How Custom Retail Media Solutions Boost Your Revenue

Retail media networks (RMNs) have significantly transformed the advertising industry. They seamlessly integrate advertising within the shopping journey. The primary goal of traditional ads is to enhance brand recognition. Retail media ads strategically position themselves at the point of purchase, resulting in immediate conversions. While advertisers can enjoy increasing sales, retailers can leverage new revenue streams.

But is it enough to rely on off-the-shelf retail media solutions? Or is it crucial to launch a custom platform to maximize profits? That’s what we are going to talk about in this article.

Ready-Made vs Custom Retail Media Solutions: Top 7 Differences

At first glance, the use of ready-made platforms may seem to be a sensible choice, especially for businesses seeking immediate results. Their implementation will require significantly less time and smaller upfront investments than the development of a custom product.

However, before making your final decision, you need to consider their differences in more detail.

What makes custom solutions stand out compared to ready-made products?

Flexibility and personalization

Custom retail media solutions for businesses are usually much more flexible than any off-the-shelf platforms. You can build any features that you need and regularly enhance your platform with new tools as the demand changes.

Ready-made solutions, by contrast, typically leave retailers reliant on the vendor for any updates, support, and feature modernization. They allow retailers to work with pre-configured features that may not fully correspond to their target audience or business goals. Today, such platforms may also offer some freedom in customization. However, it is usually greatly limited.

Integration possibilities

Custom retail media platforms are built with adaptability in mind. This makes them capable of smoothly connecting with a wider IT ecosystem. This ability to integrate with existing tools and solutions enhance their operational efficiency and allow retailers to provide more comprehensive services to advertisers.

For the convenience of both retailers and brands, retail media solutions can be integrated with CRM, ERP systems, data management platforms, marketing automation, and financial software, as well as social media apps.

Such integrations are valuable for automating processing, optimizing ad targeting, and increasing the ROI.

In the case of relying on off-the-shelf products, some integrations may be too challenging or even impossible.

Maximizing the value of first-party data

One of the greatest advantages of retail media network solutions is their ability to efficiently work with first-party data. Thanks to such platforms, brands can tap into the rich insights retailers gather directly from consumers. This data empowers more accurate customer targeting and enhances personalization.

As for the off-the-shelf solutions, the full potential of first-party data is not always available due to the limited integration of such RMN platforms with the retailer’s customer data systems.

Omnichannel integration

These days, brands have a fantastic opportunity to establish communication with consumers across multiple channels, from online platforms to in-store shopping. Good retail media networks must follow this trend and provide brands with all the required tools to support their omnichannel strategies.

Many off-the-shelf platforms deal only with traditional digital channels like websites and mobile apps. This lack of integration with physical store advertising or email campaigns can weaken omnichannel engagement and negatively impact the overall consumer experience.

Competitive edge and innovation

Typically, ready-made retail media platforms are standardized products designed to serve a broad audience. Multiple retailers use these platforms, resulting in similar functionalities and offerings across the board. This makes it difficult to create unique advertising opportunities or standout customer experiences.

Retailers can build custom platforms from scratch to reflect their brand identity, values, and goals. Such platforms can be equipped with cutting-edge features, like AI-driven personalization or AR-based product visualization. The retailer's priorities and market needs, not the vendor's roadmap, drive innovation in custom development.

Those advertisers who are looking for unique and tailored opportunities are likely to work with custom RMNs.

Diverse advertising formats

Engaging and varied ad formats are essential for capturing users’ attention. Custom retail media platforms can offer options like dynamic ads, interactive content, premium search placements, and video ads, which ensures fresh and appealing campaigns.

In contrast, off-the-shelf solutions often limit advertisers to basic formats, such as banner ads, with little flexibility for innovation. This restricts creative possibilities and can diminish ad efficiency.

Scalability and performance

Performance and scalability are critical for ensuring the effectiveness of retail media platforms. However, many ready-made retail media platforms come with inherent limitations in these aspects. They are designed to handle fixed levels of user activity, transactions, and ad inquiries. When operations expand, these platforms often struggle to keep up. This can lead to system overload, downtimes, and software freezing, as well as financial losses and reputational damages.

Custom development can successfully address such limitations of off-the-shelf solutions. For example, at Geomotiv, we always recommend our clients choose cloud infrastructure and modular architecture for their RMN platforms. This not only ensures stable performance during peak periods but also helps to reduce the costs of software maintenance and modernization services.

Relation between Custom RMN Platforms and Your Revenue

Investing in custom RMN software can deliver significantly higher ROI compared to off-the-shelf products, despite requiring a larger upfront investment.

Here’s why.

• Cost efficiency in the long run. Custom RMN platforms are tailored to meet your exact needs. With custom development, you can fully eliminate unnecessary features and inefficiencies that are common in ready-made solutions. Initial development costs may be higher. But the reduced reliance on third-party vendors and elimination of ongoing licensing fees make them less expensive to maintain over time.
• Deeper integration with business systems. Custom platforms can integrate seamlessly with all your existing business systems. This ensures enhanced workflow efficiency, better data utilization, and optimized advertiser experience.
• Superior control over data and privacy. With a custom RMN solution, you will have full control over collected data. This will enable not only enhanced data security but also the ability to fully leverage first-party data. Thanks to this, you can ensure highly targeted and personalized advertising campaigns, driving better results for advertisers.
• Improved quality and reliability. Custom platforms are designed to meet the highest standards of quality and functionality. Advertisers view these platforms as their preferred choice, making them stand out in the competitive retail landscape.
• Steady revenue generation. With custom retail media solutions, opportunities to boost your revenue become practically limitless. You can introduce attractive rates for different ad formats, loyalty programs, and incentives that will encourage advertisers to join your platform and stay with you.

Wrapping Up

Investing in custom RMN development is a strategic decision that can yield significant ROI.

Custom platforms empower retailers with better scalability, deeper system integration, superior data control, and enhanced security. All this attracts advertisers and drives steady revenue.

By aligning your custom RMN with your business goals and market demands, you can cement your position as a leader in the retail media space, which will ensure long-term profitability and growth.