Key times of year, like Christmas, Summer, or even “Back to School”, present retailers with opportunities to make special promotional offers to draw in more customers and increase sales.
Being agile enough to adapt to seasonal demand and making special offers to your target audience demonstrates that you understand their needs and interests and helps to strengthen your brand’s reputation.
But there are several things you should consider before launching one of these campaigns:
- Prepare in advance – By thinking ahead about the key events throughout the year that will be most relevant to your target audience, you allow yourself plenty of time to plan great offers, and also create the necessary marketing material required to promote them.
- Be flexible – While you should try to plan for the major events in advance, you also want to be nimble and flexible enough to adapt and make special offers related to current affairs, or popular culture that might resonate with your audience. This is particularly relevant for social media campaigns. Having a stock of marketing assets that you can edit and reuse is a great way to do this.
- Set SMART objectives – When planning short term marketing strategies it is important that you set objectives that you can use to measure how successful the campaign was. This allows you to analyse your performance afterwards, so that you can build on the things that worked, and change the things that didn’t.
- Innovative ideas – At many of these key times of year, competition is fierce for your customer’s attention. It is therefore vitally important that you think about innovative ways to make your business stand out from the crowd. We like to think of AsOne as an Ideas agency, and recognise how much impact a great marketing idea can have on your business.
- Brand Identity – Ultimately, the promotional activity that you choose must be in keeping with your brand. By planning a calendar of events in advance you won’t be forced into rash decisions, and a stock of media assets also helps to ensure consistency of your message.
Following the steps outlined above will help to ensure that you capitalise on these opportunities, without compromising the long term message of your brand.
The above outlines retail strategies which should also work in unison with your existing retail marketing strategy. If you are running a Google Search campaign, modifying your text ads to reflect a discount or price change could aid in conversions. If you are isolating key products on social media, ensure that products which have a decent sell through rate while full price are included in the rotation to clear stock at a faster rate. Your retail strategy is directly linked to your retail marketing strategies as the end result is clear product as quickly as possible while at the highest of margins.
As an agency with extensive experience delivering effective marketing strategies both online and offline, AsOne can be your trusted partner to help you prepare in advance to make the most of these busy periods.
We work with companies to build holistic digital marketing strategies, and we ensure that the big picture messages align with the tactical marketing activities that you undertake throughout the year.
If you’d like to have a conversation about how this might apply to your business, don’t hesitate to contact us.
