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Consumers shopping online are constantly having to decide whether to buy from online retailers or buy in-store. The decision ultimately comes down to convenience. Providing relevant information like whether an item is in stock is sometimes the deciding factor. Digital strategies lacking this capability are missing out on lots of potential local shoppers who would rather pick up the item in store and not wait for it to be shipped.
Retailers love all of those additional in store sales that are being driven by Locally’s Store Locator on a brand’s website. But how are retailers capturing local online audiences that aren’t going to brand websites but are ready to buy? Lynkem’s new service fills this gap using a store’s inventory to saturate local markets with their complete product listings to power all of your digital marketing channels.
Introducing ShopCast
Retailers are often challenged with effectively implementing a digital marketing strategy because it requires a lot of time and expertise to understand and manage. Unfortunately, this involves outside agencies or internal staff spending hours to create and publish content on a regular basis and this can get expensive.
Given that our Lynkem platform is all about digital marketing automation, we realized that traditional digital marketing could be made way simpler and a lot cheaper to implement for retailers. We knew we needed two things to make it possible, a store’s daily inventory and brand catalogs. And that’s how our partnership with Locally began.
We’re thrilled to announce ShopCast, a new “set it and forget technology” that promises to dramatically improve retailer’s exposure to online shoppers while also boosting their ability to capture more local searches for the products they have in stock. It allows retailers to easily get access to all of the various digital marketing channels to super-size their online presence in local markets.
Our integration with Locally is bi-directional. Retailers provide permission for Locally to share their inventory with Lynkem. From there, the ShopCast engine uses the combination of a retailer’s inventory and the brands catalogs to generate shopping channel feeds and search/social ads that reflect actual inventory that point back to your Locally webpages. It does that every single day, silently in the background, no intervention required.
ShopCast Supports Multiple Online Shopping Channels
Research shows that 69% of consumers shop online before purchasing a product. We also know that over 45% of purchases are done from Amazon. ShopCast promises to increase your chances of diverting more shoppers to make a purchase at your store rather than at a local competitor or one of those online marketplaces. It puts your store virtually out in front of every local consumer looking for the products you have in stock.
A new study reveals that 80% of consumers are less inclined to visit a store when the website does not provide current product availability—up from 56% last year.
The simplicity of ShopCast is the fact that it runs every single night, automatically in the background pulling in your inventory and creating shopping feeds for multiple online shopping channels. Online shoppers will now have multiple opportunities to engage with your stores through Instagram Shops, Facebook Shops, Google Shopping and Google search ads. And more channels are on the way!
What makes this tool different than others on the market? The answer is simplicity of use and our integration with Locally. Using our many years of digital marketing expertise, we have designed a specialized engine with algorithms that creates the necessary data to feed 100s or even 1000s of store location feeds in just minutes. These feeds contain clean and highly optimized data, resulting in more engaging product displays.
ShopCast and Google Search Ads
The most powerful part of ShopCast is the Google Search Ads feature. For a typical Retailer with 3,000+ UPCs in inventory, the ShopCast engine will generate over 4,500 ads and 35,000+ search terms in just over a minute. It would take a digital marketing specialist more than a week to do that! ShopCast does it every single night.
ShopCast creates multiple ads and hundreds of search terms for each UPC to make sure your store is covering every possible search a consumer might use to find a product including brand name, the type of products you sell, product name, size, color and gender. You name it, we have it covered. And yes, there’s no need for outside help to do this for you anymore so that savings goes right back into your pocket.
Retailers are now able to saturate their local market with their store’s current inventory and put it in front of every relevant consumer search being performed. More importantly, ads are created with well curated images and descriptions using brand content directly from their catalogs. And the best part is, when a consumer clicks on the ad, they’re brought right to the Locally product page so they can buy the product on the spot.
There’s a strong case for using paid search ads when you look at the fact that 64% of consumers will click on a Google ad when they are looking to buy items online. More importantly, for every $1 spent on Google Ads, research shows that businesses make an average of $2 in revenue.
Instagram Tagging Feature
With our Instagram Shops support, store associates can now take pictures of products in store with their mobile phones and tag the products shown in their Instagram Shops feed that ShopCast generates nightly.
Followers of a store’s Instagram account can then click on the post and they’ll be taken directly to the Locally website page for that product where they can Buy It Now, shortening the buyer journey. It’s been shown that you have less than 15 seconds to capture an online shoppers attention, so the shorter we can make the buying journey, the better chance a Retailer has to make a sale.
ShopCast Summary
Sign Up is easy at Lynkem.com or Contact Us if you want to learn more about ShopCast.