For many consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, marketing opportunities are valuable - and sometimes limited - assets. Understanding how and when to use these opportunities to drive awareness at retail, either in addition to or instead of their own digital experiences, poses a challenge.

Fortunately, the retail ecommerce channel bridges the gap between these two experiences, offering a best-of-both-worlds solution for increasing awareness. 

Let’s explore how CPGs can effectively utilize retail ecommerce to enhance brand visibility, generate interest and trial, and foster a broader audience of retail shoppers.

Implementing a retail ecommerce platform

Most modern retail ecommerce platforms support a suite of products, including store locators, shoppable product detail pages (PDPs), and/or shoppable media. Pins on a store locator or landing pages with a list of retailers are effective for general information sharing, but the real power of retail ecommerce comes into play when the tools are fully shoppable.

Shoppability means:

1. The tools use daily inventory scanning for the most up-to-date retailer list, displaying only locations with products in stock in every shopper’s area based on geo.
2. Digital paths to purchase are created for all of those in-stock retailers, down to the local level, directly from each shoppable tool.
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‍Belgian Boys's shoppable store locator

Once a platform that supports shoppability is implemented, brands can effectively leverage these tools for onsite where-to-buy experiences and offsite media to create greater awareness and frictionless paths to purchase at retail.com. 

Using shoppable tools to drive awareness and discovery

For today’s omnichannel shoppers, the journey to brand loyalty often starts with discovery and trial at retail before converting to repeat purchasers. Leveraging shoppable experiences as marketing tools can expedite this awareness-to-trial journey on both brand.com and brand media.

Brand.com:

• Ensure your store locator is fully shoppable with paths to purchase at all retail partners to engage high-intent site visitors. 
• Include paths to purchase at retail on your shoppable PDPs. 
• Add shoppability to blogs or recipe pages to create awareness of where products are available and make purchasing easy.
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Liquid Death’s Sparkling Water shoppable PDP

Brand media:

• Link your paid social campaigns and organic social posts to shoppable landing pages or direct-to-cart links to highlight your retail partners. 
• Include a link to your store locator in your social bios for instant (and free) awareness. 
• Include a link to your store locator or a specific shoppable PDP in email and SMS campaigns. 
• Include a link to your store locator in customer service responses regarding product availability or retail location questions.
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Santa Cruz Organic’s Instagram bio with store locator link‍

With the right retail ecommerce platform, anything that’s clickable can be made shoppable. Brands using these tools to their full potential unlock the ability to create awareness on every channel, leading to even greater marketing opportunities.

Using insights and audiences for optimized marketing efforts

Once brand.com and brand media shoppability is enabled to drive awareness, the true retail ecommerce strategy begins. 

Some retail ecommerce platforms, like Pear, are able to collect insights on shopper behavior at the click-level from all shoppable tools. This gives brands the power to learn what levers of a marketing campaign (i.e. product, channel, geo, audience, copy, creative) are driving actual awareness at retail. 

By integrating a retail ecommerce platform with their existing ad platforms, brands can then build audiences from every shoppable experience, enabling more effective targeting, 

while leveraging the platforms’ machine learning capabilities for automatic optimizations and campaign improvements.

Empowered by actionable insights, custom audience building, and optimization opportunities, brands can now make data-driven decisions that enhance their overall marketing effectiveness, extending from awareness to trial to purchase.

Looking to learn more?

Pear Commerce is the retail ecommerce platform for omnichannel brands, converting shoppable tools into actionable insights that fuel performance marketing. 

‍Get in touch to learn how Pear can help drive awareness at retail for your brand.