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With the shift to ecommerce now undoubtedly dominating the retail space, well-executed, creative marketing ideas are crucial in both raising awareness of your brand and driving sales. In order to increase your brand’s exposure, you need to gear up. It’s as simple as that. The best retail marketing campaigns aren’t just a quick fix, but work to drive sales all year round with multi-channel campaigns being a fantastic way to take your brand’s marketing efforts to the next level. Go above and beyond the standard, traditional marketing campaigns that are run by every business in the retail sector and find out how to create something really special that WORKS. Here’s how to develop a marketing strategy for retail organisations that brings real results.
As a digital marketing agency that has been working with retail organisations for years, we believe that any creative marketing ideas for retail brands should begin with understanding your market. It’s all well and good executing a campaign idea that reflects cutting-edge innovation in retail marketing but if you’re not clued up on your exact market, your campaign isn’t going to be reaching the right people. Fact. Defining your target market should be the foundation of your marketing strategy and the sooner you identify your particular niche, the quicker you can dominate it. With a better understanding of your target market, you can ensue you’re focusing your resources towards people that are most likely to be interested. First, you must understand who’s already interacting with your business and your competitors and then use that information to build your brand.
Ad credit: Birchbox UK
In today’s climate, there’s no denying that if your target market use social media, so should you. Not only should you be regularly posting in order to keep prospective customers engaged, you should also use the targeting abilities that social media presents you with, to your advantage. Of course, paid Facebook ads are one of the most effective ways to target your advertising due to their vast range of built-in targeting mechanisms, so this is a no-brainer, but thinking outside the box is also needed.
So I just did a quick tiktok this morning on reactive Digital PR for the financial industry, on how I get links from jumping on breaking news stories, today was @flybe , take a watch to find out how I do it! 💅🏻 pic.twitter.com/CbkH28TLvM
— Will Hobson (@WillHobson) January 13, 2020
In order to develop a successful Facebook campaign, you also need to know exactly what’s trending so that you know exactly what platforms are likely to stick around for the coming year. With so many innovative ways to share content online, some of the best retail marketing campaigns are taking big risks when it comes to their social media, which means that you should too.
After 85 years of printing tshirts with their infamous logo, Lacoste removed the iconic crocodile and replaced with logos of endangered species for a new campaign by agency BETC Paris which worked with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
To do this, ensure you’re taking advantage of exciting new platforms that can not only help you to create innovative, unique posts but also help you to schedule and post at the right times for your audience to maximise reach and engagement. You can find out more about how your brand can use social media to its advantage, by clicking here.
Image by National Geographic who created the hashtag #wanderlustcontest and encouraged users to submit their photographs of famous sites around the world. They then used these for their own social media.
Some of the best digital marketing in ecommerce campaigns have UGC at the forefront because it is a fantastic way of instilling trust in your brand, due to the advocates it creates. Therefore, it should be utilised either on your website or via your social media platforms (or both). Rather than pushing your product with a purely sales-driven tone (that customers can often see right through), use content that has been generated by real-life people for effective retail industry marketing, that works. As well as being successful as a brand building exercise, User Generated Content can be one of the most profitable and effective retail marketing strategies, without you creating a single piece of in-house content. It’s a no-brainer.
Graph shows how number of transactions differ depending on the time of year. The elevation demonstrates a peak in transactions for busy times of year for the retail market including Black Friday and Christmas.
From Valentine’s day to Christmas or Black Friday, and not forgetting Cyber Monday, whether it’s a national holiday or a consumerist trend, the nature of retail marketing means that seasonality is key. These are some of the best seasonal times for retailers and you should have attention-grabbing campaigns ready to take advantage of the extra shoppers.
Photo Credit: Buzzfeed
Whilst key times of the year mean that you’ll gain new customers, there are also seasonal lulls that may see slower sales (post-Christmas, for example). This is a time to bring out new and exciting retail digital marketing campaigns and offers that are going to re-target all of the engaged customers you had in December and tempt them back into buying more from your brand. Also, it’s a great way of bringing back customers that have dropped off at the very end of their buying journey. If a customer, for example, has left a product in their basket, send them a quick nudge via email (perhaps even with a discount code) or if someone has viewed your products a week before payday, remind them why they’re worth buying when their bank account is replenished – it’s the little things that go a long way and re-targeting, maybe via something like Facebook carousel ads, can often be one of the cheapest and quickest forms of advertising that brings great results.
Photo credit: @lydiamillen
Many of the best marketing strategies in the retail sector involve some form of influencer marketing as it allows a brand to get their products in front of an influencer’s highly-engaged audience, which can be substantial in number. Whilst above the line marketing and TV ads can be effective in some circumstances, paying an influencer to take advertise your product takes advantage of the fact that a vast majority of your target consumers spend a lot of their time on social platforms. Gone are the persuasive sales pitches and here are the recommendations from real life, influential humans. Influencer marketing can help to deliver long-term audience growth and contributes massively towards your customer-retention strategy. Admittedly, influencer marketing can be a bit of a minefield and if you’re a small brand with a modest budget, it may even seem out of the question. However, Hit Search’s digital marketing knowledge will ensure that the right influencer, be that macro and micro or top tier are matched with your brand and you notice a significant ROI.
Coming up with and executing creative fashion digital marketing ideas and other retail campaigns can be a struggle but thinking outside of the box as a retail brand is paramount if you want to be heard amongst the noise. You know it makes sense.
If you have a business in the financial sector and would like to up your marketing game or receive some expert information about digital marketing for financial services, then get in touch with a member of our team!
