Shopper Marketing Part 2:  What to achieve with shopper marketing

Shopper Marketing Part 2: What to achieve with shopper marketing

As we covered in “Shopper Marketing Part 1:”, Shopper Marketing is the process of ensuring consumers are correctly engaged at every stage throughout the path to purchase, from awareness to consideration to conversion. 

This article will explore what you can do to set up a shopper marketing strategy and what you can expect to achieve. 

How to create a Shopper Marketing strategy:

Brands that implement a shopper marketing strategy correctly possess a competitive edge because compiling a plan requires a deeper understanding of the consumer path-to-purchase from a holistic perspective rather than individual components. 

As a starting point for formulating your shopper marketing strategy, ask yourself these four essential questions:

  1. What does your brand represent, and does that resonate with your target audience?
  2. What is necessary for your target audience?
  3. What are your goals beyond making sales?
  4. What is your budget?

The answers to these questions should represent the heart and soul of your strategy, which can then wrap around each stage of your buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness Stage – Focus on brand recognition and storytelling to ensure you resonate with your target audience.
  • Consideration Stage – Deliver value and properly incentivize consumers to encourage them to purchase your products ahead of competitors’.
  • Conversion Stage – Delight with a positive customer experience and focus on building long-term relationships with your customers.
  • Retention Stage – Provide an easy way to connect and keep your customers coming back. 

Now that you’ve formulated your objectives for each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to think about how you should execute it. For example, what marketing activities will you implement to ensure brand recognition? How do you want to incentivize customers? What channels will you use to communicate this to your target audience?

You can use the traditional marketing principle of the “4 P’s” to map out your plan for executing the shopper marketing strategy:

  • Price: discounts, bundled offers, price communication, and coupon
  • Place: eCommerce stores, bricks and mortar stores, visual merchandising, store layout
  • Product: Featured products, packaging, catalogs
  • Promotion: promotion communications, advertising channels, communicating brand and products to consumers

What can be achieved with a Shopper Marketing Strategy? 

By using a shopper marketing strategy as the lens for looking at the entire buyer journey as one, businesses can expect to:

  • Increase brand affinity by delivering more consistent marketing messages
  • Drive sales by looking at the entire path to purchase instead of individual stages
  • Improves long-term relationships with customers
  • Focuses on long-term gains rather than short-term objectives, which creates more consistency
  • Creates opportunity for data-driven decision-making by looking at the entire lifecycle and proper data attribution
  • A deeper understanding of customer segments and preferences by looking at their behaviors across a broader range of activities rather than in isolation
  • Provide more personalized customer experiences by tracking progress through the path to purchase.

Want to implement a shopper marketing strategy for your business? Please speak to us about how Brand to Basket delivers value at every customer journey stage.

Missed the first part of this series? Read more about Shopper Marketing in “Shopper Marketing Part 1: What is shopper marketing and how has it changed lately?”Shopper Marketing Part 1: What is shopper marketing, and how has it changed lately?

 

Shopper Marketing Part 1:  What is shopper marketing, and how has it changed lately?

Shopper Marketing Part 1: What is shopper marketing, and how has it changed lately?

What is Shopper Marketing?

‘Shopper marketing’ can be thought of as the intersection between consumer psychology, customer experience, and experiential marketing. These three elements combine to convert shoppers into buyers and build the brand’s equity within the retail environment while fostering long-term relationships with consumers.

Their customer’s path-to-purchase will establish each retailer’s shopper marketing strategy. For example, whether the purchase is being made for themself or someone else, the purchase research process, and which channels the customer prefers to make the purchase, such as in-store or online. 

Shopper marketing builds its strategy on top of the unique path-to-purchase to create synergies and consistency in the messages presented to consumers throughout their journey to purchase. 

A good case study for this is how many retailers have adopted emailing receipts instead of printing them. By doing so, it opts the customer into their email funnel. 

