The best part? You don't need an additional budget, a sophisticated loyalty programme, or years of preparation to get started. You can begin monetising your audience immediately, then scale up in structured stages.

Here's how to go from zero to revenue — fast: 

Start Making Money from Your Data, Right Away

The fastest way to start generating revenue is to securely leverage the first-party data you already have. Many businesses are already collecting valuable data through their own channels like their website, mobile app or even transactional data. And there are many brands with marketing budgets looking for this data.

So, how can you connect the two?  

The quickest and easiest way to do this is to join a data marketplace, where you can share your existing Google and Meta pixels to create audience segments. Then you can securely share your audience data with brands and advertisers looking to enhance their targeting. 

Expand Your Offering and Increase Advertiser Value

Once you've started monetising your audience, the next step is to build a deeper commerce media strategy. This means offering off-site ad solutions, which let your own platform advertisers reach your audience across different digital touchpoints, not just on your own platform. 

This stage is where your strategy becomes more than just a side revenue stream — it starts driving value for your entire business by increasing traffic to your platform and enhancing your offering to your core sellers, suppliers and brands. 

Scale Up in Three Easy Steps 

Scaling your commerce media offering doesn't have to be slow or tedious if you partner with the right tech provider. Then, you can:

• configure the audience and ad packages you want to offer
• skip the requirement for heavy and expensive internal development work by integrating your product feed directly with the platform, and   
• launch your new off-site ad offering — unlocking more revenue, enhancing your offering to advertisers and driving more traffic to your platform. 

Things to Consider

Keep in mind that you have a choice here too: you can create an open commerce media network — which makes your offering available to both your core advertising brands and external advertisers — or you can keep your commerce media offering exclusive to your internal advertising brands by creating a closed network. 

My tip would just be to ensure your commerce media platform of choice offers you full visibility and control over your data, as well as analytics and reporting, so you know how your data is being used.  

The Opportunity Gap is Closing 

I believe commerce media is no longer a "nice to have," it's an essential revenue driver that businesses with first-party data should be tapping into. The good news is that you don't have to build everything at once. 

By starting with simple audience monetisation, expanding into off-site ads, and eventually developing a full commerce media network, you can unlock significant revenue in a phased, manageable way. And who says no to that?

For more information, visit www.flowliving.com. You can also follow Flow on Facebook, LinkedIn, or on Instagram. 

*Image courtesy of contributor