Are you an owner of a retail outlet or maybe an employee who is working at a retail outlet and you recently started using social media with the hope of increasing your store sales? Read this article before you set out on the wonderful journey of social media marketing .
There are a few things to consider before choosing where, what and how to put your retail brand on social media. This article aims to cover a few topics which may be helpful for you to consider before planning your social media strategy.
- Not all social media sites will work for you.
One thing you need to keep in mind is the way each social media sites function. For example, Instagram makes it very interesting with its amazing filters for photos and small video clips. Facebook has large scale reach when it comes to quality content, LinkedIn has the best possible professional network collection, YouTube has the highest chance of your videos getting maximum reach, so on and so forth. You may have read the above sentences everywhere, but how does it influence your strategy? First thing you need to understand is – what is your product? How is your biggest global competition faring in the social media space – to be more precise, ‘which’ social media platform is working for them? Then work backwards.
- Know your audience
Knowing your target audience is the best way possible to choose the right social media platform. If you are a corner grocery store where you are friends with everyone in the neighborhood, a simple strategy like a WhatsApp group might be the best possible solution for you. Your investment will be to get all your main customers and potential customers together in a WhatsApp group and you can share the specials/ offers you have in store weekly. Just make sure that group is only for discussing your products and store and not a place for people to spam. But this wouldn’t work if you are a large supermarket or a retail electronic store. Then you might have to move to the bigger social media players.
- Keep your geographic targets clear
If you are running a retail outlet with a limited territory and high competition, you need to keep your demographic and geographic targets very clear before getting into social media. For example, you run a retail electronic store and within 10 kilometers, there is a similar store, you cannot expect people would prefer to come to your store when they have a similar store around their neighborhood. However, with proper social media planning and regular campaigns, you can make sure you don’t lose your target audience to your competition.
- Stand Out
When you hear proper social media planning and regular campaigns that would be something everyone knows. But if you are able to do something that your competition is not doing, you have a higher chance of standing out in the competition. So what do you do? You have a retail store and you are selling similar products that your competition does as well. What more can you do other than the regular “discount sale” or “Buy 1 get One Free” or a pamphlet drive through the neighborhood. Well, here’s a thought, introducing something new inside your store to improve customer experience? One of our supermarket clients recently introduced a small fast food kiosk and this was shared extensively on Facebook. The traffic to their store has doubled over a week and sales have increased 20% compared to last month!!
Hope this article has got you thinking of how you can formulate a social media strategy for your retail store. If you are looking for a digital media strategist and a quality support team, talk to us today for more information.
