The salesperson’s challenge is no longer about increasing the number of sales. Today, it has turned into the pressure of figuring out how to attract more people who might buy the product or service on offer.

Everyone who has a quota also has to make a magic number happen by the end of the month, and that pressure can keep us up at night, right? That’s exactly what retail marketing is here to help with! And maybe you don’t know this yet, but it’s different from conventional marketing.

Retail marketing is designed and conceived to catch the consumer’s eye and deliver more than simply satisfying the need to own a product. The idea here is to offer the customer a true shopping experience. That’s why we’ve put together everything you need to know in this guide to grow in the market and hit those long-dreamed-of numbers. Let’s get started!

What is retail marketing?

Put simply, retail marketing is the set of strategies and activities carried out in the advertising field to promote and sell more products. What sets it apart is that retail marketing also works at the point of sale. In other words, it speaks directly to the consumer’s eyes and other senses. But why “senses”? Because the goal is precisely to delight in every way and create a positive customer experience.

Retail marketing draws on the main components of the so-called marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. The product is the cornerstone of any strategy and directly influences how the other components will be used. Pricing, the choice of point of sale, and the way it’s promoted all vary depending on the product.

So we can conclude that retail marketing adapts to the reality of each sector, right? Factors such as store atmosphere, customer interactivity, technology, communication, and many others all come into play.

In short, retail marketing studies consumer behavior, analyzes the environment the consumer is in, and anticipates their needs, resulting in more effective, better-crafted strategies to attract the right customer, in the best way, in the right place. Although the focus is on the customer, there are a few factors we need to take into account. Let’s highlight three of the ones mentioned above: product, place, and promotion.

Product

The product is the main influence on the purchase decision. Whether through its design, how it’s displayed in the store, quantity, or presentation, it must take your audience’s preferences into account.

Place

Most decisions are still made inside the store, during the buying process. In many of them, intuitive and emotional factors influence the customer’s thinking, either positively or negatively. Finding ways to capture the consumer’s attention in front of a shelf, for example, is the job of retail marketing.

Promotion

Promotion may seem harder for small businesses, but since the rise of digital marketing and content marketing, financial constraints are no longer an acceptable excuse. Promotion can happen through so-called traditional media (which are more expensive) and through “new media,” with a little help from the internet.

Why does retail marketing matter?

Retail marketing brings together the brand, the product, and the consumer. And all of this happens well before the customer arrives at the store and extends all the way to the end of the buying process.

With that in mind, technology is a great ally for anyone using this strategy to boost sales and customer prospecting. That means innovating and coming up with new ways to engage, so that consumers feel familiar with (and not intruded upon by) your brand.

The goal is to draw customers in to get to know you up close, bring them into the store, and make that experience so positive that they stop being just consumers and become true ambassadors for your business.

Once a relationship is established, the idea is to nurture it so that customers carry this work forward through word of mouth — which is old-school but still extremely useful — online reviews, social media, and other touchpoints with potential customers.

When your business is seen as a great problem solver, you become a benchmark in your segment, and we all know what that leads to, right? Sales take off, your customer base grows, and you become one of the “giants”!

What are the best practices?

The best tip for getting retail marketing right is: take good care of your customers. The sale doesn’t start at the store’s door, and it doesn’t end once the customer walks out. Relationship marketing is a sensitive point for retailers, because it’s what will engage and bring business owner and consumer closer, building the latter’s loyalty. You can use loyalty strategies such as points programs, loyalty cards with exclusive perks, discounts and benefits on the next purchase, and so on.

For retailers, the point of sale deserves top attention. Being present at trade shows and events in your segment, alongside your competitors, elevates your brand and positions it as an “expert” in what it offers.

Attractive and, above all, interactive POS displays are a sure bet. In addition to keeping customers in contact with your brand for longer, interaction drives engagement and sparks curiosity, making customers happier to be there. That doesn’t mean traditional perks like giveaways, free samples, and the like are off the table, okay? If something is traditional, it’s because it has proven itself and still pleases a lot of people!

Another essential tip is to keep up the care in the post-sale stage as well. This helps maintain contact after the sale is closed and often pleasantly surprises customers, because it shows you’re interested in how their experience with the product they bought or the service they hired has been.

