Strategies for search success: Harnessing AI for next generation customer engagement
AI is revolutionising marketing and how retailers engage with consumers during the crucial pre-purchase phase. The use of AI now equips brands with tools to optimise consumer engagement across multiple touchpoints, understand, interpret and respond to competitive pressure in real-time. AI can also match in-store product performance to ecommerce performance and maximise marketing impact and return on ad spend. Our research identifies eight key areas where retail brands need to focus:
Leverage real-time data-driven decisions
Within the attention economy, consumer focus can shift in a moment. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data in real-time provides retailers with the agility to adapt instantly to changes in consumer intent, search behaviour, or market conditions. With AI, retailers can ensure they’re always targeting the right audience with the most relevant content, improving engagement rates and maximising return on ad spend. This capability helps brands stay ahead in a highly competitive landscape where relevancy is key to conversion.
Maximise ROI with adaptive AI and product data
Leveraging adaptive AI with product data is key to unlocking the full potential of ad campaigns (e.g. Google Pmax). AI can intelligently transform product data into actionable insights, optimising advertising at the stock keeping unit (SKU) level to enhance visibility, profitability, and relevance. By continuously recalibrating campaigns in real-time, adaptive AI responds to product performance, market trends, and consumer behaviours, ensuring optimal ad spend allocation and maximising ROI.
AI solutions go beyond standard optimisation by providing granular SKU-level insights that enable high-potential SKUs to drive value while minimising budget waste on low-performing items. Additionally, retailers receive proactive strategic insights that allow them to make dynamic adjustments to campaigns based on evolving product performance, channel activity, and shifting market conditions.
This holistic approach empowers retailers to elevate their campaigns, drive efficiency, boost visibility, and achieve sustainable profitability while meeting evolving consumer demands. By effectively managing each SKU and adapting to real-time trends, retailers can maximise both growth and efficiency in a highly competitive retail environment.
Achieve hyper-personalisation at scale
AI’s ability to deliver hyper-personalised content at scale is a ‘game-changer’ for retailers. By analysing consumer data, preferences, and behaviours, AI allows brands to create tailored shopping experiences and provide highly relevant product suggestions that resonate with individual customers at the right time. This goes beyond generic recommendations, enabling deeper connections that drive loyalty and repeat purchases. Personalisation is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a critical component of successful pre-purchase marketing, ensuring retailers meet the expectations of digitally-savvy shoppers who demand relevant, timely, and personalised content.
Boost campaign efficiency through automation
As previously mentioned, paid search ads are highly effective in driving consumer traffic and sales. AI’s role is to understand and give context to the ad platforms (Google, Bing, etc.) to more effectively automate tasks like ad bidding; ensuring that the offer is competitive across dimensions like price, returns policy and delivery; this will also have the added benefit of reducing the CPC due to greater relevance and competitiveness in the bidding process.
This leads to optimised budget allocation, improved ad performance, and faster responses to market changes—all critical in a landscape where agility is crucial to success.
Align business needs with paid media campaigns
AI facilitates the ability to ensure that business imperatives can be integrated into ad campaigns. For example, where there is an overstock situation or out of season promotion, or where supplier funding needs to be applied to a paid media campaign, these scenarios need to be understood and catered for by the AI platform that integrates with the ad platform (Google, Bing, etc.). Brands should explore these interrelated factors to better leverage AI here.
Augmented search and enhanced consumer insights
The potential of AI to enhance search capabilities goes beyond keyword targeting—it can predict consumer intent, track behavioural patterns, and even deliver content that anticipates a consumer’s next move. For retailers, this means leveraging AI-enhanced search tools to provide a more intuitive, seamless experience for consumers. In this context, it can transform traditional search into a strategic asset, improving engagement throughout the customer journey.
Elevate consumer experiences with search and personalisation
Personalisation lies at the heart of retail marketing in the future, and AI enhances the ability of search engines to deliver tailored results. By analysing consumer data, AI ensures that both organic and paid search results are hyper-relevant to each shopper’s individual needs. Retailers can leverage this level of personalisation to significantly influence the consumer journey from awareness to purchase, offering curated product recommendations, timely promotions, and personalised content that deeply resonates with individual preferences.
Future-proof retail strategies through continuous learning
The power of AI lies in its ability to continuously learn and evolve. As consumer behaviours shift, AI helps retailers stay ahead by adapting to new trends and preferences in real-time. This approach can future-proof retail strategies to an extent, ensuring that brands remain agile and responsive to dynamic trends. By way of integrating AI into a comprehensive search and pre-purchase strategy, brands can maintain a competitive edge while fostering long-term loyalty and engagement.
Conclusion
This research reveals a significant disconnect between consumer behaviour and retailer strategy, particularly in the pre-purchase phase. Search engines drive a staggering £31.4 billion of retail spend, more than any other touchpoint, yet many retailers underestimate their influence. This oversight leaves an untapped opportunity—up to £6.7 billion in annual sales—that could be unlocked by optimising search strategies.
While retailers are investing in digital marketing, the challenge lies in making ad spend work smarter. AI offers a solution, enabling brands to optimise paid search and organic strategies, delivering more personalised and relevant content at critical stages of the consumer journey. By better aligning their strategies with consumer expectations, retailers can not only capture attention, but also convert that engagement into sales and long-term loyalty.
Ultimately, the future success of many retail brands will rely on adopting AI to enhance search marketing, bridging the gap between discovery and conversion. By leveraging these tools within a comprehensive strategy, brands can deliver more targeted and effective campaigns, ensuring they capture the full potential of consumer spend for continued growth.
