Opening or expanding your retail business is a huge legwork. Now, retail businesses are facing higher competition than ever due to the feasibility that eCommerce businesses have to offer.
Regardless, the unique experience customers get in a retail store makes it a preferred shopping choice for many and will continue to do so in the future. The only tricky part is marketing.
To attract customers and maximize spending per visit, an effective retail marketing roadmap is crucial for your brand.
Here, we have laid down the best retail marketing strategies that you can utilize to grow your business.
Before we go into the nitty-gritty, let’s try to understand the basics of retail marketing first.
Retail/Offline Marketing: Definition & Types
What is Retail Marketing?
Retail marketing in a nutshell is the activities and promotions that are used to attract customers and generate sales for their store’s products or services.
Marketing strategies for retail are often crafted around the “6 Ps” of retail marketing, which are:
Product: What you’re selling, including its features and benefits.
Price: The cost of the product and how it compares to competitors.
Place: Where the product is sold (including physical locations and online platforms).
Promotion: How you communicate with customers about the product, like advertising and sales tactics.
People: The staff and customer service that impact the customer experience.
Process: The procedures involved in delivering the product to the customer, from purchase to post-sale support.
Once you understand the mentioned “6 Ps”, you can come up with a much better retail marketing strategies to attract your target audience.
The Different Types of Retail Marketing
Whatever the retail marketing strategies are (which we’ll get into in a minute), they generally fall under one of these three major types of retail marketing techniques.
1. Traditional marketing: Uses offline modes to reach their target audience such as billboards, print ads, events, flyers, etc.
2. Digital marketing: Leverages online platforms like social media, search engines, and emails to draw customers in.
3. In-store marketing: Focuses on tactics inside your brick-and-mortar shops including shopping experience, catchy displays, and so on.
Before making a decision, it’s important to consider how offline marketing ideas align with your product or service and your target audience.
In fact, it’s best to analyze and trial and error with the strategies mentioned below to find the one best suited for your business.
10 Effective Offline Marketing Strategies for Retail Stores with Examples
1. Invest in Local SEO & Geo-Targeted Ads
Although it is a physical store, people tend to look for reviews and product/service listings online. Research shows that 93% of people usually go through an online search to find a local store, so it only makes sense to have a solid online presence.
Start by creating a Google My Business profile. This will help increase awareness and let users easily find your store, hours of operation, and read reviews from other customers.
Once you gain confidence in your online presence, you can move on to try geo-targeted digital ads on various platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
To avoid, or quickly move past traditional trial and error methods to optimize your campaigns, identify the hotspots where your target audience is present. You can easily get this understanding from GeoIQ’s TAM maps and geo-target your ads to only these catchments.
If you wish to catch the eyes of your local audience, this is one of the best retail marketing strategies in India you can utilize.
2. Prioritize OOH Advertising
OOH advertising or local advertising, such as posters, print ads, and especially billboards, is highly effective and stands up to digital marketing. These can be a perfect way to capture the attention of commuters and pedestrians.
But the key is to where you place these billboards, digital signage, and other local advertisements. Generally speaking, there aren’t many data-driven decisions you can make for this kind of advertising. That’s where we come in.
At GeoIQ, we help you find the best places to put your ads, targeting high-foot traffic areas in India where your audience is present. Our AI-powered location intelligence platform takes all the guesswork out, making sure your ads get in front of the right people and give you the best bang for your investment.
3. Optimize Your In-Store Experience & Point of Sale (POS)
Improving the overall curb appeal of your store can lead to increased spending. This involves delivering an exceptional experience from the street view to the inside of your retail space.
Start by placing an attractive window display to draw pedestrians and passersby inside. Make sure that your store is well-organized to help customers navigate easily.
To further boost the spending per person, strategically place small/impulse-buy products and marketing materials along the path to the POS system. Retailers like Zudio, Max, and Reliance Trends are great examples of stores that use these offline marketing ideas or strategies effectively.
4. Build Relationships on Social Media
Social media is a great way to engage & connect with your audience instantly. You can gather valuable feedback on your product or service, receive recommendations, and identify areas for improvement.
91% of retailers maintain a social media presence on at least one or two platforms. Whether you choose Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or another platform, make sure the content you produce resonates with your audience.
