All marketing activities should start with a brand model, marketing plan and marketing budget. These are all critical factors in achieving retail marketing success. To gauge success you need to track marketing results. This is where retailing software and technology can help.

Key Ingredients

A brand model is a guide for marketers to use. It holds the themes, messages and images you portray at every chance to your market. It also ensures these messages are consistent. I suggest you use Google for some tips on this or a sample brand model can be downloaded from our website. You most likely done most of the work in the past and can easily pull together a useful model.

Your marketing plan should tell you how often you will take your message to the market. It tells you when to do it and the target of your marketing. For example you may want to target members, lost customers or new customers.The marketing plan should also identify what is the marketing purpose. A purpose will help you send the right message and to place the content in the right marketing channel. It could for example be a branding exercise or it may have a ‘call to action” to promote a new season product. You can use excel for your plan as it provides a simple and manageable document.

Finally, a marketing budget will help keep your spending on track. It will compel you to get a better bang for your buck because marketing can be expensive. But don’t forget marketing can also be cheap and effective through your website, in-store communication, email and social media activities.

Through effective marketing you would like to improve on:

  • new customer numbers,
  • retention of previous customers,
  • an increase in the wallet capture per customer,
  • and stock turnover.

All so your business can increase sales and margins. And you would like to achieve this while minimizing overall marketing expenditure.

In our opinion the only way you can achieve a good outcome is with the data provided by your retail management software.

Technology

When considering software technology and marketing you need to think about 3 key areas: customers, promotions and tracking.

In retailing you need to understand and track your current clients through your software. You need to understand who they are, what they are buying, why are they buying from you and how often are they returning to shop. After all you are there to add value to these clients.

With this information you can create marketing campaigns with a purpose. For instance, getting your customers to buy other items from you or encouraging lost customers to come back are good reasons. You can also look at campaigns to attract new customers who fit your ideal target market. Whether your marketing is instore or external it should have a purpose.

Promotions support your marketing campaign. It is the detail of the offer. Good software supports you in offering discounts, product bundles or multi buy offers. They allow you to target these offers to members, specific customer groups, voucher holders or new customers. Many of our clients use it as a good opportunity to sell slow moving stock or increase checkout margin per customer. Any combination that you imagine really.

Success

There are a myriad of marketing campaigns you can undertake for your business. If not done right they can cause some financial pain and give a wack to you confidence. You will get some wrong but a careful approach should see you benefit over the long run. The key in many ways is the tracking of a campaigns performance so you can do the fine tuning necessary to improve next time and again you will need software to do this.

For every campaign what was the effect on foot traffic, sales and quantity sold. Were sales achieved through the right market i.e. your members club. If it was a “call to action” attracting new customers did it achieve the desired results. Did you achieve a good return on investment? How did it compare to previous campaigns or industry benchmarks. Many retailers don’t put enough effort into this final and critical stage.

A cost effective way of capturing the success of marketing campaigns is with the use of  business intelligence software. This powerful software allows you to capture all your data and synthesis it down for ease of consideration. It effectively removes the need for the more cumbersome reports based or excel based analysis.

Univex Retail Management Software

Our retail management software can provide all the functionality you require to support great marketing ideas. Furthermore if it doesn’t exist we are ready and willing to build it. Recently we have enhanced our reporting with powerful business intelligence software. BI software can provide real time results on your marketing efforts. Call us to discuss.