In the ever-changing and highly competitive retail landscape, achieving sustained growth requires an approach that leverages customer data and evolving shopping patterns, embraces cutting-edge AI technology for speed and scale, and seamlessly integrates online and offline customer journeys.
At Making Science, our proven omnichannel retail innovation framework, powered by advanced AI and built upon the robust Google Marketing Platform (GMP), is designed to help retailers not only meet but exceed their performance objectives.
Our framework is designed around three foundational pillars: unifying and leveraging the deep first-party data that almost all retailers have within their walls, activating marketing strategies through best-in-class technology solutions, and enabling your organization’s data readiness for a future with advanced AI.
Unifying First-Party Data: Your Foundation for Success
At the core of any successful AI-driven strategy lies high-quality data. Most omnichannel retailers have no shortage of first-party and sales data stored within their walls; it’s just a question of how to use it in a privacy-compliant way. As a retailer, we emphasize the critical importance of collecting comprehensive, accurate, and real-time customer and conversion data, whether you operate online, offline, or both.
By leveraging the Google Marketing Platform, organizations can effectively unify and deploy their first-party data, creating a rich and actionable foundation for AI success. This robust data pipeline is the fuel that powers AI, enabling it to remix, scale, and optimize campaigns with unparalleled efficiency. Ensuring privacy-compliant data inflow into Google platforms is paramount for achieving optimal and lasting results.
Fueling Intelligent Activation: Maximizing Performance Across Channels
Leveraging the cutting-edge AI innovations within Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform is a key step in driving superior digital ad performance.
This includes embedded AI tools like Performance Max, which optimizes campaigns across Google’s entire inventory, from Search and Shopping to YouTube and Gmail. When activated within GMP’s Search Ads 360 (SA360), retailers are able to maximize performance through goal-based bidding with deduplicated conversion data, powered by Google’s auction-bidding technology. This ensures that every bid aligns with real business goals, maximizing conversion rates and return on ad spend.
Shifting from Search to Video and Display, Google’s Demand Gen campaigns, run in GMP’s Display & Video 360 (DV360), are utilized to spark discovery and capture new demand earlier in the marketing funnel. By serving visually appealing, multi-format ads on Google’s most impactful surfaces like YouTube and Discover, we can boost brand presence and foster increased consideration. The integration with DV360 unlocks advanced capabilities such as unified customer views, reach and frequency management, and third-party brand safety verification.
Enabling Data Readiness for Advanced AI: The Test & Learn Imperative
The journey to AI excellence in retail is continuous and can feel uncomfortable at times. Adopting a “test and learn” mindset, encouraging ongoing experimentation and optimization, can help to ease this transition and allow you to see which combination of tools works best for your organization.
Through the Google Marketing Platform, retailers are best positioned to integrate and scale more advanced AI features, including by licensing specialized third-party AI technology. This readiness ensures that as AI evolves, so too does your marketing strategy, allowing for agile adaptation and sustained competitive advantage.
Key Takeaways for Retail AI Innovation:
- Your Data Equals Your Success: Data is the fuel that powers AI to remix, scale, and optimize your campaigns. AI can only be effective when we feed it good data to make good decisions. From tagging to 1PD connections, ensuring that your privacy-compliant customer and conversion data coming into Google is accurate, complete, and real-time will ensure your success.
- Leverage Google AI Innovation: Here we have shown the strategies and benefits of combining Google Ads AI innovation with best-in-class enterprise Ad Tech from the Google Marketing Platform. From Pmax to Demand Gen, retailers who activate within GMP are able to unlock advanced marketing features.
- Think Omni Retail: We have to meet our customers where they are today. While e-commerce and online shopping get a lot of attention, offline physical stores remain the core of many retailers’ businesses. For these retailers, we must consider foot traffic in physical stores.
- Embrace a Test & Learn Mindset: And finally, it is essential that we embrace a test and learn philosophy. Working with partners like Google and Making Science, we can help to separate the signal from the noise, working in collaboration over time, to grow your business.
Retailers can unlock unprecedented levels of performance, drive profitable growth, and remain at the forefront of AI-powered marketing. To learn more about how to adopt this framework, get in touch with our specialist team at Making Science.
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