Collaborative Ads Give You Yet Another Option in Digital Marketing

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The worldwide success and phenomenal growth of online shopping platforms such as Amazon, Shopee, Facebook and Lazada, have meant that brands have another opportunity to explore in marketing their products to a wider range of customers. The opportunity is called collaborative ads, and it further disrupts the old ways of marketing products, even in the digital marketing arena. 

Collaborative ads, or Collaborative Platform Advertising Solutions (CPAS), as it’s known in the digital marketing environment, gives brands another sales channel to add to their own in-house channels. It was first introduced by Facebook. Platforms that engage in collaborative ads offer pages sorted by categories that shoppers can browse through to find the items they want to buy. 

It makes shopping easier from the potential customer’s point of view by offering more options than shopping by visiting several brand’s websites that are known to have the item in question. Shopping by category also makes sense when a customer isn’t familiar with brand names that sell the item they’re looking for. The concept ingeniously copies the idea of department stores and converts into an online application. 

Benefits of Data

The brand manufacturing the item benefits from the partnership with the CPAS by sharing in the sales data generated by the CPAS. This data is invaluable for creating marketing projections and forecasts that will help them plan their production runs and operating expenses for the future.

Before the advent of CPAS, brands would typically have to invest in an ecommerce platform to obtain the same level and depth of data. The sheer popularity of the growing number of online platforms offering the collaborative ad model means more data is generated, giving you a clearer picture of how your products are performing.  

Increasing Visibility

But from a sales perspective, the collaborative ad business model also drives traffic to the brand’s retail partner’s website, or their own site if they ship direct. This increased visibility is an inexpensive way to gain a wider audience and increase sales volume on par with a heavy investment in display ads, but without the need to for PPC ads. 

How Collaborative Ads Work

The brand partners with the CPAS and designs an ad promoting a product they sell. The CPAS features the ad under a category page that hosts other similar products. When a browser chooses the product and clicks on the ad, they are sent to the retailer of the brand’s website or to the brand’s website itself. 

The retailer and the brand both gain the advantage of direct sales without having to invest in an ecommerce platform. Plus, they have access to valuable sales data that helps them improve their marketing strategies. A side benefit to having the customer directed to the retailer’s or brand’s website is that the customer can then browse their website and make additional purchases, thereby increasing conversions.

Every brand and retailer should look into the concept of collaborative ads to find out if it will benefit your marketing strategy. Â