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Building A Strong And Successful Retail Brand Image

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Brand|Building A Strong And Successful Retail Brand ImageWhen it comes to attracting customers to your retail business, again and again, there are several areas that you could focus on to make a real difference. Having good levels of a varied choice of popular products will help you to a broad extent. However, having a recognizable and memorable brand will make sure that your company sticks in the mind of your customers and will help them to remember and choose you in the future.

A Visually Recognizable Store

A recognizable storefront help to create a lasting impression in the memories of your customers. This means having a bold logo that represents what your brand is all about. While you don’t need to have anything literal in your logo that shouts about the type of products you sell, if you’re a new company or your name gives no indication of the type of products you sell, this may be a helpful option.

Hire a graphic designer to create a logo and signage for the front of your store. Having well-designed branding will make a big a big difference when it comes to creating a lasting and professional impression.

But branding should not just be on the front of your store, you need to remind your customers where they are when they are inside your store. Branded signage can be used around till points, shelve-edge graphics, branded point-of-sale, posters, and if possible, on your product packaging. Using branded carrier-bags, till receipts, and promotional material will also help.

A Team That Meets Your Brand Standards

Branding is not just about your logos, store fit, and promotional material though. Your team should also represent your brand in both their appearance and how they approach your customers.

Having a distinctive image for your team is crucial as it will make your team identifiable. Whether you want your staff to wear a uniform is up to you, however, if you choose to allow your team to wear their own items of clothing then you should set some standards to ensure that they meet your brand expectations. Consider getting custom lanyards to let your customers know who is a team member.

Setting out your customer service expectations is crucial. This means working out how you want your customers to view the service experience. Instilling your ethos in everything that you do is important. If your brand wants to stand for value, quality, great service, or its ethical stance, then you need to pick the message that you want to put across in your branding.

Social Media

Your business needs to think about how the brand is represented on social media. Having a presence on the major social media sites is crucial if you want your business to thrive. When you use these sites, you should make sure that you are maintaining a standard of communication that is in keeping with the message that you want to put across to your customers. This will mean deciding the type of tone that you want to communicate using, as well as the types of posts and interactions that you will be providing.

5 Ways Retailers Can Increase Sales

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Retail Sales|5 Ways Retailers Can Increase SalesIf your business has experienced a dip in sales, the first thing you must do is research why this might be. Even if it is seasonal, it’s a good idea to get a sense of what can be done to give yourself a boost to make up for the temporary loss. Researching your company’s weak spots is incredibly useful not only for sluggish sales but also to ensure your company’s longevity in the future.

Ask for feedback

There’s nothing more irritating than experiencing a dip in sales, particularly if you’re not entirely certain as to why. One of the biggest focuses any business should have is their engagement with their customers. Good customer engagement and service will leave visitors feeling as if they were listened to and valued, rather than completely undervalued. Asking your visitors and customers for feedback might illuminate some problems with your branding or sales technique you didn’t realize you had.

Develop a marketing strategy

At the center of any business’s sales strategy should be their marketing strategy: this will affect how your business is perceived and how far it reaches among online and real-life audiences. While it’s always good to rely on customer engagement and service to ensure good word-of-mouth, marketing ensures that your reputation spreads much further. Using specialized auto sales events can not only help with your campaign but also hold unique events to promote your business, generating sales through networking and direct communication.

Add discounts and freebies

If you have a solid customer base and are either looking to retain their loyalty or bring in a new swathe of visitors, offering unique discounts can help drive this. It’s said that offering complimentary services can help drive sales and attracts brand new clients to your business.

Showcase your benefits

What can people truly gain by using your service instead of anyone else’s? It’s been found that customers are more drawn to specific benefits rather than actual product features. As part of your new marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to focus on this, rather than what each product specifically features. Driving this message across your social media platforms and in person should help promote how you, as a company, can personally benefit visitors.

Tactical pricing

How you price your products should involve a little research. If your business has nearby competitors, you may want to offer a price that is a little more affordable to passing customers. Providing the same service that is much cheaper will encourage people to spend their money with you, rather than a pricier competitor. Similarly, however, if you are undervaluing a product, increasing the cost of it may help to boost your revenue without a solid push on sales.

