20 Awesome Marketing Ideas For Your Retail Store
Marketing your retail store is a sure way to stay afloat and keep making profits.
It’s a big deal because it helps you stay relevant and competitive against other brands.
For this reason, you need working marketing strategies to help you gain more customers and retain the ones you have.
It’s all about driving awareness of your business and product.
Retail marketing helps you expand your brand’s reach, build profitable relationships, and puts you ahead of the competition.
As such, it’s a necessity. Whether you run a small business or a bigger brand, you need these strategies to stand out.
In line with that, here are some of the best retail marketing strategies that can give your retail store that edge over others.
Table of Contents
1) Understand the Market
Running a retail store takes a lot. As such, it is important to understand the market within which you operate.
To do that, you need to do some market research to have a good idea of the retail market.
Part of that is having enough data that cut across different aspects.
Store portfolios, sales performances, and competitor analysis will help you chart a successful course in the business.
It’s all about keeping up with the changes and current trends in the retail business.
2) Use Customer Research and Analytics
Research and analytics are two powerful tools you could use to learn more about your customers.
Your retail inventory and more could also help you analyze employee sales performance.
To that end, you can use reporting and analytics software for retail marketing.
Study Data
Analyzing data will give you insights into your customers’ purchase behavior. With that, you can form the basis for your marketing strategy and tactics.
Also, you’ll get to learn which of your products are best-sellers in the market.
What you can do is pair them up with products that don’t do as well. That way, you can increase sales across the board.
3) Focus More on Personalization
About 62% of customers expect personalized discounts or offers based on past purchases they have made.
What a personalized experience does is create more interest in your brand and more leads for your business.
It keeps them happy whenever they visit your store. Personalization should be the focus of your retail marketing strategy.
Getting Personal
There are cool ways to execute customer personalization to target customers.
Email marketing is a good example where you can use automated messaging mails on customer’s birthdays.
Stats show that birthday offers help to generate the highest engagement, with open rates 2.5 times higher than any other type of email campaign out there.
Take it a step further by running personalized ads by keying into specific audiences based on demographics like location, sex, age, and more.
Customers want
Customers will appreciate marketing attempts built around what they want. That way, it becomes easy to settle on a choice.
Also, it helps them identify your retail store as the go-to place for items they need.
4) Train Your Employees
As of 2019, e-commerce retail sales were expected to account for up to 13.7% of retail sales worldwide. They did. However, the employees were a large part of that.
In line with that, it makes sense to have adequate employee train because it could be the difference between you and your competitors.
Set it up
You can arrange a regular training session and conferences to train employees to keep up with trends in the market.
If you must, hire experts to come in and provide such services to boost your retail store.
Neglecting such training will leave you lacking behind your customers.
Industry Trends
Training keeps your employees updated on recent happenings in your niche.
As soon as you hire them, set out to grain them particularly in retail selling and upselling skills.
You could make the arrangements to train them every six months or yearly.
5) Empower Your Customers
Retail sales are projected to hit the $30 trillion mark by 2023. That means one thing.
Customers need to feel like they have a larger say on how things play out especially about their retail choices. What to do? Give them power.
Communicate and Respond
Always ensure there’s a chain of communication between you and your customers.
What you can do is implement customer feedback software in your retail store.
That way, customers can communicate directly with you about their purchase or the service you provide at your store.
With such information, you can use this information to fix issues, offer special promotions, respond to them directly, and offer other promotions.
Deal with the Feedback
Receiving feedback on your products and services is one way to know what your customers needs.
Negative feedback can help you make good adjustments while a positive one means you’re doing something good.
Track all information with particular reference to how customers react to your products.
Empowering your customers is also a way to let them know they mean a lot to you.
You’d be inadvertently creating customer loyalty that can help grow the business.
6) Get Social Media Presence
Virtually all businesses on all fronts have some form of social media presence.
However, not all have the kind of presence needed to adequately market their retail store.
You should work towards this aspect because the world is increasingly getting digital across all fronts.
About 81% of shoppers do online research before going ahead to purchase.
Effective Marketing
A further 31% of consumers say they shop while going through their social media accounts.
Invest in getting a social media presence and media advertising that target customers who are interested in your retail store’s products and services.
7) Reward Your Existing Customers
When you have an increase in loyal customers, you can make them even more committed by rewarding them for their loyalty.
New customers are great, but you should never forget those who have stuck around, and probably bought many products from your retail store.
Customer Loyalty Program
A customer loyalty program is a nice way to incentivizes customers to get some goods at reduced costs or even for free.
You can use software for this purpose so that at checkout, you can track their progress and reward them accordingly.
The figures are convincing, too. For example, a study found that about 62 percent of U.S. shoppers make more store visits and purchases because of loyalty programs.
Create that Special Interest
Everyone who learns about your brand loyalty programs would want to associate with you.
Existing customers will also be willing to spend more.
8) Get Your Website on Major Search Engines
Major search engines like Google will help your retail store grow.
As such, you should consider submitting your website to such engines to market your business online.
It’s also important to use your niche sites and other specialized link directories that allow you to submit your website and business information.
More Popularity
What this does is increase the popularity of your link and helps to increase targeted traffic to your retail store.
That means a whole lot of people can find your business location, what you offer, and learn about coupons via directories and search engines through local listings.
10) Get a Retail Business Mobile App
Creating a mobile app for your retail store is in keeping with the current times. It has the potential to increase sales, and you don’t have to take it on by yourself.
