Retail marketing refers to the ways in which brands drive awareness of their products or services, with the ultimate goal of generating sales. The details of implementation vary by industry and niche, but there are some fundamental concepts behind effective retail marketing strategy and best practices.
How to Create a Powerful Retail Marketing Strategy
For starters, whether formally or through hands-on experience, every retail marketer will come into contact with The Four P’s of marketing strategy: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
- Product refers to what you are selling, whether it’s a product or a service. Some businesses may struggle to define what they are selling, particularly if it is a service; others may struggle with product/market fit, where the business ensures their product is geared up to meet strong demand. Clarity on what you will be marketing is the critical first step to developing an effective strategy—and one that can easily get taken for granted.
- Price is how much you charge for your product. You want to make sure that you are charging enough to generate profit, while also being within reach of your target consumer. Price affects the public perception of your offering, and so this must be taken into marketing consideration; often, this involves balancing charging enough to highlight the value of your product while also remaining competitive alongside competitors’ pricing.
- Place refers to where you advertise your product. In order to reach your sales goals, you must promote your product in places frequented by your target customer. You must market to your customers in the channels where they are already present, both online and offline.
- Promotion refers to how you advertise your product. You must both address the needs of your target customer and speak their language.
Ideally, through your retail marketing strategy, you are able to tie online behaviors to offline conversions; but this is often easier said than done. 2019 was the first year when US digital ad spending was set to exceed traditional ad spending, at $129.3 billion to $103.5 billion respectively. Although digital marketing continues to grow as people continue to become more reliant on their digital devices, both traditional and digital marketing have their place in retail marketing. Both avenues drive more in-store visits and transactions, extend the brand reach, build more brand awareness, send more traffic to the website, and secure more loyal customers.
Let us dig into the vital features of a powerful retail marketing strategy.
Key Features of a Powerful Retail Marketing Strategy
The first step to an effective retail marketing strategy is defining your target audience and understanding their needs. Know your customers beyond just their demographics like age and geography. Do you have a clear understanding of what problems your target customer is facing, and what motivates their decision-making? This is a critical moment to ensure that you even have the right products for the audience you are targeting; this may take some trial and error, or A/B testing to see which audiences your message and product resonates with. Do you know what they want and the way they perceive your brand and your competition?
The next step from here is to conduct market research to identify which channels your customers are using. Remember, you want to make sure your place aligns with where your target customers’ attention lands. In this step, you can also start to get a feeling for market size and baseline engagement.
Never neglect your digital or traditional marketing; for example, don’t forget about your physical, brick-and-mortar storefront. Your window and curbside presence offer extensive opportunities to engage with and attract new customers. Your physical presence can get you in front of eyes that might otherwise never see you. Train your staff to engage with customers, and consider asking store visitors for feedback. Monitor foot traffic in the store, and keep an eye on emerging trends: customer demographics, patterns of store visits, what products customers engage with before making a purchase, and even how spatial orientation in the store can affect purchase patterns. The key part of any successful marketing strategy is leaving no stone unturned in gaining actionable insights, and then incorporating them into your next steps.
Don’t limit traditional marketing to your storefront. The opportunities for marketing are endless. Out-of-home advertising is a component of retail marketing that has a lot of potential to attract new eyes since it involves everything from static billboards to vehicle advertising. These placements venture beyond the spots you know to target, and can even create enough chance encounters.
In parallel, make sure you are constantly leveraging the power of social media, both to advertise your brand and to size up trends and competitors. One of the biggest advantages of social media platforms is the continuous gathering of relevant industry and engagement data, all the way through measuring the effectiveness of your existing advertising efforts. You can keep your finger on the pulse of existing and prospective customers, and even discover new target audiences. Social media is like having an infinite virtual storefront.
As you work on your virtual storefront, consider how you can turn your data insights into action. All the information you have gathered around customer patterns can be leveraged into email campaigns to attract site visitors and retargeting campaigns to nudge individuals towards conversions.
Why is retail marketing so important?
Retail marketing is both the strategy and set of tools that empower your brand to build your customer base. Through your retail marketing strategy, you collect data insights about your existing and potential customers and then strategize the steps you then take to convert them into buyers. Retail marketing, therefore, empowers you to take an informed approach to drive more conversions from both online and offline behaviors—and therefore increase revenue.
But retail marketing also lets you problem-solve. Sure, it offers up insights that let you craft targeted messaging that increases customer loyalty. But it can also help you step in when people abandon their shopping carts and help nudge them to purchase. It can also serve up data that lets you know exactly how to step in, address pain points, and win back lost customers.
A solid retail marketing strategy also empowers you to get maximum ROI on your ad spend. Something like 56% of ad impressions is estimated to go unseen; that is a ton of wasted effort and spending. Gathering the right data insights can help you understand the point of disconnect in your advertising, make the required adjustments, and minimize this percentage. And as your brand continues to grow, so will your datasets and strategies.
Why Good Apple?
Retail companies need an advertising agency that stays up-to-date with modern media targeting technology, brainstorms fresh approaches, collects agile insights and delivers marketing strategies that are customized and flexible. Although many of the fundamental principles of retail marketing strategy are constant, applying them requires creativity and experience—especially when you consider that you and your agency must be set up to know when data insights point to a need for change, which must then be swiftly implemented.
The proof of Good Apple’s track record is evident in the brands with which we have worked, which include Starbucks, Birchbox, Zola, and M.M. LaFleur. And because Good Apple is based in the center of one of the most dynamic cities in the United States, we have “seen it all”—and continue to be ahead of emerging trends. Our approach is fine-tuned from our countless successes.
Our word-of-mouth referrals speak to the positive, successful relationships we have built with our retail clients—but so do our numbers. Our client campaign effectiveness averages +30% KPI efficiency within just the first year. And when compared to competing agencies, Good Apple’s paid Facebook campaigns consistently drive 29% more conversions and 90% more efficient CPA (cost per action).
Ready to Revamp Your Retail Marketing Strategy?
If you take one thing away from this article—aside from how Good Apple will create campaigns that exceed your goals and performance expectations—it’s that sound retail marketing strategy takes a deliberate approach to both digital and traditional marketing methods. You need to collect data on all potential buyers, existing customers, and anyone who turns away your brand; all data you collect on these groups can help inform some aspect of your messaging, which in turn can help you better address pain points, better showcase product or service features, and meet your audience where they need you in order to convert.
The trial and error involved with developing a retail marketing strategy on your own can get expensive and time-consuming. Why waste time and give your competitors an advantage, when you can claim the advantage for yourself by working with a veteran agency like Good Apple? We can quickly get you up-to-speed on collecting the best insights to drive future strategy, and we can help you both assess and revamp or fine-tune any campaigns you have got in play.
The future of marketing is expected to incorporate artificial intelligence, voice activation, increased social media integration, and hyper-personalized ad experiences. This landscape is becoming increasingly technical and rapidly evolving. Let our experts at Good Apple stay on top of these trends and implement whatever is required to put your strategy into motion, meet your KPIs, and build out your client base.
