Retail marketing is the road that can lead your business to success. By optimizing the strategies you use, when, and how, you can make the most out of your capital, time, and workforce. Your retail marketing strategy will help you tremendously, from customer relations to product development and branding. Thus, helping you stand tall before your competitors.
Your product or service can be extremely viable. But if it doesn’t reach the desired customer, then your retail business fails to make the impact it can. The answer to this problem is Retail marketing. This powerful tool helps you make a difference just by a few simple means.
What is Retail marketing?
As a retailer, you want to bring your products to your customers. But this process is complex and involves many steps. Each of these steps focuses on generating awareness about your product within your chosen niche. To sum it up, all actions that go underway to create sales for your business encompass retail marketing.
With the advent of e-commerce, customers can get goods without stepping out. Therefore, retail marketing plays a pivotal role in your brand’s success. So before wasting much time, you should be working on your retail marketing strategy.
Why invest in retail marketing strategy: what do you want to achieve?
A retail marketing strategy focuses on making the best use of human resources and technology. But to optimize your strategy, the first step is to define objectives. These shared objectives can give you an idea about what you want out of your marketing strategy.
1. Lead generation
Marketing helps you connect with people. It helps you identify the receptive and interested people. You can then convert these leads to your customers with excellent marketing skills.
2. Boosting sales and ROI
As your customer network begins to grow, your sales spikes. So does your ROI(Return on investment). Both lead generation and sales are processes that run parallelly.
examples of retail marketing objectives
source: pinterest.com
3. Branding
Your customers identify you in a certain way. Furthermore, they present your product or service to others in a similar way. To create and modify the image of your business before your customers are known as branding. Branding is crucial to your companies survival.
4. Customer interaction
Keeping a customer onboard takes effort in this time of cut-throat competition. You are required to keep them in the loop continuously; otherwise, someone else will bait them. You can engage your customers through advertisements and other relevant means and, thus, keep the communication going.
5. Visibility
You must have seen pop-ups or notifications of brands on your devices. That is one of the examples of maintaining visibility in your customer network and beyond.
6. Decision-making
Marketing strategies can be effective only when you monitor the outcome regularly. Insights into how well are you are reaching your targets can help you make informed decisions and bring about changes to optimize business performance.
Types of marketing
The ultimate aim of marketing is to generate a response from your customers. You can do so by using any of the following modes:
1. Online Marketing
This mode uses online channels to improve reach. Some common examples are Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and basket emails. Another critical component of online marketing is content marketing, like blogs and videos. You can drive results either organically or by paying for it.
2. Print media marketing
Printed catalogs, pamphlets, billboards, or smaller sized posters are typical examples of this mode of marketing. These have their appeal because they help you in expressing more with less and at times are economical too. Their design requires diligent optimization.
3. Marketing through partnerships
You can also take help from other organizations or outlets to achieve your marketing goals, such as departmental stores, supermarkets, warehouse retailers, or specialist retailers. They can put a flyer with their products or in stores that can help you reach people.
4. Other types of marketing
There are some conventional modes of marketing, like TV and radio, though they are uncommon nowadays. Word of mouth remains the most effective. Placing samples for a try-out has its appeal too, and so does discounts.
Principles of retail marketing strategy
There are a few well-tested principles that can give you the much-needed direction in your retail marketing strategy planning.
4 Ps- Product, Price, Place, Promotion
principles of retail marketing
source: www.slideshare.net
Product
In the current backdrop, retailers have become highly aware of the customer’s needs. A few retailers sell a combination of both hard and soft goods while others focus on a particular type of goods. Here, hard goods are known for their durability. For instance, appliances, sporting goods. Whereas, the soft goods are much less durable like clothing items or cosmetics. Therefore, it is best to build your brand around your customer needs.
Price
The profit from your goods depends not only on the raw material and manufacturing but also on marketing, transport, and maintenance. This pricing process involves competitive analysis too. Thus, it ensures that your customers still favor you above your competitors. In addition to this, you need to make sure that the product price does justice to your customer’s expectations.
Place
Your customers value their convenience the most. For this purpose, it is vital to fix a suitable method of distribution. It can be through an online channel or in-store distributors, whatever suits best for your target customers.
Promotion
Nowadays, promotions are not just about marketing your products but rather about engaging with your customers. This step forms the basis of customer loyalty, which goes a long way. Furthermore, it can be the making of your brand and product development.
How to make an unbeatable retail marketing strategy?
