Growth can mean any number of things for a brand — a new market, new audience, new sales goals, a move from online-only to bricks and mortar or vice versa. Whatever your aims, whenever the moment, a solid retail marketing strategy helps you carve your brand’s path to success. “Over 70% of new businesses fail due to ineffective marketing strategies,” says a recent planibusiness.com article. “That’s why crafting a solid retail marketing plan is essential for success.”
What Is a Retail Marketing Strategy?
A retail marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that a retail business develops and implements to attract customers, drive sales, and build brand loyalty. It's a roadmap that outlines how the retailer will reach its target audience, communicate its value proposition, and create a compelling shopping experience. A good plan “outlines the strategies to attract and retain customers,” says planibusiness.com.
The activities that fall under the umbrella of “retail marketing strategy” include some you might not expect. “A retail marketing strategy is any method that helps spread awareness and increase sales and profitability for your products or company,” says shopify.com. This includes more than advertising in print and broadcast media; it can include store layout, social media presence, and even the employees you hire.
Retail marketing has been around much longer than e-commerce, obviously, yet today many brands focus most if not all of their marketing energies — and budget — online. “Retail marketing as a whole doesn't get the attention it deserves,” says Liza Shuttleworth, writing for peertopeermarketing.co. She notes that e-commerce accounts for only about 14% of retail sales worldwide, which means 86% of sales come from people entering bricks-and-mortar establishments. “This presents a unique opportunity to use online and offline marketing to drive revenue for your retail business,” she writes.
A retail marketing strategy will help your brand in several key ways:
- It will help attract customers by targeting the right consumers, differentiating your brand from competitors, and helping it stand out in a crowded marketplace.
- It will increase sales by converting casual shoppers into customers, then build brand loyalty to keep those customers coming back. First-time customers are great, Shopify points out, but one study found that just a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 95%.
- A solid marketing strategy will keep your brand competitive by helping you adapt to trends and consumer behavior.
- And a well-crafted strategy will give you the data you need to understand what’s working, what’s not, and why.
Crafting a Marketing Strategy
Creating a retail marketing strategy can seem daunting, but breaking it down into manageable steps makes the process much easier. Here's a guide to help you build a solid plan.
Know Your Audience
The basis of any marketing strategy is research specific to your brand and its customers. “The era of one-size-fits-all retail is long gone,” says a blogger on retailmarketingtechnology.com, recommending that brands create strategies that respond to the ever-changing needs and desires of customers, while positioning the brand to achieve its goals.
Start here: Experts advise brands to identify their ideal customers, then use surveys, purchasing data, and online behavior to understand them.
Identify key demographics like age, gender, location, income, and education level. Explore psychographic data like interests, values, attitudes, and lifestyle. Research shopping behaviors like how often they shop, what they buy, where they shop, whether they prefer physical stores or online shopping, how they find information about brands and products, and the like. Identify their needs, desires, and pain points — what problems do your products solve for them, and how could your brand do better? Finally, what motivates them to purchase — price, quality, brand reputation, convenience?
The goal is to determine enough about who your customers are and what they want to be able to build personas for a few consumers within your “ideal customer” group; these personas will in turn refine your marketing strategies by helping you target actual humans, as opposed to concepts like “convenience,” or “price.”
Define Brand Objectives
What do you want to achieve? Set clear and measurable goals for your marketing efforts. These might include increasing brand awareness, increasing repeat purchases, increasing subscribers to your brand’s newsletter, or driving new customers to your store within a specific time frame.
You can increase the likelihood of success by making those goals SMART ones: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Create a Cohesive Brand Experience
Building a cohesive, consistent brand experience means figuring out who your brand is, so it can become what you want it to be. If that sounds like a high-level “vision thing,” it is — but it’s a key piece of creating and implementing a retail marketing strategy that works for your brand. Components of this process might include the following:
Identifying your Unique Selling Propositions
Every brand has a unique selling proposition (USP) — or can create one. Find yours, whether it’s price, quality, exclusivity, experience, or some other characteristic — then ensure your branding reflects that USP. Ask questions like, What makes you unique? What sets your retail business apart from the competition? Why should customers choose you over others?
Clearly articulate your unique selling propositions (USPs) and the benefits you offer to customers — anything from your product selection and quality to your customer service and brand values.
Zeroing in on Your Brand’s Personality
Brand personality is another high-level concept that has real-world applicability. A collection of traits associated with a brand’s image and messaging, personality gives companies a way to differentiate themselves and connect with their ideal consumers, and it gives consumers an identity to relate to, in much the same way that we relate to other humans via personality.
Are you an excitement brand, like Red Bull or Nike, or a sincerity brand, like Patagonia or Allstate? Learning more about who your brand is, and leaning into the strengths and appeals of its personality traits, can help you keep your image and brand experience cohesive and consistent, as well as understand what about your brand appeals to its ideal customers.
Define Your Values and Story
Prospective customers want to have a sense of who a brand is to decide whether to commit their loyalty to it. Sometimes this connection happens unconsciously, when customers decide whether they can relate to a brand or whether they fit the brand’s ideas about who it’s “for.” Heritage brands, with their appeals to tradition and familiarity, benefit from this connection. Other times, this is a conscious decision on the consumer’s part, such as with younger consumers who expect the brands they patronize to align with their values of sustainability, fair trade, and environmental friendliness.
