How to run a back-to-school shoppable marketing campaign for your CPG brand

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With school about to start back up, EMARKETER shares that back-to-school sales will rise 3.2% this year. Ecommerce sales will be responsible for 34.9% of those sales. "The average consumer expects to spend $475 on back-to-school shopping this year—a 21.8% jump over last year."

It's time to get creative with your shoppable media strategies!

Here are 4 promising campaign tips:

1. Discover high-intent audiences with Pear. Promote your school-friendly snacks and beverages to shoppers ready to buy. Our brand client saw their retail ecommerce audience perform 20X better than ads retargeting their brand.com visitors.
2. Get strategic with your geo-locating. Go beyond brand awareness and drive results on Meta by narrowing down retailers located conveniently near a school. One of our CPG partners who targeted by zip code experienced 9Xs better campaign performance!
3. Retarget your Store Locator users. Run programmatic ads driving to your Pear Store Locator. Then, retarget those who engaged with a shoppable Pear Connect social ad.
4. Get a custom back-to-school Pear Landing Page. Seasonal campaigns are a perfect reason to drive traffic to a temporary landing page. Feature your brand's lunch box favorite flavors and goodies. Mark your URL with the UTM parameters you want to know about your shoppers, and optimize as you go.

Here’s how to run a shoppable back-to-school campaign, using our CPG brand partner Egglife as an example:

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We’ll cover two advertising options for Egglife, starting with shoppable Facebook ads that are soaring in popularity. EMARKETER confirms why you want to meet your shoppers anywhere:

“Nearly 8 in 10 shoppers have made a purchase while multitasking, according to Walmart. Consumers now make purchases while browsing social media (38%), eating at home (24%), or on their daily commute (8%).

Adaptive retail meets the demand for immediate satisfaction, allowing purchases within seconds of seeing an item without switching channels.

Marketers should integrate shopping into social media, connected TV, and other activities, and design multichannel campaigns to capitalize on these moments. Doing so will make it easier for consumers to shop wherever they are.”

Use pixels for greater shopper visibility

Social advertising platforms offer unique session-level tracking pixels for brands. These pixels track user interactions within a single website visit or “session”. When a visitor engages with a site, landing page, or shoppable tool equipped with a tracking pixel, their activities—such as page views, clicks, and conversions—are recorded for that session. This allows marketers to monitor campaign performance in real-time, and retarget according to audience behavior. Marketing pixels integrate directly with Pear’s tools, so you can get deeper insights into your retail ecommerce shoppers’ behavior.

‍Target your audience beyond product discovery

‍Assuming Egglife had already linked their Meta Pixel to their Pear Store Locator, they have a pre-built audience of high-intent shoppers who engaged with their shoppable tools and are already considering an Egglife purchase.Starting with that information in their Meta platform, Egglife could set up a back-to-school Pear Connect campaign inspired by last year's blog of lunch box ideas. They could highlight the most popular wraps at the most popular retailers. Within Meta, they could filter their campaign by geo to focus on zip codes with a large population of schools. When Egglife fans see their shoppable ads, they can skip past brand awareness and jump right into purchasing—with a single click.

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With the combined power of Meta and Pear, Egglife could feature on-the-go school breakfasts and lunches made from their gluten-free egg wraps to an audience who has already searched for or engaged with them. This retargeting strategy allows CPG brands to target shoppers already nearing the end of their sales funnel and primed to buy. With shoppable Pear Connect ads driving to Egglife items in stock, their back-to-school bottom line just got even bigger. 

Strategize your tracking & select retailers by sales volume

If Egglife also built out a UTM strategy, they could test and learn what ad creative, copy, and CTAs perform best, allowing them to reallocate budget for the ultimate return on ad spend (ROAS). If not, they could simply focus on high-volume retailers. With their existing traffic from on-site experiences like their where-to-buy page, Egglife could discover which retailers were selected most for specific products. Then, they could use these insights to inform merchandising, or choose one of their retailers to collaborate with on a future marketing campaign.

Egglife could focus the campaign on a single popular retailer, using a custom Pear Landing Page with shoppability built in. Using this tactic, Egglife could feature a series of their lunch products all available at a specific retail partner. Then, they’d direct customers to add the items to cart at that retailer. This approach is perfect for seasonal campaigns like back-to-school, because Pear does the work of creating the landing page and paths to purchase with in-stock inventory, so brands can just focus on creating clickable content that converts.

Let your CSM help

If this feels intimidating, don’t worry. Our CSMs are happy to walk you through it and develop a strategy that works for your brand. We want to help you unlock the performance marketing benefits that our shoppable tools have to offer.

Ready to test out your campaign ideas? Book a demo here.