The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide for Retail Stores
A Retail Store needs a strong digital presence, to develop good relationship with their customers. Having a strong brand helps retail businesses differentiate themselves from competitors.
Retailers often make the mistake of ignoring digital marketing. Retail companies must consider selling and marketing their products in digital marketplace. Retail must use a mix of online and offline sales and marketing strategy to attract more customers. The goal of implementing digital marketing is to increase the business revenue.
Successful Retail Stores use multiple digital marketing channels to generate revenue. Most of the retail stores use Local SEO, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, WhatsApp Marketing, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, etc. Retail Stores must incorporate digital marketing strategy into their business plan.
With online shopping gaining importance, the need for digital marketing in the Retail Sector has reached new heights. Follow the steps to successfully Implement Digital Marketing in Retail Store.
Step 1: Formulate a Digital Marketing Strategy:
Retail stores mostly follow an integrated digital marketing strategy where more than one marketing channels are used for achieving the business goals. In most cases we have use multiple marketing channels like WhatsApp marketing, Email marketing, social media Ads, etc for increasing the revenue.
Multiple campaigns are used within one marketing channel. In case of Email Marketing, we usually run campaigns like product promotion campaigns, newsletter campaigns, cart recovery campaigns, etc. Marketing campaigns are generally created for getting online sales, improve social media followings, branding Ads, etc.
The digital roadmap will generally cover Website Design and Development, SEO, Setting up Google Business Profile, WhatsApp marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing, Google Ads, Digital Marketing Analytics, etc.
STEP 2: Create a Google Business Profile:
Google My Business and Google Maps will ensure your Retail Store is found on Google Search. Google My Business is a profile made on Google that makes it easy for people to find your business and details about it, such as name, nature of business, business location, working hours, website, phone number, and your customer reviews. Monitor the comments posted by the customers and respond to the comments.
The challenge in configuring the Google business profile or Google My Business is to make your Retail store appear in the first 3 search results. Let us say you run a Retail Fashion Store in a Cochin City. When a customer searches for Fashion store in Cochin, your business profile should appear in the first 3 search results.
By updating your business information in Google, you help customers to find you and tell them the story of your business.
STEP 3: Create Images for Social Media:
Create photos & videos of the product and the Store for social media marketing. If you are into Retail fashion Store, you shall source the product photos from the manufacturers and suppliers.
If the photos cannot be sourced, then you shall have to take our own photos. Hire a photographer to take your own pictures. Ensure that you have good DSLR camera with proper lighting without shadows.
Use design tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Canva, Crello, for creating social media posts. Source the stock images from websites like Freepik, Pexels, unsplash, etc
STEP 4: Create Videos
Videos are becoming an important aspect of Retail Marketing. Retailers use the data collected from the video marketing to track the customer behaviour. Well crafted video contents can help retailers position themselves as industry leaders. Create video Ads and use the content in Social Media Marketing.
Creating a video from the scratch is painful task and is costly. There are applications which offers ready to use video templates, where you can create your video in few hours. You can customize the videos using your custom images and voice overs. Use tools like invideo, canva, vimeo, vidnami, etc to create videos from video templates.
Add the video contents to the website. The chances of showing up in the first page of Google shall increase if you have video contents in your website.
STEP 5: Create an e-commerce website
Having an e-commerce store shall improve your brand visibility in social media and other platforms.
Shopify provides web applications to start a new online store. Shopify powers more than half-a-million businesses globally. It offers fully hosted solutions, which means you don’t have to worry about installing updates, managing software, or taking backups.
You can customize the look of your Shopify website. Use the Free and Premium themes available in Shopify to customize the Fonts, Colour schemes, product appearance, etc
Web applications like Bigcommerce, Magento, Dukaan, Digital Showroom, etc offers platform for creating your online stores.
STEP 6: Social Media Management
Social media plays a major role in brand building for Retail Stores, whether the product is sold online or in-person. The key to social media management is to find the right platform, where you can connect with your customers. Facebook and Instagram are the most popular social media platforms used by businesses.
Create Business pages in Facebook and Instagram and post consistently. Use studio quality images in Social Media. Monitor your engagement metrices (Likes, Shares & Comments) constantly. Interact with the customers by asking questions.
STEP 7: Social Media Marketing (Paid Ads)
Use paid ads in Facebook and Instagram to remarket your products to current and former customers. The primary task in any social media marketing campaign is to identify the right target audience. Precisely identify your audience and device the strategies to reach them in social media. Keep optimizing your ad campaigns. Paid ads help you create real following thereby expanding your reach.
Take every opportunity to boost your social media engagement. Use your Instagram channel to showcase your products. Other great ways to leverage social media are giveaways, working with bloggers and influencers who are active in your niche. Invest your time in creating rich visual content for social media.
Use Google Ads to target those customers who are most likely to buy your product or services. Place your website in the top of the search results page through Paid Search Advertising.
STEP 8: Implement Email Marketing
Email is one of the most effective marketing tools, if your retail store has an e-commerce website. Make sure that you keep collecting email addresses on your site. Use pop-up boxes to prompt users to enter their email addresses in return for a small promotion like 15% off their first purchase.
Use email marketing application like KLAVIYO to create email sequences. KALVIYO is the leading e-commerce marketing platform for Shopify. You can send personalised emails, SMS messages, signup forms, etc using this application.
Email Marketing is heavily used for cart recovery. An abandoned cart email is sent to customers who almost made a purchase to encourage them to complete their transaction.
STEP 9: Implement WhatsApp Marketing
WhatsApp is a powerful marketing tool to connect with your Retail customers. Use WATI for sending marketing and sales promotion messages using the broadcast function.
Create a message template and get the same approved from Facebook before sending a broadcast message. You can send bulk WhatsApp messages in your local languages.
Through WATI dashboard, you can know the total number of messages sent, conversations started with customers, etc. You can track the progress of the conversations with customer. Just like you create email sequences in email marketing tools, you can create WhatsApp sequences.
STEP 10: Search Engine Optimization:
When a user enters a search query in Google, millions of listings are displayed. The challenge is to get noticed in the first page of Google. Optimize your on-page content for Search Engines. On-page content refers to product titles and descriptions, images, blogs, etc. The result of optimizing your website is tracked with Google Search Console.
Make sure that our content naturally uses language which matches your customers search intend. We shall use the language which the customers would use when they search for related products.
STEP 11: Connect with Instagram Influencers
Engage with Instagram Influencers to create brand awareness. Influencers are people who have large online audiences and can influence the purchasing behaviour of the audience.
Working with the right influencer can get your product in front of a huge number of potential customers. Ensure that the influencers following aligns with your target audience.
STEP 12: Digital Marketing Analytics
You want to know which marketing channels is giving you more revenue. The goal of every Digital Marketing Analytics is to understand the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns.
Most of the business follow an integrated digital marketing, where we have more than one marketing channels to generate revenue. The marketing channels used for generating revenue for your Retail Store is WhatsApp Marketing, e-commerce website, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, etc.
Each marketing channels shall have multiple marketing campaigns. In case of Email Marketing, we usually run campaigns like product promotion campaigns, newsletter campaigns, cart abandonment campaigns, etc.
For us to perform data analysis, we must first understand the metrices or parameters for measuring the data. Marketing metrices are values used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, etc to analyse the marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Investing in digital marketing is not a luxury anymore for Retail Store. A well crafted digital marketing strategy will improve the brand awareness and result in better Return on Investment (ROI).
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About the Author
Joshi Rabiyath
I am a Digital Marketer, currently run a Digital Marketing Agency. Please check the Digital Marketing Services offered by us. I write about Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, etc.