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While physical stores are becoming less relevant and online purchases are on the rise, investing in a sound retail digital marketing strategy is a smart decision. Retail marketing allows companies to attract customers, enhance their brand loyalty, and ultimately increase sales. The key is to seamlessly and intelligently combine in-store and digital marketing and deliver a holistic experience. In this article, we’ll explore the ins and outs of retail digital marketing, discuss its benefits and challenges, and investigate essential strategies.
Retail marketing is a practice aimed at attracting new customers to the product and generating revenue from sales. However, it encompasses a large array of methods and techniques, including advertising, promotions, merchandising, and others. The most common types of retail marketing are social media, digital, and in-store marketing. While in-store retail marketers focus on physical customer interactions with the products, digital marketing revolves around the online space. From e-commerce websites and marketplaces to mobile applications, retail digital marketing strategy involves numerous techniques.
Why invest in a retail marketing strategy? Aside from driving sales, it can improve your brand recognition and introduce more people to your retail business. In this section, we’ll explore key digital marketing benefits.
The most crucial purpose of retail digital marketing is to eventually increase sales and make the business more profitable. Identifying a potential audience and captivating it with targeted and personalized promotions is a key factor to drive sales. Additionally, online marketing allows experts to access valuable customer data that helps them fine-tune their campaigns.
Creating and maintaining a brand image is integral to long-term success. Almost 60% of US consumers state that once they are loyal to a brand, they are loyal for life. This statistic illustrates the importance of building and fostering consistent and open communication with the user base. From generating rewards programs and building a community to engaging customers and utilizing feedback, your audience should be at the center of your marketing strategies.
There is hardly any market that isn’t saturated, which makes it difficult for businesses to stand out. Furthermore, market trends tend to change and fluctuate affected by consumer expectations, economic situations, and political tensions. To stay afloat and retain customers, organizations need to find ways to establish connections to their audiences and utilize every channel. Although physical stores still deliver sales, companies rely on online marketing channels to expand their user base, adapt to the changes, and grow brand awareness.
Digital retail marketing also facilitates better customer engagement. By building consistent brand guidelines and fostering an emotional connection to the customer base, companies can turn newcomers into repeat buyers. In fact, returning customers spend on average 67% more compared to their newcoming counterparts. Moreover, the cost of acquisition is notoriously high, forcing retail marketers to pivot to recurring revenue.
While the importance of technology continues to grow, more and more customers become accessible through online channels. Regardless of the geographical location, language, or time zone, businesses can reach their respective customer base. Aside from convenience, organizations are also equipped with more cost-effective tools to attract new audiences. As a result, you can steadily grow and expand outside of your area and discover new business opportunities along the way.
Finally, working with digital channels allows you to utilize KPIs and data that was otherwise unavailable. Measuring and tracking your retail marketing strategy is a lot easier with modern tools, platforms, and know-how. Digital marketing strategies will give you an insight into your target audience and their needs and wants, as well as the general state of the retail industry. By leveraging these findings, you can improve your product, messaging, and other aspects to deliver a greater customer experience.
The retail industry can be extremely competitive making it quite strenuous to develop and maintain a digital marketing strategy. In this part, we’ll dive into some of the challenges of online retail marketing.
The market of today is centered around customers, not businesses or industries. With consumers becoming more and more vocal about their experiences and needs, organizations have to pivot their strategies to satisfy them before anything else. To succeed in these conditions, you have to prioritize seamless purchasing processes, adopt various online platforms, and carefully consider customer feedback.
Nowadays, creating an e-commerce platform or website has become quite easy for businesses and individuals of various tech savviness. In the abundance of retail businesses, it’s important to develop a well-performing and functioning tool with intuitive navigation and an optimal user interface that speaks to your audience. Aside from that, you should strive to fill your site with the most engaging and relevant information that helps customers shop and explore the content.
Retail marketers cannot afford to solely focus on one channel, whether it’s physical stores or online retail sales. Neglecting to diversify your marketing strategy and building an online presence can be detrimental to the long-term viability of the brand. It’s imperative to invest in both brick-and-mortar and digital marketing to ensure a holistic and diverse representation of your products.
In the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes engaging content, companies are left to trial and error strategies. The type of content can also largely vary from one platform to another. While LinkedIn is focused on business-related topics, Instagram demands visuals and TikTok thrives from short-term videos and clips. Finding your niche and consistently generating compelling content that speaks to your audience is a huge challenge.
User data protection policies are continuously upgraded and extended to encompass the latest developments. However, even to this day, many consumers do not fully comprehend how their data is being used. According to Salesforce, nearly half the customers don’t trust companies, and 86% demand more transparency. For this reason, it’s extremely important to communicate what you do with the user data and how it can benefit the customer.
Let’s go over the most common and effective strategies that retail marketers can employ to maximize their efforts.
It’s no secret that social media platforms have long become the epicenter of marketing and promotion for numerous companies. It started as a tool for artists, designers, and other visual creators and businesses but has expanded into some of the most versatile and useful spaces for any marketer. However, it’s imperative to select the right social media sites to promote your products and target customers who are more likely to be interested in them.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., can help you reach new audiences, establish brand loyalty, and showcase your products. Unlike traditional TV or newspaper ads, social media allows businesses to bridge the gap and communicate with the customer base directly. Moreover, now you can actually create an online store within these apps and make direct sales.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of practices that allow companies to optimize their content and make it more searchable. Whenever a user searches on Google, they tend to open the first couple of links that pop up. In order to maximize your chances of appearing among these first options, businesses adopt SEO principles and techniques.
