How To Renovate Your Marketing Strategy

Improving marketing strategies benefits directly both sales and revenue. According to a study by Yext and Vanson Bourne, 96% of retail marketers expressed that they are experiencing problem implementing a marketing strategy that is effective.

Why retail marketing strategies fail

More than half of retail marketers believe that their current brand marketing strategy is not effective. Some of the reasons behind this failure include:

Unclear off-website traffic:
in a retail ecosystem that includes third-party sellers such as Amazon and digital rating services like Yelp and Google, it has become increasingly difficult to access the data of potential customers in order to generate marketing insights regarding their profile, likes, and browsing flow.
Bad search engine ranking:
with the Google algorithm updates happening almost every month, SEO is now an activity that must take place constantly.
Benchmarking has become increasingly complex:
one in every four retail marketers stated they did not have a clear view on how they stand in comparison with their competitors. The accelerated adoption of different marketing tools has made harder to copy effective strategies.

Taking into consideration these points, marketers can create, implement and improve customer marketing strategies. Below you can find some ideas to boost your current outreach and start reformulating your marketing plans.

Make your business easier to find with off-website content

Invest time in crafting a good store description that includes opening hours and submit it to listing sites and niche aggregators. Although this task may have to be done manually (which takes up a lot of time), this will make your business easier to find when potential customers in your area search for products you carry.
If you use third-party sellers, make sure your profile is updated and includes the latest contact information. A little profile activity goes a long way into convincing customers (and algorithms!) that your store is active and open for business.

Create landing pages for each of your locations

Increase your local search rankings by creating landing pages and location profiles for each of your branches. Use your sales reports (such as the ones generated with Erply’s back office
) to create localized offers and place them in the corresponding location homepage for a more tailored shopping experience.

Care about your reputation

Although more than 70% of retail marketer monitor customer reviews, they still have a long way to go to encourage shoppers to give feedback. Send thank-you messages to your customer and kindly invite them to post a review by linking a third-party review site. Prompt them to also review their purchase on-site, since this can also encourage other shoppers to get the same item.

Leverage your information

Establish five to ten parameters in which you would like to compare yourself against your competition. There are many solutions that can help you to study about your competitors’ traffic, social media influence, and even the marketing tools they use. Keep it simple. The goal is to find best practices that you can implement in your store, not to become lost in data.
At the end of the day, what matters the most while working on a marketing strategy for retail is to be open for change. Explore new tools and find the right combination that brings more customers and sales, while also positioning your brand as a market leader.