Retailers: The Time is Now for Enhanced Social Advertising

The ways consumers engage online—particularly how they shop via social media—continue to keep retailers on their toes. In order to drive business outcomes, it is essential for advertisers from retailers and big-box brands to understand how to crack the code on social media and determine what is important to consumers in the moment.

Not only have consumers been increasingly engaging with brands on social media, but audiences have also continued to become more opaque as data privacy flips the script on how user behavior can be tracked. This industry shift has caused retailers to rethink how to authentically tell their brand stories across social media channels and resonate with shoppers.

Retailers and big-box brands have the opportunity to leverage social media ads in a unique way to tap into new strategies, drive more revenue, and improve their bottom line. Smartly.io is helping to drive this innovation through our latest enhancements for retailers: Budget Pacing Visualizer, Dynamic Local Inventory Ads, and Cross-Campaign Budget Optimization. These products will help retailers to connect with shoppers with the right message at the right time, all while providing flexibility to users in how they like to browse and buy.

Here’s more on how we’re doing this: 

Budget Pacing Visualizer

Because retailers generally have strict financial rules, especially for budgeting within marketing and advertising, it is often a challenge for them to adhere to ad spend accuracy and tracking across a multitude of campaigns. The Budget Pacing Visualizer is a platform-agnostic feature, supported for Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter, that supplies visual representation of campaigns’ budget pacing progress as compared to the target spend for specified timeframes and date ranges. The unique visual-first approach to this budget pacing and tracking makes it easier for retailers to manage various campaigns across business units and keep their finance teams updated on status.

Dynamic Local Inventory Ads

Retailers want to surface local in-stock products that will resonate with shoppers, but it is challenging for them to operationalize this within ad campaigns. The Dynamic Local Inventory Ads’ capability allows for dynamic ads to leverage a local inventory feed on top of a product catalog for campaigns on Facebook. This gives consumers insight into a product’s store-level price and availability. Smartly.io also enables retailers to customize these ads with branding, logos, borders, and other overlays to further enhance the product imagery. Using the Smartly.io Image Templates on top of Facebook’s solutions allows for a world-class ad experience for shoppers.

Cross-Campaign Budget Optimization 

Already available on both Facebook and Snapchat, retailers can now also leverage Smartly.io’s best-in-class budget optimization suite on Pinterest. Now, retailers can pool campaign budgets together and leave the difficult decision-making of optimal budget splits up to automation. For example, retailers can optimize budgets across multiple campaigns on Pinterest that have the same campaign objective in order to maximize ROAS. Grouping similar campaigns into a shared Budget Pool allows retailers to achieve the best possible results while improving their bottom line. With retail advertisers having a heavy presence on Pinterest, Smartly.io’s platform expansion enables their campaign dollars to be spent more smartly. 

We bring together media, creative, and intelligence into one platform. Our goal is to always provide brands with a competitive edge when it comes to their social media advertising strategies. We do this by continuously providing new products and tools that break down silos and help advertisers bridge the gaps which often exist between internal teams. As our retail customers continue to seek out new and authentic ways to engage consumers and test across all touchpoints of the buyer journey, we continue to empower them via technology and with exceptional experience in mind.

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