How to make on online promotion national and local--at the same time
The web’s a place to buy things--even more; it’s an opportunity for shoppers to research those purchases before buying them offline. But with that opportunity comes a challenge for retailers with a presence in both channels: how to align pricing, products and promotions as offered online with what’s in their local stores. The challenge has given rise to a new interest in geographically based web search, and new distribution services that serve up national store promotions, by user, on a localized basis.
“Five years ago, retailers were 100% focused on the web as an e-commerce tool--basically, a cash register,” says Brian Hand, CEO of online promotions distributor CrossMedia Services Inc. “In the last two years, a lot of them have realized that while web sites are a great way to sell products, a majority of people are going to web sites to research before they go to a store to buy. People are starting to use the web to figure out what is going on around where they live and work.”
That corresponds to increased efforts by portals such as AOL and Yahoo and search engines such as Google to provide geographically-based localized search options: all now have localized potions on their sites. CrossMedia Services already has the ability to serve up localized retail fliers to a web user based on where users’ locations, and major national retailers and grocery chains deploy its technology to serve localized promotions to site visitors.
Now, CrossMedia is seeking to push those localized retail and grocery store promotions beyond retailers` own sites into broader localized distribution across more sites, such as Internet shopping portals and the web sites of local newspapers with a new service called BroadReach. The localized fliers already are available on CrossMedia’s own site, ShoppingList.com.
“Retailers currently spend more than $20 billion per year to advertise local store promotions via print, radio and TV,” says Hand. “Increasingly, they’re looking to the Internet to more cost-efficiently reach and influence local shoppers.”
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