Think about this – if a customer goes into the electronics department of a store and purchases a student edition of Microsoft Office and then provides their email address for the receipt to be sent to them, the store can now attribute that email address to someone who is likely a student. Then when it comes time for the “back to school” campaigns to roll out, that person will likely receive an email with various deals and promotions for other tools or products they might need and can drive them in-store (since it knows where they’ve made previous purchases from) or online with coupon codes. 

What’s new about Shopper Marketing?

Shopper marketing tactics have been popular since the 80s, but forty years ago, they only took place in brick-and-mortar stores. With eCommerce and social media, shopper marketing has evolved to include these new sales channels. 

The growth of the online space has paved the way for communicating and incentivizing customers, which plays a role in shopper marketing. For example, the ability to run loyalty programs or coupon promotions at the click of a button while seamlessly measuring conversions.

On being highly measurable, data analytics and business intelligence have come a long way. Having access to these insights has given retailers greater clarity around their customer’s purchase trends and habits, which can make informed business decisions to provide the best possible shopping experience. 

What does the future hold for Shopper Marketing?

One pitfall of shopper marketing that many retailers fall for is the lack of personalization in their marketing communications. This is often because they’re often purchasing data from third-party vendors and applying it to their business, which is like trying to jam a square peg into a triangular hole – it just won’t fit. The future of shopper marketing is utilizing technology to customize the shopping experience better to suit personal preferences. In a hyper-competitive retail world, the winners will be the early adopters of technologies designed to influence purchase decisions.

If you want to stay ahead of the technological curve, speak to us today about how Brand to Basket drives revenue growth through personalized customer experiences.

Challenges around product availability at local stores

Challenges around product availability at local stores

ACCORDING TO EXPERTS, the COVID19 pandemic has led to a massive disruption in the global supply chain, which shows no signs of easing anytime soon. 

This supply chain crisis results from factors such as changes in consumer demand, shifts to online shopping due to lockdowns, factory closures, shipping delays, raw material shortages, to name a few.

With economists predicting that the current conditions won’t improve until 2023, here are a few ways that businesses can navigate supply chain issues in the new year.

Moving Excess Stock:

  1. Geotargeted Ads: Having the ability to target potential customers according to their proximity to local stores could be a powerful way to let nearby patrons know that their favorite products are in stock. 
  2. Mobile Wallet Coupons: This allows businesses to create various promotions or coupons and send them directly to a customer’s mobile wallet in return, giving them a nudge or encouraging them to purchase from your store next time they’re looking to make a purchase. Once the coupon has been added to the customer’s wallet, the business can share updates about it through notifications. 

Dealing With Limited Stock:

  1. Take control of stock levels: Research shows that 43% of retailers believe better stock level visibility would help serve customers and increase the overall customer experience. You can implement an effective stocktake system to keep track of stock accurately.
  2. Digital transformation: As many countries begin to move away from lockdowns and restrictions, bricks and mortar retailers are starting to recover; however, foot traffic is still not where it used to be pre-pandemic. Many businesses are benefiting from moving online to supplement income lost due to lower than average levels of in-store shopping. 
  3. Source locally: It could be a valuable exercise to source alternative products or components and materials locally instead of relying on existing shipping routes. This will vary for different businesses and depend on where they currently hold inventory and are presently sourced or manufactured. This will help companies determine their options and perhaps uncover even better solutions.
  4. Network: Speak to other retailers who might be experiencing similar things to your business. Not only is it essential to have a strong support network around during challenging times but keeping your finger on the pulse and staying informed will help with decision making and forecasting. These networks may also be beneficial for sourcing new products or stock.

As supply-chain disruptions persist, volatility and uncertainty remain for the foreseeable future. However, retailers can grab the opportunity by the horns and address disruptions head-on. This will help in the short term and, if executed properly, could also help build resilience against future disruptions. 

Mobeo’s suite of solutions can be customized to fit your individual business needs while driving traffic locally to your product or store. In addition, we offer the ability for businesses to create scalable, personalized digital offerings that are seamlessly added to shoppers’ mobile wallets, allowing for online-to-offline conversions in-store. 

Talk to us today about how we can help boost your digital footprint.