaching verified retail shoppers and can be accurately measured for return on ad spend.

Going Beyond Off-Property Social Activity

Influencer content is versatile enough to maintain effectiveness beyond its native home on social channels and blogs. Once removed from its birthplace, it is user-generated creative that can be utilized across paid and owned channels, recycled, and repurposed for annual tentpole events.

The retailers that are most successful with brand-supported, retail-centric influencer marketing will find a wide variety of use cases, such as embedding creators’ content within their sites (i.e., recipe galleries, product tutorials on item pages), utilizing imagery as off-site media creative, or even methods of merging heavily engaged social content with in-store signage. Each of these placements can be monetized by the retailer, and brands benefit from the authenticity and efficacy of the content. In fact, per Statista, 80 percent of marketers using influencers find the tactic to be effective or very effective at driving intended outcomes. What’s more, user-generated imagery is five times more likely than professional content to elicit conversion, according to Photoslurp, a European visual commerce and marketing platform.

Having a platform and vetted influential creators in place gives retailers’ corporate marketing and social media teams a new promotional tool that can be used to create awareness and drive trial for in-store services, loyalty programs, private label products, and more.
 
Staying On Trend

As retail media continues to grow, marketers will see less information about which retailers are in the mix and more about the arms race of new features and differentiators each retailer can offer. It will be much the same for the established third-party providers assisting them in constructing a formidable product.

And while influencer marketing can take its place within retail media networks, that can’t happen before retailers understand the significance of advertisers’ demand for it and the utility of their data as a catalyst for the tactic’s potency.

The fragmented journey of today’s shopper spans more touchpoints than retailers’ media networks currently support; 2021 should show which players are ready to fill those gaps.

About Author: Blake Marts is a director of product marketing at Inmar Intelligence, a partner in the ANA Brand Activation Partner Program.