SEO involves discovering the most relevant and searchable keywords associated with their brand, products, and content. Additionally, it’s vital to create an SEO-friendly title, meta titles, URLs, and image descriptions. Google also prioritizes articles and posts that carry informative content and are optimized for mobile devices. Adhering to these tips will significantly improve your website’s ranking and empower your user base to find your products faster.
Affiliate marketing enables content creators to promote a product using a referral program. For instance, many bloggers utilize this strategy to generate a source of income. Whenever a user follows their personal affiliate link and purchases the product or service, the creator makes a small commission in return.
Influencer marketing is more personal as companies work with bigger creators who have built a solid online presence. Businesses reach out to creators on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms to promote their products to their respective audiences. This digital marketing strategy offers great returns as users tend to trust their favorite online creators.
However, there is a huge caveat when working with social media celebrities. Basically, you are placing your brand’s image in the hands of another person whom you cannot control. If the creator does or says something that goes against your vision, you may end up losing a portion of your customers. Be careful when choosing the influencer for collaboration and don’t neglect extensive checking and vetting.
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing remains the most effective and lucrative digital marketing strategy. Statista shows that marketers make $36 for every dollar invested, while retail marketers make up to $45. Not only is email marketing incredibly efficient, it’s also relatively affordable, especially in comparison with advertising.
Unlike social media posts that can get lost in the algorithm, emails land directly in a customer’s inbox, creating a more personal touch. Businesses can leverage email marketing to nurture leads by sending informative newsletters or targeted promotions based on customer interests. This consistent communication builds brand loyalty and encourages customers to consider your offerings when they’re ready to buy.
Email marketing also excels at promoting new products and services. Eye-catching visuals and clear calls to action can entice customers to learn more or make a purchase. Additionally, businesses can segment their email lists to send targeted campaigns that resonate with specific customer needs. This strategic approach increases the effectiveness of promotions and maximizes your return on investment.
Google shopping ads and social media advertisements are other methods of promoting your brand and content. Whenever a user searches for something on Google, they usually see several sponsored links at the top. These are companies that pay to have their websites promoted and drive traffic to their products.
Similarly, retailers can place their ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to expand their customer base. Ads can be interactive, video-formatted, engaging, etc., depending on the product itself and the target audience in question. However, keep in mind that people are generally annoyed by advertisements so it’s important to make them entertaining, short, and skippable or avoidable.
Another crucial aspect of a digital marketing strategy is aggregating and utilizing data. By launching campaigns across digital channels, you get a chance to collect a lot of useful information pertaining to customer journey, behavior, shopping habits, interests, demographics, location, and more. All these insights are integral to improving your product, selecting the right ad campaign, and developing a tone of voice.
For instance, companies can identify the most suitable time to post their promotion for their audiences to maximize the feedback. Additionally, they can establish which form of content their user base is likely to respond to such as video marketing, blog posts, influencer endorsement, etc.
Content marketing strategies aim at fostering a relationship with the audience. Depending on your brand and products, you can adopt an authoritative voice, quirky and friendly branding, comedic representation, etc. For example, healthcare companies tend to embrace more authoritative branding and set themselves as informative opinion leaders. Accessory companies tend to maintain a more informal and friendly atmosphere to be shareable on Pinterest or Instagram.
Retail marketing specialists engage customers by generating various types of content. From blog posts and articles, white papers and research, to videos and images, it’s essential to have a good variety of content. While white papers are excellent for conveying complex topics and exploring the retail sector and trends, videos are usually meant to entertain the audience.
Omnichannel marketing is basically the convergence of the above-mentioned strategies. Instead of focusing on just one digital marketing strategy, it’s recommended to diversify your efforts. Not only should you have a well-established online and physical retail store presence, but you should also connect them. In other words, your user base should be able to identify your brand on any platform from design, logo, messaging, CTAs, etc.
Omnichannel marketing revolutionizes how businesses connect with customers, creating a seamless experience across all touchpoints. Imagine a customer researching a product online, then seeing a targeted ad on their phone, and finally receiving a personalized discount code in their email. Omnichannel marketing fosters this connected journey, ensuring your brand stays top-of-mind at every stage.
This cohesive approach strengthens brand messaging and builds trust. Customers receive consistent information, regardless of the platform they use. Furthermore, omnichannel marketing allows for data-driven personalization. Businesses can analyze customer behavior across different channels, tailoring their messages and offers for maximum impact. This personalized touch fosters customer engagement and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Finally, let’s discuss the future of the retail sector. What are the most prominent digital marketing trends?
Amazon pioneered the personalization online marketing strategy which nowadays has become the norm. People are a lot more responsive when the company provides them with personalized suggestions, anticipates their needs and wants, and delivers tailored communication. Invest in data analytics to collect user data and understand customer preferences.
Social commerce allows brands to sell directly on social media platforms without ever leaving the app or website. Users can now connect their Shopify accounts to their pages and promote products in videos and images. According to Forbes, 80% of respondents state they tried new things based on suggestions from their friends and family on social media. Adding a direct buying option to your product will further incentivize your audience to make a purchase.
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that allows consumers to virtually try on a product. Using applications, AR glasses, or web cameras, users can discover how the item will look. For example, Sephora has a web AR option to try on their makeup brand and Ikea allows users to visualize their houses with different furniture.
Retail digital marketing is becoming more and more complex with the latest technology. At the same time, it creates more cost-effective opportunities to promote your product and reach out to new audiences. It’s important to ensure that your marketing efforts are not wasted on outdated campaigns or the wrong target audience.
If you need assistance in your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with NIX. We are a software development agency that offers end-to-end solutions to retail businesses and beyond. Our extensive knowledge in technology and digital marketing services makes us a great partner to achieve the most ambitious goals. Get started with your retail digital marketing today to increase online sales, enhance the customer journey, and build brand awareness.
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