Additionally, if you have a solid social media presence, you can build brand loyalty, which is far more valuable in the long run than the immediate ROI you would get from running ads. This little retail marketing idea would help in building brand credibility.
5. Send Targeted and Remarketing Emails
Many might say email marketing in general isn’t as effective as other channels. But contrary to this, email marketing does work wonders if you send targeted emails to your audience. Just make sure that these emails don’t land in spam or junk.
Use any email marketing tools of your choice to create a well-structured customer journey and create personalized content for each of these stages. Relying on these retail promoting strategies will increase the likelihood of higher click-through rates.
Remarketing, on the other hand, helps you convert your audience who are in the consideration or buying decision stage of the customer journey. For example, you can use remarketing campaigns to re-engage users who left products in their cart, visited your site without making a purchase, or showed interest but didn’t complete their purchase.
6. Utilize Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing comes in various shapes and forms, including SMS marketing, push notifications, and in-app ads.
With SMS marketing and push notifications, you can send offers or discount notifications and targeted messages based on customers’ purchase history & preferences.
In-app ads, on the other hand, show your ads within other mobile applications. These ads are highly effective because they allow you to target your audience based on their demographics, user behavior, and interests.
Moreover, you only drain your budget if a user interacts with your ads, such as by clicking on them. So, this retail marketing strategy can be cost-effective as well if done right.
7. Influencer Marketing
Over the past couple of years, we have seen a significant surge in brands leveraging influencer’s follower base as part of their retail marketing strategies.
By partnering with influencers who have a strong following in your target market, you can leverage their credibility to promote your products or services across various channels. If this works out for you, in the consumer’s mind, your brand will be directly correlated to the influencer and vice versa.
Therefore, choose influencers carefully and build long-term relationships with those who align well with your brand values if you wish this retail marketing idea to reap the benefits.
8. Implement Loyalty and Referral Programs
Having loyalty programs as part of your retail marketing can help foster relationships with your customers and turn them into loyal, repeat customers.
In the beginning, you can consider giving your customers a discount if their cart value meets a certain limit or when it’s their birthday. Once you have enough insights into your customers’ behavior, you can provide discounts on their favorite brands and more. This retail marketing strategy doesn’t fit every retail store. So, it’s best to personalize according to your business.
Likewise, referral programs can aid in bringing in new customers while rewarding the existing customers with discounts or products.
9. Offer Free Samples and Trial Offers
Nothing brings new customers quite like free product samples and trials. These retail marketing strategies are great ways to help your customers try out your product while promoting it at the same time.
This is especially useful if you’re looking to launch a new product and customers are unsure about it. The hands-on experience they get from these samples can help your audience make a better decision.
Trial offers, such as free trials of subscription services or limited-time access to premium features, allow customers to experience the benefits firsthand. This is one of the offline marketing ideas that businesses use to increases the likelihood of conversion.
10. Align Your Marketing Plan According to Seasonal Peaks
Once you’re in the retail business for some time you will have a great understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and when the demand for your products or services peaks.
There are a lot of factors that influence these patterns, including the products you offer, your target audience, and your store’s location. As a result, demand peaks can vary widely between different retail stores.
So, analyze these factors and plan your overall marketing plan, whether digital, traditional or through PR activities – to align with your seasonal peaks and optimize your retail marketing strategy accordingly.
Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
Every retail store is different and so should be the strategy. So, craft your retail market strategy with your target audience in mind.
No strategy is the “Go-to” solution. Whether these offline marketing ideas works or not depends on a ton of factors.
As we mentioned before, trial & error these retail marketing strategies to understand what works for your business.
Mix all three marketing types – traditional, digital, and in-store techniques to your retail marketing ideas to enjoy the reaps of marketing for your retail business.
How Can We Help You?
It’s simple: whenever location matters, GeoIQ is here to help. Our powerful location intelligence platform assists in optimizing your ad placements and identifying the best locations for your next store expansion to maximize revenue.
We help you leverage advanced data analytics to pinpoint high-foot traffic areas and demographic hotspots, ensuring your marketing efforts are both strategic and effective.
Whether it’s maximizing your local advertising or expanding your retail footprint, our platform provides invaluable insights to make data-driven decisions that your retail store demands.