If you are looking to accelerate the growth of your beauty brand and get your products into more hands but you're unsure which retail media networks to focus on. In this post we'll talk about how beBOLD is using Criteo to advertise on Target.com and Ulta.com and how those platforms can help your beauty brand expand beyond Amazon and Walmart.
Criteo is a Digital Media Commerce Media Platform that helps brands, retailers, and publishers meet their business goals. Criteo's product is a form of display advertising, which displays interactive banner advertisements, generated based on the online browsing preferences and behavior for each customer. The solution operates on a pay-per-click/cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
What's awesome with the Retail Media platform is that the advertiser can choose for their ads to appear on a single retailer, or to run a campaign with multiple retailers and still break down reporting at the individual retailer level. Brands can use budget caps to allocate budget to different retailers at the levels needed, or leverage AI (Artificial Intelligence) to allocate funds dynamically to achieve the best return on ad spend.
There is no question that Ulta Beauty doesn't have the online sales volume that Amazon or Walmart has. But this doesn't mean it's not one of the most important retailers for a beauty brand to consider. While Ulta as a company focuses on in-store experience and is even opening stores within Target brick and mortar, their website allows for advertisers to take advantage of the retail media provided through Criteo.
Your customers are here and you should be too.
Target is the king of the in-store experience. Their brick-and-mortar stores have groceries, coffee, and often other perks that make for a great shopping experience and encourage in-store sales. But many customers still shop online. Some of them are shipping and others are picking up their order in stores. Either way, advertisers can take advantage of the traffic.
Again, your customers are here and you should be too.
Shop Ulta Beauty at Target in-store, on Target.com, or through Target's industry-leading fulfillment options — Order Pickup, Drive Up and Same Day Delivery with Shipt — for the best in prestige beauty today.
A Retail Media Network (RMN) is a platform where brands can place ads on retailer websites. This type of advertising allows brands to show their products to shoppers who are already interested in purchasing from that particular retailer and increase omni-channel sales.
Ulta and Target both use Criteo ads as their Retail Media Network. This platform allows us to push ads to search result pages and other areas of Target and Ulta to encourage growth of your brand in the beBOLD ecosystem.
Retail Media is important because it allows brands to advertise on platforms where their products are already being sold. This type of advertising is especially effective for beauty brands because shoppers who are looking at Ulta or Target for beauty products are likely already in the market for those types of products.
Additionally, Retail Media provides an opportunity for brands to select their digital aisles. This means that brands get to choose where shoppers will find them online. This is incredibly important, especially for brands that are having difficulty being discovered organically.
Read how Hero Cosmetics scaled their omnichannel advertising to increase attributed sales by 3x - case study here
Hero Cosmetics has:
Here is an example of a Criteo ad that would appear on Target.com:
Here is an example of a Criteo ad that would appear on Ulta.com:
As you can see, on Ulta less space is taken by ads. This makes things more competitive especially since Ulta sees a lower search volume than Target, Amazon, or Walmart.
Criteo has a self-serve platform that allows for brands to take up advertising space on Ulta Beauty and Target (among other retailers). This PPC platform works similarly to Amazon Ads or Walmart Connect Ads. Criteo Partners have access to their retail media platform and can use marketing spend as an investment into growing your customer base in the online store of these big box stores.
Just like with Amazon, Google, or any other PPC platform, understanding how performance marketing works will help you grow your business. Assessing the demand and audience size is the first step to gaining a competitive advantage. Marketers can use the services provided by Criteo to launch campaigns, explore the data, and utilize the technology to spend money in the places where that spending can lead to success.
When creating a marketing plan to encourage consumers to purchase on Target and Ulta Beauty, marketers need to consider their brand's goals, target audiences, and demand for their beauty products.
With that in mind, Target and Ulta typically do not have the same scale as Amazon. How much you are willing to invest in these channels will play a role in performance but you can expect to see returns similar to what you might see on Amazon and Walmart. We find aiming for a 3X return is typically a healthy return for a brand.
We can't stress this enough and we keep repeating ourselves on purpose. Your customers are shopping on these online platforms. These are two of the biggest retailers for beauty brands. And as large retailers, advertisers should take advantage of the opportunity for growth on Target and Ulta.
Data shows, your customers are already on Target and Ulta. There is a clear advantage to selecting the digital aisles to target the places you know your customer already is.
Trying to navigate the dozens of online retailers can be challenging for a business. Using a website like Criteo allows you to have simpler access to monitor data and decide which retailers your brand can perform on.
YES! Navigating the beauty space can be a challenge for a brand, especially with a new ecommerce retailer popping up every week for consumers to explore. beBold has the capabilities to to drive your business across several retailers and use data and technology to improve our services.
Creating a marketing strategy that works omni-channel can be difficult, but beBold and our technology partners work tirelessly to support your business at scale.