DOUGLAS Golden Rules for data-based retail marketing

Golden Rules – data-based & smart investment  

Retail marketing is a broad field and serves all touchpoints of your customers along the entire customer journey. The term retail marketing generally refers to the marketing activities of a retail company, either by the manufacturer itself or by the retailer. It is important that the brand reaches the right target group with its product and the corresponding advertising at the ideal time. How your products are presented to potential buyers is also essential: Retail marketing is a complex, dynamic channel.  

Trust in concrete data in retail marketing and invest smartly? With the comprehensive strategic consulting of DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS’ Client Services, we can solve all your retail marketing questions. We analyse the status quo of the brands on our platform and can thus gain data-driven insights that support your beauty brand. We generate insights into data such as growth, traffic, conversion or the composition of the buyer groups. These are used to derive concrete recommendations for action. Together with DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS, you can develop target-oriented strategies for your brand via onsite and offsite channels.  

Retail Marketing with Sponsored Product Ads (SPA) & Audience Ads (AA)  

Sponsored Product Ads and Audience Ads are among the central marketing measures in retail marketing. If these are strategically built on the data-based buyer behaviour of the target group, completely new sales opportunities open up for your brand. Both advertising placements serve to increase the reach of your beauty brand, strengthen brand awareness and increase sales generation. But what are SPAs and AAs?  

What are Sponsored Product Ads?  

DOUGLAS Sponsored Product Ads are advertisements on the DOUGLAS platform that highlight your selected products. Through the performance-based advertising tool, articles can be placed at the pole position on the DOUGLAS digital shelf on search result, category and product detail pages. For example, positioning at the top of a search results page is conceivable. Potential customers will see your products as the first ranking in the search or at the top of category pages.  

What are Audience Ads?  

Audience ads are basically nothing more than display banners that are placed on the homepage, search results pages or category overviews. Especially with DOUGLAS Audience Ads, however, the personalised playout of these is the key point. Due to the strongly data-driven basis, your Audience Ads can target your potential customers in a target group-specific manner. Audience ads reach your customers exactly when they are looking for (new) products and are already in shopping mode. As an awareness and branding tool, Audience Ads give users in the shop environment the final impulse to buy.   

Data-driven ads: What are the differences between SPA & AA?  

Now that we have looked at the two biggest measures of DOUGLAS Retail Marketing, the question arises as to what the differences are between Sponsored Product Ads and Audience Ads. The principle is very similar, but each advertising option has a different goal:  

• With Sponsored Product Ads, we place your specific products prominently on the DOUGLAS platform. The goal here is primarily to increase the sales volume of the products.  
• If it’s not just about individual products, but rather entire collections or the brand itself, Audience Ads are in demand. These can be placed on the start page as well as on sub-pages as display banners. With the aim of increasing brand awareness and reach, the ads are broadcast in a target group-specific manner with catchy visuals.  

Both types of advertising have one thing in common at DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS: From campaign planning to the creation of visuals to broadcasting, the ads are based on data we can gather about your specific target group from the diverse DOUGLAS platform.  

The Golden Rules for Sponsored Product Ads with DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS  

But how do you make your DOUGLAS advertising campaign a success? Our Client Services team provides you with the Golden Rules for a successful Sponsored Product Ads campaign. Based on our experience, we have gathered valuable insights into the most successful strategies for SPA. 

If your campaign goal is to increase ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend), you should:  

• Spend a minimum budget of 10k euros,  
• include at least the top 30 SKUs (Stock-Keeping-Unit),  
• monitor the SKU setup regularly and check if anything needs to be adjusted, and  
• structure the campaign according to your categories in order to achieve a better performance comparison.  

It should be noted that the algorithm needs time to learn and optimise. With DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS, optimisation using the algorithm is available to you free of charge – without artificial limits imposed by variables such as budget or campaign period. For existing SKUs you should allow 4 to 5 weeks, for new SKUs 6 to 7 weeks.  

Advantages of SPAs in databased retail marketing  

With Sponsored Product Ads in retail marketing, you advertise your specific products very specifically to a group of buyers who have already shown interest in a product category or are looking for a specific product. If you follow the Golden Rules for SPA, your products are placed in the DOUGLAS Premium Digital Shelf – at the pole position of the product listings. This way, you not only boost your brand reach, you can also increase your sales immensely.

Audience Ads – your DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS Golden Rules  

Audience Ads appear on the home page on the web, in the mobile version, and in the DOUGLAS App. They inspire relevant users based on their shopping behaviour and preferences. Our data-driven Audience Ads allow you to target the right customers with relevant messages. Also in relation to Audience Ads, we present our Golden Rules for a successful campaign. First and foremost are the campaign settings. Here you should:  

• use a minimum budget of 15k euros,  
• plan with an appropriate balance between impressions and category traffic,  
• avoid exorbitant narrowing of the target group,  
• avoid planning always-on campaigns to prevent wear-out effects.

An essential part of Audience Ads are the visuals. When creating them, you should therefore make sure that the creatives for all placements have the same look and style. You should also make sure that your focus product is clearly visible in the visual and not overshadowed by too much text.

Advantages of data-based audience ads in retail marketing  

Audience Ads appear on the homepage of the DOUGLAS platform and thus reach a large number of users – in conventional retail marketing, however, often not necessarily the right ones. This is different with data-driven Audience Ads from DOUGLAS MARKETING SOLUTIONS. Here, the target group is precisely analysed using our experience and concrete data – and can thus be targeted and provided with relevant content about your brand. Audience ads create more awareness for your brand, are the ideal tool especially for launches of new products or lines and act as a consideration booster by drawing potential customers’ attention to your brand in a targeted way. Audience ads at DOUGLAS are played out using the thousand-contact price (CPM) payment model.  

Our Retail Marketing Client Services team works with you to find the best solution for your brand and your needs. With strategic recommendations according to the Golden Rules, your Sponsored Product Ads and Audience Ads in the DOUGLAS platform will be a success.