Your retail marketing strategy is a success formula. How you make it and how well does it work are questions that can save you a great deal of workload, time, and money. Let us see how you can start.
1. Check out your competition
You have the liberty to start from scratch, but it has downsides. This method can show you what’s working even before you give it a try. Therefore, it saves time.
To start with, look at what plans and platforms like social media they are using. Google your competitor to find out. The most common finding is SEM. Compare it with your plan, and if you think it is working, then go ahead or else, start where they aren’t present.
Round out at least 10-15 competitors and assess them as much as possible. Understand their mix and round out their uniqueness. Eventually, prioritize these as per your requirements in the form of individual strategies.
The best possible things to study are their leadership materials, blogs, google alerts, events, reviews, and diversity in their plan. Thus, you can decide how much overlap you have with their brand image.
2. Choose your desired mix
The first part takes the most time. Now that you have a clear understanding, you can use it to create demand and be recognized. Therefore, you can start by formulating your objectives and, for instance, increasing the customer base, branding, or improving ROI.
Divide them into short and long term goals. With the completion of this step, you will have a list of objectives and a list of strategies you find compelling.
retail marketing strategy planning
source: www.bizible.com
3. Evaluate your mix
Now assess how vital a specific strategy is to your goal. Differentiate between the individual strategies and select which ones are a must-do, which are essential but unnecessary, and at last, which ones are just nice to have.
This step will help you in prioritizing these individual strategies and, therefore, help in allocation. For example, how much budget you want to dedicate to a particular strategy and workforce and time.
A few questions that can help you here are: where are your customers and how to reach them (using which platform)? Whose opinion do they value? What do they respond to, such as coupons, pricing, and specialty membership (like gold or diamond membership)? How modern are they (which platform to use to reach them)?
4. Create your plan
The last step is the easiest. By now, you have a list of individual strategies arranged in order of priority along with respective allocations. Hence, all you need to do is bring them all together on the same table.
Now here are a few things to look out for. Firstly, fit your plan on a timeline. Secondly, see which ones overlap and make the required changes to your budget. Thirdly, check the list for redundancy. Last but not least, fix a method to evaluate your progress. Along with this, determine a time for evaluation and making any changes if required. With this, your retail marketing strategy is good to go.
How to make the most out of your retail marketing strategy?
The most important thing about a strategy is that you design it to change it. The marketplace is so dynamic that each day, new competitors will surface. Consequently, your methods have to evolve to beat them in satisfying your customers. There are a few essential steps that can make you ace your strategy.
1. Tell a story with your brand
Emotional branding has changed the face of customer satisfaction. The reason being, a man in the street generally responds to a story they can relate with. Therefore, your brand should tell an inspiring and relatable story rather than just selling a product or service.
2. Use only specific social media platforms
There are numerous platforms to reach your customer base. Many a time, engaging on many platforms distributes your effort. Instead, it is more suitable to pick a few social media platforms and give it all you have. It also helps you in using your workforce and capital efficiently.
3. Savor customer feedback
Customer feedback helps you interact with them. You can use this opportunity to make an army of loyal customers. They can, in return, help you with promotions, which saves your capital. So, promote your customers to share their feedback, at times, using means like discount coupons or other takeaways. Afterward, use these insights to develop your brand.
4. Shopping on social media is the new trend
Several social media marketplaces have emerged, like the Facebook marketplace. These are more efficient as it helps in direct and immediate contact between seller and buyer. Thus saving you the time and money required for designing a new website.
5. Renew your strategy every once in a while
This is the golden advice. Depending on your capital and workforce, you can decide how often you do it. Most of the time, only slight changes can bring you closer to your goals. Simultaneously, be prepared for cases where you will have to change your strategy owing to emergencies like a new disruptive competitor.
6. Follow the trends
Study trends as much as you can. They show you the path forward. You can either do what your competitors are doing with a slight twist or tread on a completely untouched path.
7. Customer profiling aids lead generation
When you profile your customers, you will begin to see trends. These trends will help you in targeting the consumers to whom your product appeals the most. As a result, you can generate the most number of leads with fewer chances of failure.
Datahut is here to help!
At Datahut, we know the ins and outs of data and its functioning. With our experience with data-related functions in the marketplace like web scraping and price comparison, we have much to contribute to your business. Our insights can help design your retail marketing strategy. For any of your data-related queries like retail marketing or data analytics, do give Datahut a try.