Retail Marketing Begins With Your Growth Objectives
- Do you have all the customers you can handle and simply want to maintain your current sales, or do you want to grow your retail business even bigger?
- How many calls does your website generate? What about your social media profiles? Do you know how to tell which is bringing you the most business?
- Where do you want to focus your marketing efforts? Do you know what aspect of your business brings in the most money? Are you looking to expand into new markets and offer new products? Or do you want to focus more on your current products? These are important questions to consider when coming up with your marketing budget.
- What sets you apart from other retailers in your niche? Are you able to offer lower prices? A better customer experience? Can you give your customers exclusive access to a product? For retailers, it’s important to isolate what makes them special. Find the reason that your customers should choose you over the others and base your marketing around that idea.
Retail Marketing Fundamentals
- Adwords: Most retailing markets are highly competitive. If you Google how you would like to be found and see your competitor’s ads then you’ll need to be there too.
- A Website That Converts: Your website needs to load in 2 seconds or less, look great on mobile and make it very obvious what you do and why you’re different from other retailers.
- Local SEO: Your retail business needs to be on the map. This is accomplished by creating keyword rich listings in hundreds of online directories. It is one of the most cost effective and fastest ways to be found and should definitely be part of your strategy.
- A Newsletter & Blog: Find a way to regularly connect with your clients, prospects and fellow retailers by sharing a monthly newsletter with your blog excerpt, upcoming events, pictures of your teamin the community or with customers, and helpful tips. Remaining top of mind will help with professional referrals and make your business the go-to place for customers when they have a need you can fulfill.
Next Level Retail Marketing
- Are you networking? Do you take full advantage of the handfuls of business cards you collect or do they sit on your desk? A CRM system is a perfect tool to automate nurturing those leads. Send customized emails that look like you fired them off from your account personally. Ask for referrals and testimonials, automate aspects of your new client onboarding. Did an initial consultation not close? Send an automated check in.
- Social Media Visibility: Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Do you have positive reviews? Are you active daily on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Instagram & Twitter?
- Social Media Engagement: Visibility is the first step but you want to network online the same way you network at events. Join retail and community online groups, comment on posts, share and make connections. Out in the community? Share pictures! Can you profile customers? Share testimonials?
- On Page SEO: This involves optimizing the load speed of your retail business’s website (like a car, it will slow down over time without a tune-up), making changes to the code to be more search engine friendly and optimizing your content for target retail keywords. A proper retail SEO strategy will help your Adwords campaign to perform better and cost you less per click.
- Online Reviews: People really do care what others think, especially when it comes to choosing where to shop. The more 5-star reviews you have on Facebook and Google, the more likely prospective customers will choose your store. Even if they find out about you elsewhere you can be certain they are checking you out online.
- Videos and Photos: Your visual media needs to make you stand out, so show them the people behind the logo! On your website show professional photos of you working with your team and interacting with customers. Shoot 1-2 minute videos for your website and social media of you providing shopping tips for your industry, sharing a positive customer story or of a customer saying nice things about you. Visitors to your website or social media should get a feel for what it would be like to buy from your business.