In order to drive sales, you will first need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. You’ll want to reassess how your company appeals to the everyday person and what can be improved. At the center of this should be a robust marketing and sales strategy.

How To Attract Customers And Boost Retail Sales

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Running a business is never easy, but ensuring you make a profit each month is something that business owners can easily lose sleep over. After all, having a business is all about making money, so if you’re in a sales slump and profits are down, your stress levels are definitely going to begin to rise. Even if you haven’t experienced a slump in sales yet, you likely will one day, and probably sooner rather than later, so it is important that you are prepared for when this happens. Luckily, there are many options out there for attracting new customers and boosting sales, so keep reading for some great tips and ideas.

1. Create A Loyalty Programme

Any type of customer is a good type of customer, but, ideally, you want customers that are loyal to you and keep coming back again and again. Obviously, this ensures that you continue to make a profit from the individual customer, which is great, but a loyal customer will also recommend you to family and friends, which means that your business will continue to make bigger profits, and so will continue to grow. In order to gain this loyalty, lots of businesses use loyalty programmes like punch cards to keep customers coming back. Whether it’s a discount or free product, your customer will want the reward that they receive when they fill their punch card, so will keep coming back again and again.

2. Hand Out Coupons

No one ever wants to pay full price for something, so make it so that your customers don’t have to. When you’re trying to attract new customers, hand out coupons to those that look most likely to visit your store. This is a brilliant way to let people know that your business exists, and will also make it that much more probable that you’ll receive a few extra customers looking for a bargain. You could also print a coupon in your local newspaper, or post some through letterboxes near your business. Another great idea that lots of businesses use is sending their customers coupons for their birthday.

3. Clean Up Your Act

You could have the most world-changing product on the face of the earth, but if your store looks uninviting, then no one is going to come in and have a look. To make it look a little better, get outside and clean up any rubbish. You could even look at the earthmoving information here and consider hiring a road sweeper. Also, make sure that all of the windows are sparkling, the paint isn’t chipped or flaky, and you have a great display in the window. The inside of your store should also look clean and tidy, as well as well-lit and easy to navigate.

4. Compete With Competitors

Unfortunately, business is a dog eat dog world, and you will need to be better than and earn more than all of your competitors if you want to continue to grow and be successful for the foreseeable future. Because of this, it’s important to do all you can to neutralise any sort of promotion that your competitors pull out the bag. To do this, when your competitors announce a sale, you should announce one too, just with bigger reductions (only if you can afford it!). This makes it much more likely that your customers will visit your store and spend money, than your competitors.

5. Use Social Media

We are living in a time that is dominated by technology, so, if you aren’t using social media to promote your business, you are seriously missing out. You can use your social media accounts to announce new products, sales, giveaways, and loyalty programmes like the one mentioned above much quicker than you would do any other way. Just be sure that your content is steady, rather than having quiet periods and then announcing a sale, otherwise, your customers will know that you’re only online because you need some extra cash. You can also use your social media to connect with your customers, deal with their queries, and get any feedback they have to offer to improve your service and products.

6. Invest In Advertisement

Any business owner that believes that advertising and marketing are a waste of money isn’t going to be business owners for very long. If you are not obtaining as much as you usually do, and are considering reducing the amount of money you are putting into marketing and advertisement, just stop. Now is the tie that you should be investing more money in advertising, not making cutbacks. Of course, you might not have the cash available to be making television advertisements or anything else that expensive, but newspaper and radio ads, and even billboards can be fairly cost-effective and can bring in a lot of customers.

7. Hold An Event

If you want to boost your sales in a huge way, then a great way to do this is to host some sort of event. You could partner with a local charity and offer a discount for anyone that donates to the worthy cause. This will show that your business has good morals and that you are incredibly community minded, which should increase your sales for long after the event has ended. Depending on what you sell, you could hand out free samples in the days leading up to your event, to generate interest with the locals, and could even send a press release to the media to attract those from further afield.  Of course, you should also use your social media as much as you can during this time, as a means of free advertisement.

A drop in sales is every business owner’s worst nightmare, but it is one that you can wake up from if you take action. The tips above are only some of the great ideas that you could use to boost your sales, so don’t despair if none of them works for you. Every business is different, so you just need to figure out what is right for yours.