Having a team — or even one person, depending on the size of your business — dedicated to this task can make all the difference, and your customers will certainly start seeing you in a much friendlier light.

After all, they want to talk to you, so stop and listen to what they have to say. Even the harshest criticism should be received calmly and analyzed, so you can determine whether it’s really valid and what to do to keep those mistakes from happening again.

Nowadays, there’s no longer any excuse to ignore what customers have to say. With the growth of social media and how easy it is for brands and consumers to interact, this dialogue has become much easier. And that’s what we’ll talk about in the next section.

How and why should you use technology in retail marketing?

It feels like a new technology pops up every single day and that we’ll never be able to keep up with the mind-blowing speed at which everything is moving, right? We often want to bring every technology into our strategies and businesses all at once, and that’s exactly where things start to go wrong!

It’s not easy to figure out which innovations are the best fit for your business, and the urge to have it all ends up confusing us. To gain a real competitive edge, stores should focus on technologies that are almost universally useful, that is, ones that adapt well to most business models, as well as on those that are truly innovative and will make a difference in their business.

Technology is a powerful ally of retail marketing and, when used correctly, it can make retailers’ day-to-day work much easier, boost sales, and strengthen relationships with customers. A good example, and one that’s widely used these days, is Facebook chatbots. They are basically conversational bots capable of carrying on a relatively generic dialogue with a customer through predefined commands.

When implemented correctly, chatbots cut customer service costs almost instantly, while also enabling responsive and satisfying first-touch interactions with customers.

And depending on the problem to be solved, human interaction isn’t even necessary! Some more robust chatbots are as efficient as a personal assistant, able to respond faster and build a genuine relationship between brand and audience.

The Connected Consumer

According to a Nielsen survey, people between the ages of 19 and 34 don’t mind paying more for a great shopping experience. A real estate agency, for example, offers clients the option of taking a 360-degree online tour of the entire property.

The convenience of visiting the desired property without leaving home improves the experience, creates a sense of ease and comfort, and reduces costs for the agency itself, while also ensuring safety for everyone involved in the transaction.

This kind of service model is defined by cutting out the middlemen and giving customers autonomy. Representatives have been replaced by direct consumer access through digital channels or even social media.

Remember the airport kiosks that let passengers check themselves in? That has evolved too, and the same check-in can now be done through airline apps. Other good examples are Uber and Airbnb, which let customers order, schedule, book, and pay right on the platform.

Other apps for buying tickets, shopping malls, and so on have also become widely used. Some supermarket chains even let customers do their entire “monthly grocery run” without getting off the couch and have the products delivered to their door.

Consumers have often complained about the pushy approach of some overly persistent salespeople and, although some people do enjoy that face-to-face service, there’s a large number of people who value the autonomy and privacy that technology can provide.

That’s why investing in technology doesn’t mean excluding “traditional” customers, but rather including the so-called “introspective customers,” so that they, too, can have good shopping experiences.

Mobile

Smartphones have become so widely used that they’ve grabbed a big share of the market and are now the most-used digital platform. Mobile activity now accounts for two-thirds of the time users spend online.

This has an impact on many fronts and calls for changes to some strategies, ranging from the format of social media posts (which, if you pay attention, are increasingly vertical to fit those small screens) to your website’s hosting platform or how you approach customers when promoting your product.

In this scenario, consumers are less and less willing to spend time and mobile data on websites that aren’t responsive — that is, that don’t work well on smartphones and tablets.

In short, this means there’s an almost urgent need for your home on the internet — in other words, your website — to be increasingly responsive, interactive, and fast-loading. The main cost benefit is that building a website is relatively cheaper than creating and maintaining an up-to-date native app. Once again: it all depends on your business model and your audience’s preferences.

Online Audience Behavior

We all know that nothing happens on the internet without leaving a trail, right? From now on, we’ll call those trails data. Have you ever stopped to think about the staggering amount of data your business generates every day?

Try pulling together all the emails your customer service receives, every social media interaction, the visits to your website and e-commerce store, and the path your customer takes from a Google search to checking out their cart. It’s impossible to measure all of that “by hand”! And that’s where so-called Big Data, or “data science,” comes in.

