With so much rapid change in the advertising and media landscape, organizations of all shapes and sizes are being pressed to examine and evolve their retail media networks. This can be challenging given different revenue models, interconnected companies, security and privacy concerns, and many other considerations. So how do you know where and how to improve your retail media efforts – what makes sense to invest in, what makes sense to stay away from – and what does the future of your vision for retail media even look like?
At V2, we are here to help you. For more than 17 years, we’ve developed enterprise media and entertainment solutions for companies worldwide. We understand the environment and challenges for growing retail media teams — many of our team members are former media executives themselves. With a firsthand understanding, technical expertise and experience, we are here to help you determine a successful path forward.
Okay, enough about us; let’s dive into how and where to look to evaluate your growing retail media network.
Getting Started: 3 Key Questions to Ask
1. What Are Your Top Sales, Operations, and Reporting Challenges?
To begin, we recommend running diagnostics focused on your main pain points. This exercise will help you to draw insights from across different disciplines, while creating buy-in with different teams. Organizing challenges into three buckets – Sales, Operations, and Analytics & Reporting – will help you to hone in on delivery gaps, broken and inefficient processes, and frustrations felt across teams.
Common Retail Media Network Challenges
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2. Where Are You Investing Your Energy?
How is your company spending its time and energy? Are your best people working on value-creating activities that truly move the needle on your business, or are they mired in non-valuable administrative tasks? Sadly, many times it’s the latter, particularly when you’ve outgrown your current retail media solution.
Defining Your Energy Spend
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3. What Is The Cost of Doing Nothing?
In the ad spend space, there’s no shortage of challenges. While you may be able to overcome or tolerate certain pain points, it’s time to reconsider your strategy when profits and growth are on the line. Here are some signs that you need to begin scaling your retail media network now:
- Suboptimal inventory utilization
- Revenue leakage
- Suboptimal revenue per customer
- High operational costs
- Margin erosion
- Inefficient planning
Building Your Strategy:
Walk, Run, and Fly Growth Models
How do you put a retail media strategy in place? Here at V2, we recommend a “walk, run, fly” approach based on three different growth models that can be helpful to reference as you look to plan and organize yourself for growth. We have identified these models from years of talking with top-tier media (and now retail media) companies that looked to V2 for help in scaling their capability leveraging Salesforce. There are any number of ways to build or scale your retail media network to be sure – but we’ll guide you through a few of our strategic recommendations to help you achieve your goals. More than just a Salesforce implementer, we are your strategic partners and advisors.
Walk, Run, and Fly Growth Models
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Building & Scaling
Your Retail Media Network With Salesforce
Over the past 17+ years, V2 has developed custom solutions to solve complex ad sales and retail media challenges. Now, with the launch of Salesforce’s Advertising Sales Management (ASM), we’re able to solve many retail media network challenges without the heavy lift of custom code development to enhance or create capability where it didn’t exist, and we can now rely more so on lighter weight configuration of Salesforce ASM due in large part to the unique and industry-specific Salesforce Media Cloud data model.
With Salesforce’s Advertising Sales Management, you can leverage industry-specific workflows, built-in automation, and real-time analytics that will help you to:
- Accelerate sales, streamline operations, and optimize campaign performance
- Drive visibility and profitability with a converged platform
- Monetize underutilized cross-channel ad inventory through intelligent recommendations
- Automate and streamline ad operations and sales
- And much more…
In our next post, we’ll talk more about Advertising Sales Management, to help you determine if ASM is right for you. In the meantime, check out four ways to prepare four digital transformation with ASM, and contact us to discuss your retail media goals and challenges.
