These days, being a retail brand is never boring. If the previous holiday seasons have taught us anything, it’s that marketers will continue to face challenges as they speculate about how consumers will shop at this crucial time for retail.
Given the macroeconomic dynamics at play, the holiday season may or may not make or break many people. Roadside pickup and seamless returns, two services that were new just 18 months ago, are now taken for granted. In addition, the blurring of online and offline barriers has given rise to what can be termed “Instant Shopification,” which is the expectation of a new breed of hybrid shoppers that, no matter where or when they come across any brand, if they can see it, they ought to be able to buy it right away.
Two things have been clear during it all. Retailers and consumers have both shown incredible resilience over the past few years, embracing the digital revolution in significant ways that have permanently altered the way sales and purchases of goods take place. Keeping this in mind, take into account these three factors while trying to reach hybrid shoppers over the upcoming season and beyond.
Go where the crowd is
We can all shop before we buy thanks to mobile technology. Who hasn’t webroomed a little to look things over before entering a store? Customers create a mental shopping list of everything they find in their social feeds, which is how the hybrid shopper trip begins well before actual buying intent.
Why is this crucial? As per a report, in the US, nearly half of customers started their holiday shopping before Thanksgiving last year. Reaching their clients early, over a number of months, and not only during the mega-sales will be more crucial than ever with this year’s anticipated discount and promotion-heavy selling season. And this is not restricted only to the US.
What’s best? In-store traffic and purchases are also influenced by online discovery, as shown by a recent Ipsos survey in the US, which found that 70% of consumers made in-store purchases after finding a product on Meta technologies (as opposed to 42% on YouTube and 19% on TikTok).
Measure everything and connect it
The hybrid shopper should be viewed as a single, holistic piece of data intelligence if one wants to connect the dots across all of the marketing channels.
If one only considers online conversions, they are leaving out clients who saw your advertisement and made a purchase in-person, and they are not getting the entire picture of what the holiday marketing efforts may be generating. One can adjust the future marketing strategy in light of the overall sales generated by Meta advertising on both websites and in-store by looking at offline conversions.
Be imaginative
As they assist retail brands in connecting with their customers by fusing word of mouth with scale through actual people, Meta is at the forefront of the creator revolution.
Given that consumers routinely ask creators for advice on what to buy, these partnerships make sense. According to Meta’s 2021 Seasonal Holidays Study by YouGov, 63% of 18 to 34-year-old respondents believe what an influencer says about a brand more than what the brand says about itself in advertising, and 30% of holiday buyers are more likely to trust a brand that partners with a reliable creator.
Additionally, 20% of Instagram time is now spent on creator-friendly full-screen video formats like Reels, which is growing. Since its inception, Meta has been driven by the inventiveness of the businesses and creators that utilise it as a platform to amuse their audiences on a worldwide scale.
Users can now make their reels shoppable with product tags and reach a larger audience with Reel Ads.
According to brand consultant Abhimanyu Mishra from Brandfizz, Instagram Reels has carried forward the influencer marketing tag with ease and seamlessness. Influencer marketing is now a popular strategy in social media marketing, not just in the US but all over the world to raise brand awareness, expose content to new audiences, and produce fresh leads for a company’s sales funnel.
