The cloud is modernizing the retail industry, especially when it comes to marketing practices. The cloud affords retail marketers the capacity to compile, organize, analyze, and access zettabytes of complex data to delight customers and deliver revenue at the same time they can access broader buying audiences and more precisely target consumers.
With integrated cloud commerce platforms and optimized supply chains, consumers can easily search, shop, compare, and procure specific goods and services right at their fingertips.
Though the cloud has already transformed many aspects of retail, retail marketers’ use of the cloud is still in its early days. The growing number of applications and infinite sources of data made available by the cloud hold much more promise. Let’s dive into the shifts shaping the retail world and what the cloud has in store for retailer marketers in the coming quarters, as well as a few of the ways that they are already leveraging the cloud.
Cloud as Data and Business Platform
As in many vertical market segments, cloud providers (largely powered by the Cloud Wars Top 10) offer industry clouds: online applications and capabilities tailored to specific industries, such as manufacturing, government, healthcare, agriculture, and, of course, retail. Retailer marketers can use industry clouds, like Microsoft Cloud for Retail, to connect data from disparate systems and sources — everything from point-of-sale (POS) system data and your website’s online behavioral activity data to third-party data from data providers and financial data from ERPs and credit data providers — to deliver contextual experiences throughout the shopper’s journey.
Contextual experiences include the ability to present product and promotional offers that are tailored to consumers’ behaviors and needs at the right time. Because of the data aggregation and analysis done in the cloud, retailers can connect a shopper’s online activity and preferences across the web with their in-store shopping history.
Through industry clouds, marketers can now access customer, company, and marketing data thanks to the integration of commerce, communications, and customer experience via Microsoft’s retail cloud offering, which is used by fast-fashion retailer H&M, for example.
In addition, all-in-one, cloud-based retail platforms are thriving. These platforms support specific retail segments and provide marketing with more intelligence to better communicate with and sell to more customers. Two notable examples are:
- Shopify: An all-in-one cloud commerce platform that makes it easy to launch a business and start selling to customers via online stores and integrated point-of-sales systems
- Toast: A cloud-based point-of-sale and management system that helps restaurants improve operations, increase sales, and create a better guest experience
Identifying, Connecting With Buyers Through Streaming Media
Retail marketers are maniacally focused on working with their vendors and business partners to increase online and in-store traffic that converts to increased sales. To scale this effort, retailers are developing “retail media networks” that offer ad space on retail websites, in-store displays, and mobile applications, enabling them to precisely target the right consumers with the right products. According to eMarketer’s Insider Intelligence, retail media networks, running largely on cloud services, will grow 38% to more than $10 billion in revenue by 2023. As a result, cloud vendors are stepping in to capitalize on this business. Salesforce, for example, recently announced an initiative designed to help retailers optimize their customer-data-powered advertising businesses.
The newest and hottest retail media network channel benefiting retail marketers is streaming TV. Cloud pioneer Amazon is using its recently inked Thursday Night Football agreement with the National Football League (NFL) both to sell advertising space to its vendors and to reach new consumers for Amazon’s growing product portfolio. Another example of the adoption of streaming TV is Walmart. The powerhouse retailer offers a retail branded network called Walmart Connect to provide marketing solutions for its vendors to reach its joint consumers. For perspective on streaming TV’s impact as a marketing strategy, Walmart Connect surpassed $2 billion in revenue last year.
Real-Time Audience and Buyer Intelligence, First-Party Data
For retailers, marketing and sales effectiveness is all about the data. To fully utilize shopping and customer data, retail marketers are increasingly relying on cloud data platforms. These platforms provide retail marketers with a single source of data compiled from multiple sources, allowing retailers to plan targeted marketing campaigns and generate customized offerings that will improve the customer experience and increase sales.
While synchronizing data in the cloud allows for precise shopper personalization, there are some challenges:
- Merging siloed data: To provide a holistic view of the shopping journey, retailers must merge siloed data across every business function into a synchronized format that can be viewed by all stakeholders within an organization, including marketing, store operations, digital teams, human resources, and finance. This is a gargantuan task, as data must be pulled from different systems both inside and outside of the organization that is in different formats and varies greatly in terms of integrity and accuracy.
- Structuring data: Consumer data is notoriously fragmented, inconsistent, and, at times, conflicting. Unstructured data needs to be parsed into readable formats and merged with structured data.
- Ensuring data integrity: To ensure data integrity and accuracy, data governance must be in place so decision-makers and automated processes can take proper actions.
- Adjust to Google’s third-party cookie data phase-out: As in many industries, retail marketers have relied on third-party cookie data from Google. The urgency for retailers to change up their approach arises because Google will be phasing out third-party cookie data. As a result, retailers will need to ramp up efforts to synchronize their first-party data in their data warehouses to deliver a seamless shopping journey across all channels — online, in-store, mobile devices, social media, and live streaming.
Understanding Brand Sentiment, Activating Social Commerce
Another strategic opportunity for retail marketers involves social commerce and the data that social media engagement creates. When retailers are actively engaged on social media, they can not only communicate better with consumers but also better understand their customers’ sentiments, preferences, and attitudes toward their company and its competitors. For example, retail marketers are shifting budgets and campaigns to TikTok to reach active buyers across Gen-Z, Gen-X, and even millennials. TikTok will reach $11 billion in revenue and capture more than 4% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2024, according to eMarketer’s Insider Intelligence.
Used for collecting and analyzing information on how consumers talk about a retailer or brand on social media, social media monitoring is another rapidly growing data application. This marketing application also helps identify and activate social media influencers as well as loyal fans who advocate for and promote your brand and products. When used together and fed into cloud data platforms and intelligence, retailers can understand the consumer mindset better and more accurately forecast trends in shopping behaviors and product preferences.
Final Thoughts
Retailers’ use of the cloud for commerce and supply chain efficiency is well documented. Now, retail marketers, driven by the value and reliance on shopper journey intelligence and online buyer activity data, are tapping into cloud-powered applications and integrations to drive tailored experiences and revenue more effectively and efficiently. The cloud, data, and retail marketing are thriving together. It is an exciting time to watch as retailers lead the way in cloud-based, data-driven marketing.