Beyond understanding a brand’s values, consumers also want the story behind the brand: why does this brand exist, what inspired it, what motivates it. Storytelling can be a powerful way to connect with consumers, regardless of industry, product, or target audience. Defining your brand’s story and looking for ways to communicate it across multiple media, including your physical presence, can forge powerful emotional connections with consumers.
Develop and Implement a Consistent Visual Identity
A logo, color palette, and visual style that reflect your brand and resonate with your target audience are essential to any retail marketing strategy. Over time, the “look” of your brand will become a visual shorthand for everything that makes up your brand — its products, values, story — so craft it carefully and deploy it consistently. Create opportunities to share your visual identity with consumers by producing swag and using the logo and colors in both traditional and digital marketing.
Develop a Customer Experience Strategy
All of these behind-the-scenes efforts at messaging and identity need to be carried out across a customer experience that’s both positive and compelling. Connecting with consumers might begin online, in your advertising campaigns, or via some other means, but the bricks-and-mortar experience is where it counts. Define how you want customers to experience your brand in-person, knowing what your research tells you about who your customers are and what they want. Strategize ways to give them that as part of their experience of your brand. The best retail experiences offer not only a positive in-store experience but also a seamless integration between online and offline experiences.
Elements to consider in developing this part of your marketing strategy include store layout, visual merchandising, customer service, and overall ambiance. Consider incorporating immersive elements into your store, as part of a multisensory experience that captivates customers.
Should You Hire a Retail Marketing Firm?
A retail marketing firm can be an invaluable partner in not only crafting and executing a successful retail marketing strategy, but also assessing outcomes and making adjustments and course corrections.
They Offer Both Knowledge and Expertise
Retail marketing firms are immersed in the retail world. They know the latest trends and technologies; they know what strategies and tactics have a proven record of success; and they understand what resonates with today's consumers.
They’re also well versed in strategic planning and execution, ready to help clients create clear objectives and plan comprehensively to achieve them.
Retail marketing agencies typically have a clear understanding of the client’s perspective, too, so they’re able to help define clear, measurable goals for your marketing efforts, ensuring those efforts align with your overall business strategy.
They Bring a Fresh Perspective and Objectivity
We all think our babies are the most beautiful — in other words, we’re all biased toward our own creations, be they children or brands. This can make it difficult to break with tradition, to ideate new approaches, and to abandon ideas that are hindering, rather than helping, your brand’s success.
Because they’re not as deeply embedded in your brand’s history and day-to-day operations as you are, marketing firms can see the brand more like prospective customers see it: objectively, and with clarity about the brand’s position in the marketplace. For this reason, agencies bring a valuable new perspective to both creative and practical aspects of strategy and execution. Their marketing pros can develop fresh retail branding ideas and innovative concepts that you might not have considered, and they’re experts at crafting the kinds of engaging, immersive experiences consumers connect with. They can also offer guidance about what kinds of retail experiences will best serve your brand, whether that’s experiential marketing, mobile retail, pop-up shops, or traditional, long-term bricks-and-mortar.
Marketing Is What They Do
Sure, you can do your own market research — but can you do it as thoroughly or efficiently as professionals who do that type of work all the time? Probably not. Marketing firms know how to research and understand your target audience on a deeper level, ensuring the strategy leads to campaigns and events that resonate and connect with your ideal consumers.
A marketing agency’s team includes specialists in various online and real-world marketing channels who can develop and execute targeted campaigns. When it’s time to execute, marketing agencies know how to get the job done — they have pre-existing relationships with trusted vendors with whom they can negotiate favorable rates. They’re also experts in handling logistical and operational details, from permitting to contingency planning, that make marketing campaigns and events possible.
They Understand Data, and How to Use It
Today’s marketing firms aren’t all clever taglines and provocative imagery — they’re numbers crunchers, too, and for a brand embarking on a new retail marketing strategy, that’s essential. Marketing firms understand data: how to collect it, how to compile it, how to interpret it, and how to derive actionable insights from it.
This data-driven approach means a retail marketing firm can track key metrics and analyze the results of your campaigns, providing valuable insights into their effectiveness. They can make data-driven adjustments before and during a campaign to maximize its impact and reach. They can help connect your brand with technologies that gather data about customers before, during, and post-sale, and that allow you to analyze what’s happening in your store. And they can satisfy your internal bean counters by measuring ROI effectively and accurately, helping you demonstrate short- and long-term return on your investment by tracking and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs).
They Save Clients Time and Resources
The collective expertise and experience positions a firm or agency brings to your project enables them to execute your marketing strategy seamlessly, freeing up you and your internal team to focus on other tasks as well as core responsibilities. Agencies do cost money, but they make efficient use of that money by helping clients avoid costly mistakes and ensure their budget is used effectively.
And then there’s the back-end savings: The retail marketing firm has already done the hard work of finding, hiring, and training specialists — strategists, analysts, designers, copywriters, logistics pros — work that would take your brand years or months to accomplish. For brands that are serious about growing their retail business, an agency can be a valuable partner in achieving their goals.
The retail landscape is constantly evolving. Brands must stay informed about industry trends and new technologies, along with changing customer preferences and tastes. And brands must be prepared to pivot, remaining flexible to adapt strategies as needed based on a shifting landscape. A comprehensive marketing strategy is the infrastructure for this adaptability, and in today’s marketplace, it’s essential for any brand that wants to attract customers, drive sales, and build a successful retail business.
.jpg)
