10 Smart Retail Marketing Tips for 2021

  1. Know Your Target Demographic

This is the first step towards making your business prosper, it is only after you know who your primary customers will be that you can work towards getting your products seen by them. Having your target demographic be older mothers will make using Facebook and more conventional means a better way to get your product seen. Using things like Instagram and partnering with influencers will result in school teenagers gaining interest in your products. So if they are your primary demographic, this is the better way to approach them. You need to be able to customize your language in order to fit the demographic you are aiming for. If you are focusing on more professional people, you need to present your brand in a respectful manner. While with younger people you will want to have an approachable tone with some contemporary slang in order to really sell your product.

  1. Know Your Marketing Channels

Knowing the basics for your marketing campaigns will allow you to make easier decisions on what to focus on. There are 4 main channels:
• Digital marketing

Utilize social media ads to really get your customers to know about you.

  • Online listings

Tools like Google and Yelp are growing in popularity as a means of discovering new businesses around the area, be sure to utilize it.

  • Word of mouth

Are customers talking about your business to each other in a positive tone?

  • Physical displays

Are people liking the displays you have?

  1. Social Media Targeting

The pandemic has made physical advertising a lot harder, by doing so it has raised the relevance of digital marketing, one of the most important ones being via social media. Social media targeting allows your demographic to come to you way easier. If you are selling wholesale party dresses, be sure to market it towards young and middle-aged women, as they are the primary focus group for those products. Have your business details on your social media, and voilà. You have just increased your relevance and customer base noticeably.

  1. Seasonal Peaks

This one is fairly obvious, but you should be aware of the seasonal peaks when most people flood to sales. Work on creative new marketing strategies to prepare for the peaks, so that you can outwit your competition in this vital segment of time. If you are new to the business and aren’t certain of the seasonal peaks, make sure to go to google trends and other helpful sights in order to prepare yourself properly.

  1. Reviews
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Reviews are a staple of customer approval, especially in retail, where the competition is even more fierce. It’s a huge win to have your store have multiple 5-star reviews. Encourage people to review you. Maybe they don’t feel like doing a review when they have just made a purchase, some may even forget, but that’s okay. It’s on you to have them go through with it. This is why you have automatic e-mails sent after a purchase has been made, ensuring that the review can be fast and easy, while also not time-sensitive. This is an important factor to take into consideration, especially considering that as much as 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they would personal recommendations.

  1. Be Relevant in Your Local Community

How do you make your brand name hold weight when said out loud? Every business owner wants their brand to be respected, it’s the path to getting there that’s the tricky part. During the pandemic, you can’t really expect much word-of-mouth marketing, so you have to amplify your community involvement. You want to be selling products that blend into the background of one’s house. Have them feel like a part of everyday life, that way they will form an emotional attachment to your products. Try to focus on sales locally, as they are your primary focus. Use geotargeting on platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, Youtube, etc. in order to reach the locals. Sponsoring a local event is also a valid way of doing this. You don’t have to go with anything massive like sponsoring the Tour de France. Sponsoring an event for your industry can go a long way. Sponsoring charity events is also worth considering. While fewer chances of hitting your primary demographic, it does still give you a spotlight while also raising your reputation in the community due to sponsoring such a humanitarian event, it’s a win-win situation. 

  1. Have a Mobile-friendly Website

Keep in mind that a lot of your customers will be accessing your site from their phones, this makes it imperative for your website to have mobile compatibility. As more and more people rely on their phones instead of their computers for purchases, this factor becomes all the more relevant. If that wasn’t enough, even Google has made mobile-friendliness an important factor in 2015. If you want your business to succeed, an optimized mobile-friendly website will play a critical part in it.

  1. Utilize the Holidays
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Utilize the holidays to your advantage. Any holiday that can be used to tie your products in with, is a good holiday worth celebrating. Offer holiday-specific discounts based on them. Discounts on chocolate during Christmas, flowers on mother’s day, couple t-shirts during valentine’s day, and so on.

  1. Make the Customer Feel a Sense of Urgency

An exceedingly effective strategy in marking is forcing your customer to make a time-limited decision. Product availability may influence the thought process of the customer. And for this reason, you want to give them a sense of urgency, like every second counts. This will lead them to be more open towards making rash decisions, just so they can get the product before it goes out of stock. The same can be applied with a discount. “40% discount on jeans until the week is over“ will give a sense of urgency and self-doubt in the customer, asking themselves: “Hmm, maybe I do need a new pair of jeans“. An interesting thing you can also do is having one-day sales at the end of the week (that is usually the slowest), and with this, you turn the slowest day into a productive day as well.

  1. Consider Partnerships

Viewing the free market as a bubble is a recipe for disaster. You want to cooperate with interest groups who can potentially propel your business forward (as well as vice versa). Securing cooperation between businesses that aren’t your competitors is a great way to promote your own brand. There are several ways of doing this.

  • Coupon exchange

You can try and work out some deals with surrounding shops, offer them a bunch of your coupons and in exchange you offer them yours. You want this to be an equivalent exchange, because if one side benefits massively while the other doesn’t get anything, it will lead to a sour relationship and be canceled relatively fast. 

  • Partner with stores that have the same clients as you do

If you have stores in the area that have a similar client base as you do, reaching mutual beneficial deals with them will prove beneficial for both.