When it comes to marketing for local retail shops, there are two main methodologies – online marketing, and offline marketing. However, what many marketers forget to remember is that while these are two separate mediums to engage with the target audience, the concept and philosophy behind them is still the same. Local retail shop marketers who understand this can produce significantly better performing campaigns. Here's how.
Use physical banners like you'd use online banner Ads
In online marketing paradigm, marketers talk about keyword optimization, call to action, landing pages, etc. The philosophy behind this obviously to find the relevant target audience and to make them take some sort of action. However, when most marketers think of offline marketing via traditional banner Ads, they assume that the philosophy behind that is confined around building awareness. That's not true at all! For instance, by carefully analyzing the foot traffic patterns around a physical store, the surrounding shops and what kind of demography the area invites at what times of the day, month, and year, local retail shop marketers can come up with compelling messaging via physical banner Ads, strategically placed within the vicinity of the shop, so as to be able to attract relevant foot traffic towards walking into the store.
Use lighting and ambiance like you'd use HTML stylesheets and responsive design
In the online marketing paradigm, there's a heavy emphasis given on presentation of the website. Professional UX Designers are hired to envision a website interface that will be extremely easy and user friendly. However, the same attention is hardly given to lighting and ambiance within in the physical store, at least at many (if not all) retail shops. By having proper lighting and ambiance, by hiring professional store designers, local retail shop marketers can make the store very appealing and welcoming to the incoming traffic.
Use display window like you'd design your home page
This is another important factor that plays a vital role in attracting foot traffic. Just like in the online marketing paradigm the quality of the home page or the landing page decides whether the visitor is going to stick around and browse or not, the same concept applies to display windows of a retail shop. When people walk by and browse around, they will walk in if they find something interesting, something they may be interested in, something that's worth checking out. Carefully studying the foot traffic, and understanding what type of products attracts people to come into the store can help local retail shop marketer pick the right type of products for display, and organize their display windows accordingly.
These are simple, and time tested techniques that successful local retail shop marketers have used for decades. In today's World where there's an over emphasis on online marketing, these simple time-tested local marketing techniques should not be forgotten because in the end local retail shop business works when people walk in to the store – either to browse around and buy later, browse online and buy in store, buy online and pick up in store, or any number of those variants. The shop is where a true human connection happens between the local business owner and the consumer, something that no website can replicate.
Tags: local-marketing
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