Consumers Have More Choice Than Ever
In fact, in a recent 2016 study by E2Open, "Forecasting Benchmark Study", it was revealed that the number of choices in most product categories increased by 31% since 2010!
"Eppur si muove", or "And Yet It Moves", reportedly uttered by Galileo Galilei, might well apply to today's Retailers, who, when confronted with consumers who are more empowered than ever, continue to insist on a Retail Marketing Strategy based on an environment long since past.
Retail Marketing Strategies
Discover 6 secrets to integrating Inbound Marketing to your Retail Marketing Strategy to lower the cost of customer acquisition and increase sales and profit.
As the World Turns, the Retail Landscape Changes
Facing Up to the Retail Marketing Challenges
Whether you run a single retail store or a major retail business with thousands of retail stores, if you're one of today's retailers, whether in the relatively healthy market of the U.S. or the depressed markets of Southern Europe, where, for example, retail sales have declined month-in and month-out for more than 3 years, you're are confronted with one fundamental question that seemingly defies an answer: Are consumers not buying or just not buying from them?
Consumers Are Apparently Very Hard to Please
In the same E2Open study, which was based on annual consumer goods sales of over $250 billion dollars by 17 multi-national companies involving 1 million SKUs (Stock Keeping Units), it was revealed that only one out of 1000 items introduced into the supply chain actually becomes a top seller, while the rest are either discontinued or fall to the bottom of the sales charts.
If you’re a retailer, whether a specialty brand type retailer or a big box retailer who specializes in “Stack-em Deep and Sell-em Cheap”, you know the consumer is out there, but you really, really need to know how to get them ‘in here’.
Use Inbound Marketing to Reach Target Customers
That's why it's time you learned a few Inbound Marketing Secrets I am going to share with you today that I've learned running a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing Agency.
Customer Loyalty is Your Key to Success
In the past, it was ok to have a fairly distant relationship with your customer.
No more!
Some retailers have a lot of data about their customers, for example, one of the leading retailers in Spain reportedly has more than 6,500,000 customer records, (while Spain has a population of +_45,000,000), and is able to provide targeted offerings to each and everyone contact in that database, especially via social media. However, it, too, has suffered from a constant loss of sales, either due to a drop in demand (raising the question of whether they're just not buying) or from online competitors (or just not buying from them).
The question, though, is how to integrate Inbound Marketing Concepts with your Retail Strategy.
It helps to review the three primary tasks of your inbound marketing system:
The Three Pillars of Inbound Marketing
- Get Found
- Convert
- Analyze
Let’s explore how each of these has to be modified to ensure your Retail Marketing Strategy is fully integrated with the concept of Inbound Marketing:
- Retailers, of course, get found by consumers going to their store. But in the Inbound World, consumers are researching products online, and then either buying them online or going to a retail outlet to buy them.
Google reports that they process approximately 3,500,000,000 (3.5 Billion) searches a day.
For the retailer, this ultimately means investing in SEO, primarily via the use of keywords related to the products in the store, such as a Washer and Dryer or some other sort of consumable. A typical Big Box retailer may have 35,000 to 40,000 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) and will need to leverage all available mechanisms to create valuable content for consumers to find and consume.
- Consumers also are using social media to research products and services prior to purchasing. As in the bricks’n’mortar world, consumers rely heavily on what others have to say about a product.
Products without reviews on Amazon have virtually zero chance of garnering a sale.
Real, actionable information based on objective measurement in these channels is still a largely unexplored avenue though there is an abundance of data available, using systems like SAP for Retail Industry solutions. Think 'Big Data' and the Internet of Things or IoT.
- Consumers actually do read emails, otherwise, why would anybody bother to generate the 838 billion of them generated annually (Forrester)?
The goal of a retailer, within the context of Inbound Marketing, is to create short, useful emails, which either provide additional offers or useful How-To information for the consumer or to provide entertainment.
For instance, pet owners might greatly appreciate annual reminders of their pet's required medical checks along with a discount coupon. However, the dog may not like to go to the vet (they’re smarter than the look).
Somehow, they always know when you're taking them to the vet.
- How-to videos can also be highly useful to the consumer.
Notice I did not say 'to the retailer'. The point with any of the content suggestions here is how to be useful to the consumer, who makes the most important decision in the world-to buy.
Videos don’t have to be a Hollywood affair to be effective. In fact, there are more than enough studies out there that show short, simple, authentic How To videos are as effective as highly polished finished affairs.
However, Retailers may want to work with their suppliers to see if they can leverage work done by the brands to provide the appropriate content, as long as you can tie it back to your original keyword research and make it useful and evergreen.
Keep in mind, video SEO requires much more than just posting a video on YouTube. From a Google perspective a YouTube video on your website is actually better for YouTube than your own SERP results. For this reason, we recommend you use Wistia, a video hosting platform that helps your own site benefit from your video.
- Lower cost of customer acquisition.
With the improvement in the ability of the CMO to measure and improve the cost of customer acquisition, and the widespread deployment ERP systems, such as SAP IS Retail, which allow you to create a tremendously powerful datawarehouse, the CMO can now do more than simply create pivot tables.
He can bring in data from the Inbound Marketing platform directly into the datawarehouse and do analysis in real-time of what is working and what is not.
With an Inbound Marketing platform such as Hubspot, you can literally attribute the dollar value to every click on every channel.
- Improve Inventory Accuracy and Campaign Integration.
For many retailers, their pre-online inventory strategy was based on "knowing Less".
Translated, this meant they bought an assortment pack, of say short sleeve shirts, and let the manufacturer decide what the mix should be with regards to size and color and quantity.
E-Commerce, of course, depends on absolutely accurate inventory information in order to be able to tell a customer whether a product is available and when they can expect it. So if you are currently at 98% inventory accuracy, across ALL of your supply chain, not just on the store floor, you are only average!
Your customers are expecting Amazon class customer service from order-to-delivery to post purchase feedback. They are expecting their in store experience, which cost them money to consume, to be superior to what they could get by just going online and ordering it.
For example, many products and services require a sales associate to have very in-depth product knowledge. The customer experience can be dramatically affected by slow in store service, inattentive sales people unable to provide quick tips to consumers in the moment and many other factors.
Many Retail Strategies to Be Mastered
There are, of course, many, many other techniques and methods that a retailer must master and follow to compete effectively in this new Inbound World. You might want to download our checklist, "Integrate Inbound Marketing with Retail Strategy" which covers all the relevant subjects you will need to address in order to increase sales, improve profit margins and reduce customer acquisition cost using Inbound Marketing.
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Discover How To Integrate Inbound Marketing With Your Retail Strategy
