As the work of marketing and sales teams converges, brand marketers are increasingly having to consider how they can enhance performance in commerce.

Cassandra Stevens, global commerce director at media agency Zenith, addressed this topic at the recent ad:tech London event where she highlighted five key areas of focus,

One, inevitably in this context, is greater integration of the different areas of the business. “We do not help ourselves when we have different silos within organisations,” Stevens pointed out.

“Within a brand team there exists a sales team, there’s a trade team, there’s digital marketing supported by agencies. In many cases there’s a separate e-commerce team that’s creating another silo, and then on the retail side you have a buying team, you have a digital marketing team and everybody is trying to talk to one customer.”

But when brands can better integrate online and offline departments, for example, a sales lift of up to four times is possible, she reported. (For more, read WARC’s report: Five commerce imperatives for brand marketers.)

While customers now expect a connected, omnichannel, shopping experience, the exact nature of that can vary between markets, she added. Thus, customers in the UK value convenience but in China “they prefer to be interlinked to competitions when they’re shopping”,  Stevens noted.

Marketers also need to find particular areas of growth and develop profitable relationships with retailers, she argued – a process that requires a detailed understanding of a category’s retailer landscape and who’s shopping where.

At the same time they can improve their media investments through, for example, agreed traffic-driving initiatives.

“Using your own media, if you know that somebody has a preference to shop somewhere, how can you actually drive them directly to the retailer’s product page from your own media and then traffic can be used in your negotiations with the retailer. So you can say, ‘We drove 10,000 visits. We want some prospect for that traffic’.”

Data and tech advancements also provide an opportunity for seamless integrations between brands and retailers, via such things and stock and price feeds on brand sites to to ensure customers can find the nearest store where a product is in stock or where they can find the best price.

Sourced from WARC