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Grocery stores are facing increasing competition from large, national brands so being able to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace is becoming more and more challenging. That said, there are some techniques and strategies that you can implement to give your marketing a boost and encourage people to shop at your store over larger, established stores.
Seasonal Campaigns
Running seasonal campaigns can be a great boost for business, particularly if they are well planned and tailored to the needs of customers. Marketing campaigns can run throughout the year, focusing on certain times such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter and Father’s Day as well as the traditional festive season in December. You may also want to run campaigns around bank holidays too, creating offers for customers or other incentives such as discounts. Seasonal campaigns should be designed specifically for your customers so gathering feedback about what they want to see in store and what discounts and seasonal offers they would appreciate is important. Making campaigns more personalized for your customers will help build trust and develop your reputation too.
Cooking and Educational Classes
While this isn’t for every grocery store, it’s certainly worth consideration for some. If you live in a city such as London, there are plenty of celebrity or aspiring chefs who want to get their names out there. Hosting a cooking event where they teach a favourite recipe can generate interest around your store and it’s a great promotional tool if you use ingredients handpicked from your store. Another option is to create some dishes yourself using ingredients from your store and video or take photos of the dishes that you can post online with a recipe and grocery list, encouraging people to visit. The educational content doesn’t necessarily have to be cooking it can be on better nutrition, healthy eating or shopping on a budget, all of which prove popular for customers.
Pricing
Everyone is interested in saving money so you can generate interest in your products and store through the use of well targeted promotional pricing. This is one of the best marketing tactics that you can use. When you combine promotional pricing with a limited time offer, many customers will buy in bulk. You can also use loyalty coupons and cards to encourage repeat business. If customers perceive your store to be one that offers them value for money they will keep returning.
Free Products
Use the power of free samples to trial new products or get customers interested in a particular product that you would like to promote. When you offer free samples, you will provide people with inspiration perhaps for cooking a new dish or simply trying something new. Shoppers love nothing more than free food, particularly during their weekly shopping trip. It can also help to improve the experience of shopping too and it can make it easier for you to win over regular shoppers. Loyalty in the grocery store niche is so important and offering complementary products can help boost customer loyalty and encourage customers to keep returning.
Personalised Advertising
The use of in-store advertisements can bring to the attention of your customers any promotional offers in particular areas that they would typically find things. Also consider using things such as a handwritten chalkboard to provide new and interesting offers every day or use a few little personal touches around the store such as offering local products to customers or going the extra mile.
Partnerships with Charities
Some grocery stores establish partnerships with local charities which will help to boost your reputation as a business while also giving back to the local community. This shows that you are not just concerned with making money; you genuinely care about local people and local causes. Coffee mornings, fundraisers and other events can attract existing and prospective customers to your business.
Print Materials
Don’t overlook the power of printed promotional materials such as flyers printing, presentation folders, folders printing, board printing, foamex boards and roller banners all of which can be used to promote your products and your brand. Print materials distributed to local customers or left on the counter announcing offers or promotions work really well. You could also run a promotion where customers bring in a flyer with a discount coupon and receive a certain percentage off their next shop.
Now that you have a good understanding of the different marketing techniques that you can use to promote your business let’s take a look at some of the more specific things that you can do to increase your sales.
Rewards
Making your customers happy should be the focus of your business and serving them in the best way that you possibly can. Finding ways to keep customers returning time and time again is important and one of the ways that you can do this is to offer surprise rewards. This could be something like a loyalty points system where over time the points accrue and then the customer can exchange these for products, free delivery (if you offer online delivery) or coupons.
Streamlined Checkout Process
Whether in store or online, the checkout process should be seamless. One of the best ways to increase your ecommerce sales in particular is to have an effortless checkout system. One of the main reasons why customers abandon their order is an over complicated system with too many steps. Checkout processes should be kept to as few stages as possible.
Mobile Friendly Website
If you would like to add an online element to your grocery store and you work with a web design company in London, it’s important that your ecommerce offering is mobile friendly. More and more customers are accessing content and making purchases through their mobile devices so your store should be easy to browse and shop from any tablet or mobile phone. Ensuring that your website is responsive will increase conversions and encourage more people to use your online store.
Payment Options
Customers love flexibility and if you can give this to them in your store it provides them with greater convenience and more reason to keep returning. Some of the options to consider for your ecommerce offering include Stripe, Apple Pay, WePay or Google Wallet as well as PayPal. Although the initial time it takes to integrate all of these payment options can be time consuming, it is well worth it because it can boost online sales.
Customer Testimonials
Social proof is one of the most powerful marketing techniques that you can use. In today’s social world customer feedback has never been more important. You should be collecting customer testimonials at every possible opportunity. When prospective customers see a stream of happy customers, they are more likely to buy from you too. Being responsive to customer feedback is crucial so you can continue to evolve and enhance your products and standard of customer service.