There’s software capable of mapping all this behavior and generating insights into your customers’ preferences and needs, so you can adapt and increasingly become the right brand to solve their problems.

You know when we say, “Oh, if only I could read minds”? Using data to generate analytical insights is basically being able to read your customer’s online mind. It lets you predict shifts in consumer habits and get ahead of them.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

With the boom driven by smartphones and virtual reality headsets, this is a retail marketing trend that’s drawing more and more attention and is very well received by tech-savvy consumers. Revolutionizing the shopping experience is exactly what retailers want. Today, you can use devices and apps to simulate how a tattoo will look on your skin once it’s done, for example. Or test a paint color on the walls of your home before spending money, painting, and regretting it.

In the services sector, a good example is the vascular system simulator, which lets you see where blood vessels are located and puts an end to that little “hard-to-find vein” problem.

Wearables

Very common in the fitness market, wearable technology — that is, technology the user can wear — is now a reality in many other segments as well. At Rock in Rio 2017, attendees were admitted using a wristband, ensuring security both for the festival (by discouraging ticket scalpers) and for attendees, who had the convenience of not losing their ticket or having it stolen on the way to the event, for example.

The idea here is to expand wearables into other segments, improving management and access control systems, along with a range of other features.

What Are the Trends in Retail Marketing?

Keeping up with the latest trends in retail marketing is like keeping up with fashion trends so you don’t leave the house in the wrong outfit. Except, in this case, the outfit is how your company will be seen by current and potential customers. Tricky, right? That’s why betting on a few well-received trends is important, especially with all the technology involved today and the speed at which information spreads online.

The transition between online and offline channels is happening more subtly and naturally than it seems. Take a shoe store, for example.

You probably know someone (or maybe you’re that person) who searched online before heading to the store or used online tools to compare prices. It’s common practice, and most companies have already caught on.

Consumers visit one online store and end up buying from another, or they research on e-commerce sites to buy in the physical store and vice versa. Once we notice this, it becomes clear that the language used online and offline must be the same, because keeping the conversation consistent across both environments builds brand trust.

Relationships are another point worth highlighting. We can see that the term “salesperson” is gradually being replaced by “consultant.” This person is no longer solely responsible for generating revenue, but rather for creating, maintaining and developing relationships in order to build customer loyalty. The metric is keeping consumers satisfied so they come back, make new purchases and recommend your company to as many people as possible.

Product, service and customer service review channels have been gaining prominence lately, as traditional marketing has been losing credibility. Word of mouth is back—revamped, modernized and in full force. In the consumer’s eyes, a positive review of a shopping experience is worth more than that beautiful, polished piece of graphic design.

That’s also why content marketing is growing stronger every day as a way to build trust in the market. In retail, beyond the content itself—on blogs and social media—videos featuring testimonials from real customers are gaining ground every day, and they also have greater reach and engagement power.

A good example is the food products chain Plena, which developed a channel offering cooking tips, food safety advice and other topics that strengthen the brand, build credibility and create a closer relationship with its customers.

By now it’s clear that customers have become more demanding and value attention from the companies they plan to spend their money with, so treating them well is the bare minimum. As mentioned, they want to talk to you, be heard and have their needs met with quality.

Improvements to a company’s processes and products should be made with the customer in mind, along with their experience whenever they’re in contact with your brand. People in general have become more concerned about the planet, and sustainability is a recurring theme when it comes to the trade of goods. Consumers opt for the lowest possible environmental impact and identify more with companies that clearly position themselves as “eco-friendly.”

To wrap up, retail marketing encompasses and integrates all customer touchpoints and senses. Heart, mind and spirit. Your physical structure—points of sale, booths and megastores—should keep pace with your online structure and vice versa. The language spoken offline should be the same as online.

On that note, we can mention sensory marketing, which enhances spaces with pleasant music and a storefront (or layout) that delights the eye, encouraging consumers to interact with the environment in an increasingly natural way.

With advances in consumer behavior insights, it’s clear that retail marketing is essential and may be what sets your brand apart from so many others and secures your place in the sun—or that famous magic number at the end of the month.

Managers need to stay alert, keep their teams prepared and not be afraid to seek help from those who know the subject, so they can take the business to a new level, avoiding a plateau or even fading into obscurity.

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