The latest trends and overseas strategies for US consumer electronics

As one of the world’s largest consumer electronics markets, the United States continues to unleash its consumption potential. According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. electronic product sales reached $61.8 billion in the first half of 2024, a year-on-year increase of 3.1%; the U.S. consumer electronics market is expected to reach $159.9 billion in 2024. This series of growth figures reflects the impact of consumer electronics products Continued demand in the US market.
Outbrain, a leading technology platform, also shared a major observation: from December to February, the number of clicks on technology content (covering technology news, product reviews, industry trends, innovative technologies, etc. articles or videos) on the Outbrain platform surged by 44% %. This shows that during the traditional shopping seasons of the year-end holidays and the beginning of the new year, overseas users’ interest and purchase intention in technology products have increased significantly. This is driven by multiple factors: brand promotions, new product launches, or consumers’ desire to update or upgrade their technology devices in the new year.

Faced with such huge market demand and fierce competition, how to effectively reach high-quality overseas users and increase user participation during this peak shopping season has become a major problem for overseas companies to overcome. Especially in this era of information explosion, consumers’ attention is distracted by overwhelming marketing activities. How can we stand out among many brands and products and effectively gain the attention and favor of overseas users?

In this regard, Doris, Outbrain China partner manager and team leader, shared with us the latest consumer trends and targeted response strategies in the US consumer electronics industry based on her rich industry experience.

Trend 1: Nearly half of consumers tend to search online before shopping online
With the boom of social media and e-commerce platforms, consumers’ shopping habits are gradually changing – nearly 50% of American consumers will search for information on the Internet in advance when purchasing consumer electronics products. Significantly outperform other product categories.
Strategy: Leverage the open internet to reach consumers at an early stage
In response to the increasingly changing shopping habits, Doris put forward suggestions for precision marketing: in the early stages, the power of the open Internet should be fully utilized to accurately target the target user group through advanced positioning technology to achieve efficient and accurate reach. The core of this strategy is that as consumer behavior patterns continue to evolve, precision marketing has become the key to enhancing brand influence and promoting sales conversion.
Outbrain has advanced algorithm technology that can deeply mine and analyze multi-dimensional data such as user intentions, interest preferences, browsing behavior, etc., and build detailed user portraits. Based on the user’s interests, preferences and real needs, Outbrain can intelligently recommend content ads that are highly relevant to the user and provide a personalized advertising experience; it can also dynamically adjust the advertising push strategy based on the user’s real-time behavior and historical data, significantly improving the effectiveness of advertising. Accuracy to ensure that advertising content is highly matched to user interests.
Doris said: “The Outbrain platform uses artificial intelligence technology to accurately predict the best interaction moments for users, and comprehensively optimizes all aspects of the marketing funnel in the open Internet ecosystem. This process covers from the user’s first contact with the brand to the final purchase or action. Complete conversion path for other related actions.”

When an Asian multinational company released its new foldable screen mobile phone, it joined hands with Outbrain, a leading technology platform, to successfully break the boundaries of traditional media and effectively reach a wide range of new overseas audiences, especially attracting a large number of followers of technology trends.
Outbrain, with its powerful user interest analysis capabilities, finely divided the user groups and accurately pushed them to specific user groups with strong interests in electronic products, home life and health, thereby accurately locking in potential consumers who are most enthusiastic about new technology products. This strategy not only broadened the audience base, but also brought a large amount of high-quality traffic to the new mobile phone release page, maximizing the marketing effect.

Trend 2: US online shopping is accelerating its migration to mobile
Adobe Analytics data shows that online shopping in the United States is shifting from web to mobile. In the first four months of 2024, mobile sales reached US$156.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.8%. Adobe further predicts that in this year’s year-end holiday shopping season, mobile sales will once again surpass web sales, accounting for 52.5% of total online sales. This forecast undoubtedly sounded the alarm for all online retailers and advertisers, emphasizing the urgency of optimizing mobile shopping experience and marketing strategies.

Outbrain’s data also shows that mobile devices are the main source of technology content conversion: accounting for 88% of the share, far exceeding desktop devices (9%) and tablet devices (4%).

Outbrain helps advertisers strengthen their mobile performance
Outbrain provides advertisers with powerful mobile support, covering a variety of ad formats, including standard native ads, video/animated shorts, mobile app install ads, carousel ads, click-to-play ads, and video ads, all of which are perfectly adapted to mobile devices, ensuring that ads can be displayed smoothly and efficiently on different screen sizes. In addition, Outbrain can reuse advertisers’ existing assets, including videos, photos, and social media content, and find the best match and promotion method for advertisers’ content based on user behavior and interests on the open Internet.
In 2021, Bosch launched its blockbuster product, the smart cooking machine, to enter the hot cooking market. Bosch adopted a full-funnel strategy to promote this strategic product, and Outbrain contextual advertising is a key component. Bosch used Outbrain’s click-to-play ads (Click-to-Watch) and Spotlight ads to widely reach potential consumers in the open Internet; in order to further reach users at the lower level of the funnel, Bosch also used Outbrain’s static videos (video stills) and the highly acclaimed Standard Smartad. Outbrain’s combination of various high-quality advertising formats successfully attracted the attention of a large number of high-quality users and led them to visit product detail pages, thus achieving marketing goals.

The main consumer group in the US consumer electronics market is the millennials, who not only have strong spending power but also a high degree of dependence on electronic products. They are keen on pursuing intelligence and the latest technology, and show high brand loyalty. This provides market opportunities for consumer electronics brands, but also poses challenges to how brands can effectively reach and maintain the loyalty of this group.
Driving technology brands to establish credibility on the open Internet
Data from Outbrain shows that compared with social media, native ads placed on top quality overseas media can win more trust from consumers, highlighting the important impact of the media environment on advertising credibility.
In addition, the time allocation of American consumers on the Internet further supports this view: they spend as much as 59% of their time on the open Internet, far exceeding the 41% on closed platforms (such as social media, closed apps, etc.). Compared with non-news content, the user engagement of ads on news websites is nearly 20% higher. Advertisers’ recognition of advertising on well-known news websites should not be underestimated. 80% of advertisers said that ads on authoritative news websites can bring high returns on investment. When ads are placed in the context of news, brand performance can increase by 77%.

Ads in news have a memory effect of 5.5, social media has a memory effect of 5, and search ads have a memory effect of 4.8
Ads in news usually have a high memory effect, which is mainly due to the authority of the news content and the attention of the audience. News websites or apps often have a large number of loyal readers who are accustomed to browsing and reading news content. Therefore, when ads are integrated into news content in the form of native ads on Outbrain’s partner media, it is easier to attract the audience’s attention and leave a deep impression. In addition, the news content is updated frequently, which also provides more exposure opportunities for ads.