4. Pixels & Performance Marketing 
5. Awareness 6. Trial
Driving awareness
In the last few sections you learned about making everything shoppable (and why it matters for CPG brands), understanding shopper behavior with actionable insights, and the importance of pixeling for audience building and marketing optimizations. If you missed any of the previous sections, revisit here: shoppability / insights / marketing.
In this section, we’ll dive deeper into how applying these key components of retail ecommerce can help capture the first step in digital share of wallet at retail: awareness.
| GENERATING AWARENESS
Within the share of wallet funnel, the awareness step refers to the initial stage where a brand aims to make potential customers aware of its products. This is the top of the funnel, or the discovery phase.
For CPG brands looking to generate greater awareness - particularly around retail partnerships or retail ecommerce experiences - marketing efforts should be focused on:
- Introducing your products to new audiences.
- Demonstrating your products’ value to new or existing audiences to stand out against competitors.
- Educating audiences on your products, especially where and how they can buy them.
Meeting these goals through organic and paid marketing efforts attracts more visitors to your website and/or shoppable media, where customers can engage with your retail ecommerce experiences. Pixel events will then be fired back to your ad platforms (as covered in the last section), enabling you to build an awareness-level audience. Building audiences off this early stage of the funnel unlocks future marketing opportunities for retargeting and more personalized campaigns.
Once awareness is established, the customer journey progresses to the next stages of the funnel, where efforts are made to convert this initial introduction to your brand into actual trials. More on that in the next section.
| BUILDING AN AWARENESS AUDIENCE
Customers at the awareness level are in the research and information-collection stage. By directing these shoppers to retail ecommerce experiences, brands can meet them wherever they are in their shopper journey, offering comprehensive product details, information on where those products can be found, and options for making actual purchases - either online or in-store.
Using your store locator or shoppable PDPs as marketing landing pages should be one of the first steps in reaching and building this awareness audience. Doing so gives customers an immediate view into both your products and in-stock local retailers - along with one-click paths to purchase - while building a valuable audience of high-intent shoppers on your ad networks.
For brands promoting new product launches or launches at new retail partners, driving to shoppable tools from email and SMS campaigns or social posts is the most efficient way to quickly build audiences of shoppers loyal to that specific product or retailer.
Partnering with similar brands provides another avenue for audience expansion. Leveraging multi-product shoppable landing pages is a useful tool for promoting brand collaborations featuring recipes or complementary products. These links make cross-promotion seamless, giving both brands the opportunity to get in front of new customers and build audiences to tap into for future marketing campaigns.
Once an initial audience has been built around awareness, the true retail ecommerce opportunities become unlocked.
| STRATEGICALLY LEVERAGING INSIGHTS & AUDIENCES
Building custom awareness-level audiences from shoppable tools gives your brand the power to strategically optimize campaigns, increase the likelihood of future conversion, drive meaningful engagement, and foster long-term brand loyalists.
- Targeted communication
Building audiences allows you to tailor your messaging to address specific needs, preferences, and behaviors of shoppers. As you move beyond creating awareness into the next stages of the funnel, understanding your audience through actionable insights and using them to help segment creates personalized and optimized communication. - New product or new retail partner launches
Having a pre-existing audience allows for a much more targeted approach when promoting a new product or new retailer. For example, if you built an audience of users who already engaged with a specific retailer via your store locator, you can use them as a retailer-loyal target audience for campaigns promoting that new partnership. If you’re launching a new or limited edition product, you can target the top of funnel audience of users who are already aware of your brand and, therefore, more likely to interact with your campaigns.
Check out this case study on how Saucy Spoon used retail ecommerce to increase awareness for their new product launch. - Customer retention
Re-engaging with your audience post-awareness helps maintain customer connection with your brand. Retargeting efforts through email or SMS keeps you top of mind and encourages potential customers to move further down the funnel towards purchase. - Increased conversion rates
A well-defined audience is more likely to convert into customers. By focusing on those who have already shown interest (through visiting a store locator, for example), your marketing efforts become more effective.