A mobile app development company can help you build your retail business app.
With many people going mobile for almost everything today, having your retail store app is a great way to directly access your customers online.
That way, they can check out your products, campaigns, offers, and availability.
On the flip side, you also get to check out their preferences and send a customized push notification inviting them to visit your store and to also take advantage of walk-in offers.
10) Remarketing Ideas
It is possible to increase your customer retention rates through remarketing.
About 73% of customers use multiple channels to get what they want.
That doesn’t mean you should let your former marketing ideas become obsolete.
Reach back and see what worked before and how to make it apply to current trends in the market.
That initial positive reaction they had to the first one could be remodeled and sold again.
11) Influencer Marketing
Influencers have the kind of massive reach and engagement that can put your retail store out there.
They have many followers that trust them and the information they put out. As such, you can hire them to recommend your product.
Their followers are more likely to consider such information and purchase items especially if they can benefit from it.
Influencer marketing works very well within a local community.
All you have to do is connect with them and create strong campaigns to boost your retail store.
12) Rethink Your Pricing Strategy
Prices can change due to many factors including consumer trends and market changes.
As a result, you need to be current on the pricing game so that your inventory stays within reason.
You have to strategically change the retail prices in ways that attract customers without compromising on getting some reasonable profit.
13) Use Article Marketing to Show Your Knowledge on Your Niche
You run a retail store so that makes you an expert in your niche whatever products you sell.
As such, you can share your knowledge as an expert or be a voice of authority in your niche.
You can get this done through some great ways including:
- Seminars
- Classes
- In-store workshops
What article marketing does is increase awareness about the presence of retailers. That could be online or offline.
For online ways, you can write blogs, articles, and other content for free. Your retail store will reap the benefits with more exposure and popularity.
14) Have Several Delivery Options
Up to 82% of consumers say they are more likely or much more likely to buy from a brand that has multiple delivery options.
Using a single carrier for your retail store’s delivery could be problematic unless they are reliable.
Different carriers or delivery options will give customers options to choose from.
That way, customers can make choices between what’s more affordable for them or not.
15) Be Active on Social Networks
There are social new working sites you need to get on to give your retail store the boost it needs.
For example, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have a little chance to help you sell your products directly.
However, many prospective customers are present and use them to hang out.
By being active on these sites, you can follow up and stay in touch with your customers via avenues like blogs.
You can also make public announcements and feature new merchandise as well as promote your products.
16) Start a YouTube Channel
It’s not uncommon for many customers to seek out ways to do things for themselves.
To feed that craze, you can create videos on YouTube to showcase how unique your merchandise is.
Videos generate a lot of interest and if you’re good at it, you get to be an expert and reach a wider audience.
On mobile devices alone, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any broadcast or cable TV network.
That’s massive and could help you get ahead especially if your content is great.
Get Creative with Video
One of the best ways to bring your products to life is with a creative video.
It doesn’t have to be like a movie, though. Let it involve an emotional storytelling component so that it resonates with your audience.
Your brand becomes more unforgettable in your customer’s eyes.
Videos Rule
Videos stand at the top of the content. All you need is a touch of class on your informative material to get the hits and conversion you want for your retail store.
17) Host Events
Hosting customers is a unique experience your store can set up. That way, you get to bring more people in the door and, ideally, boost sales.
Whether you choose to use a virtual holiday party, event, or a session, it can be a way to entertain and/or educate clients about the products or services you sell.
Make it a Success
Hosting a successful event means you can expect more people to come to the next one.
This is one powerful marketing strategy for retail stores. As such, it’s important to get it right the first time.
18) Window Displays
The art of window displays still has a place in retail stores and marketing plans.
That means it’s very important to have an appealing window display to advertise the products and services you have to offer.
It’s up to You
How you want to set up your window display is entirely up to you. You have a choice to make as to the location, decorations, and message behind each product.
The main thing here is that your window display conveys a clear idea of what your retail store deals with.
What you want is something that catches the eye and attention.
19) Add Crawlable and High-Quality Images
Everyone knows about high-quality images right?
Well, the fact is not many retail stores consider this or at least, go ahead and adopt it perfectly.
Images serve as your first chance to make an impression on potential buyers.
What you want is that fine grain, detail, and a great background to help your products have a good standing.
That way, people get to notice what you sell first.
Follow the Money
Google does have guidelines for configuring your images.
For example, for non-apparel products, Google advises making use of images that are at least 100 X 100 pixels.
For apparel items, at least 250 X 250 pixels is just fine.
20) Be Locally Relevant
Retail stores often have people and other businesses around them. As such, it’s important to be relevant to those around you.
As part of a community, people want to feel relevant and carried along.
Let your retail store brand blend with the local audience you hope to connect with.
Create and sustain an air of attachment while promoting your business and the uniting values of your local community.
You can use the following means to stay locally relevant:
- With this, it is easier not just to appear locally relevant, but to use working platforms to better reach your audience. Geotargeting is possible on platforms like Google Ads, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and others. They will help you reach the locals.
- Using Ad Copy and Imagery. These will help you use images that are visually outstanding and attractive to potential customers. Use scenic spots and beautiful backgrounds that showcase your retail store.
Conclusion
These are awesome retail marketing strategies to put your store more out there.
However, not all strategies will work for your brand.
The most important thing to note is that you can be as creative as you want by combining some of the methods outlined above to achieve the best results.
