The major year-end sales season, spanning everything from double-digit sales days like 7.7 and 11.11 to festive moments like Christmas, is fast approaching.
To win this peak sales season, marketers are bringing their “A” game. That means using AI to supercharge their marketing strategies, campaigns, and media mix to drive sales and profits.
It’s a proven approach. Brands like beauty group L’Oreal, baby products company Kindee Kids, and health product company Suntory Wellness have achieved strong sales and marketing effectiveness with AI.
Here’s how you, too, can ace the upcoming sales season with these three AI-powered marketing strategies.
1. Use AI-powered campaigns to grow sales on marketplaces
Online marketplaces are popular with shoppers in Asia. But to drive incremental sales on your marketplace store, you’ll need to have a marketing strategy that extends beyond the platform.
The reason: Although purchases happen on marketplaces, the customer journey typically spans multiple touchpoints, and 65% of shoppers use Google platforms like Search and YouTube for discovery and research.1
Gameplan: With the AI-powered Commerce Media through Google Ads, you can find and reach potential customers across all of Google's channels, including Search, YouTube, and Discover. And you’ll be able to send more traffic directly to the products you sell on marketplaces, such as Shopee and Lazada in Southeast Asia (SEA), Flipkart in India, and Rakuten in Japan.
Additionally, the AI-powered ads campaign lets you track performance and the return on ad spend (ROAS), so you can further optimise your retail marketing strategy for the best results.
Success story: Kindee Kids used the AI-powered campaign to drive traffic to its Shopee store, which it launched with a listing of its 100 top-selling items.
After the initial campaign achieved higher sales and a profitable ROAS, Kindee Kids expanded it to include the rest of its products. The result: a 40X increase in online sales and a 2X improvement in profitability.
2. Use AI to spur your customer’s journey from discovery to purchase
Video commerce is a popular form of shopping in APAC. Over 40% of SEA’s online shoppers rely on video commerce to make informed buying decisions.2
Brands looking to ride the video commerce growth opportunity will need to find the right video platform — one that is trusted by consumers and able to deliver returns. That’s YouTube.
Gameplan: To unlock YouTube’s video commerce potential, use the YouTube Shopping feature. Its highly visible purchase links, which can be embedded in YouTube videos, Shorts, and livestreams, lets YouTube creators easily tag and promote shoppable products.
The purchase links are featured alongside useful product information like the price, and shoppers can directly make a purchase via the links.
With YouTube Shopping, your brand can also use the creator’s assets, across long and short video formats, to run Demand Gen campaigns with product feeds. The AI-powered campaign lets you expand your reach to new customers across YouTube’s most immersive and visual touchpoints.
Success story: L’Oreal Thailand, which had experienced strong brand lift from its partnerships with YouTube creators, wanted to maximise results. So it combined its Demand Gen campaign with the YouTube Shopping affiliate programme to achieve 10X paid views versus creator views, and at 2X better cost-per-visit compared to its other campaigns.
3. Use AI to optimise ad spend and results across channels
To drive your best ROAS for the upcoming sales moments, use advanced marketing mix modelling (MMM).
The privacy-safe measurement method uses AI to accurately track and analyse aggregate data, and provides insights for you to understand the impact of your marketing investments across both offline and online channels. That way, you can optimise your ad spend and invest more in the channels that deliver the most ROI.
Gameplan: Use Google’s open-source MMM, Meridian, to accurately analyse how the interplay among your marketing channels influence your business results.
The MMM incorporates granular data like Google query volume or reach and frequency, and provides detailed insights on the impact of your marketing efforts, so you can do more of what works to drive greater results.
Success story: Suntory Wellness in Taiwan, which is known for its Japan-made health products, wanted to understand how its diverse online and offline marketing channels contribute to sales.
So it partnered with Mutinex, an MMM platform, and Google, and used Mutinex’s time-varying model to determine the effectiveness of every marketing channel, as well as the impact they each drove due to dynamic interactions among them.
One of the findings from the MMM study is that the highest ROAS for Google media was achieved when YouTube in-stream campaigns were run. Subsequently, Suntory Wellness is using the findings to maximise its ROI with Google media.
The bottom line: It’s time to bring your AI game to the peak sales season. With AI-powered campaigns and measurements, you’ll be able to spur customer journeys from discovery to purchase, grow marketplace sales, and make confident, data-driven decisions to optimise for your best ROI.
