8 Tips to Promote Your Physical Store in Digital Space

Traditional business locations were small stores until the internet came on stream. The internet has made many businesses to shift focus from real-world addresses to online URLs. Some businesses even shifted online as a survival strategy amidst the real-time vicissitudes of physical addresses. To avoid being forced to close down because of patronage difficulties, these traditional stores selling physical products to remain afloat now need very smart marketing to promote themselves as a survival strategy. This involves alternative business promotion focus on digital space to complement the physical.

Here are tips from business experts pointing out viable ways to help physical stores stay in business when things become difficult in the physical space.

1. Optimize Your Brand for Local Searches

Physical stores hugely depend on local patronage for most of their products. These days, it has become routine for most shoppers to do local searches to source their needs online. This makes it imperative for these small business owners not only to take their businesses online but also to optimize such businesses for local searches. Since about half of all searches on Google are local, it makes smart business sense therefore for these businesses to optimize their brands for local SEO. They tend to get better patronage as a result.

2. Have a Strong Social Media Presence

Yeah, nearly everyone is now on social media for one reason or another. Taking your physical business on social media is a good thing to do. It means taking your business where your customers are. Having a strong social media presence for your store helps to easily increase patronage for the business. With a strong presence on social media, you can easily promote your products by way of SMS marketing, emails and social media interactive activities.

3. Always Remember Your Loyal Customers

Yes indeed! Repeat customers are always the best customers. Remembering to reward their loyalty is good for business. Discount coupons, thank you notes and other loyalty benefits can always be of help in your rewards program. The more a customer feels appreciated, the better the chances of repeat business from him.

4. Showcase Your Safety Policies

As our world becomes increasingly dangerous, safety has become a main consumer concern. Store layout, physical location, product types and ease of shopping now play major roles in where customers decide to shop in physical stores. It helps to highlight the safety policies of your physical store as a way of addressing customer safety concerns.

5. Use Video-Based Content Marketing

Studies have shown that video-based content marketing is hugely effective for getting leads, customers and sales. Studies also show that a huge percentage of new customers are acquired when businesses merely post marketing videos on social media. The is one very good reason physical stores need to embrace video-based content marketing strategies. By creating mobile-friendly video content that strategically differentiates your physical store business from businesses that only exist online, you can easily develop meaningful and mutually beneficial interactions with your customers.

6. Promote Your Products Online

Promoting your products online is in addition to the physical promotion of your store. The target of this promotion is mostly local customers searching online. This is because more and more people are increasingly using digital channels for shopping in their local environments. Even if initial contact is made online, a physical store remains the ideal place to view products before buying, to pick up products ordered online, for more inquiries/consultations, for product returns and or additional services as needed.
 
7. Showcase the People Behind the Store

Every customer always wants to know the people he/she is dealing with. Every business is built around trust. The real human touch and personal approaches are unique features of physical stores. They display the real human angle of doing business. Most people always crave human interaction because it allows them to know whom they are dealing with and to build trust fairly quickly. This is the reason why physical stores with a long history of family tradition of doing good business tend to do better than others.

8. Leverage Multi-Channel Communications

The internet makes this possible with very huge advantages. When physical stores engage customers via a multi-channel personalization approach, they tend to influence customer behavior better. When these stores crave expansion into digital commerce, they can use a mix of multi-channels to get good results. These are channels like personalized social media, marketing videos, emails and website communications that help to create seamless interactions with customers and potential customers.

5 Easy and Creative Marketing Campaign Strategies

Taking a creative approach to your marketing campaigns is one great way to increase your online presence and improve traffic to your website. Even if it involves spending a little money on creative approaches to your digital marketing campaigns, getting good traffic from such efforts somehow enhances your business revenue. Once in a while, a good marketer needs to spruce up the marketing content of his business. If this need arises, the first thing to do is to work on your marketing campaign strategies in a creative way.



You may choose to try these here 5 creative marketing campaign strategies if you want to give your business some boost.

1. Routinely Create Fresh and Engaging Content

In online marketing, content is always king. The more and better the content you produce to enhance your marketing efforts, the better for your business. Online audiences respond better to engaging and current content which provides them real value. This is exactly where blog posts come in very handy. Your blog may be the first place customers hit when they have questions about products or solutions like the ones you provide. If your blog posts are engaging, relevant to your product, and remain up-to-date, they tend to encourage more visitors who are initially attracted through a search query to explore your website further. Engaging readers longer on your website content can lead to conversion and eventual customer. A creative content marketing strategy results in more engagement from your content readers. This leads to more and better conversions, leads and sales.

2. Use Video Marketing

What video marketing entails is to creatively use videos to promote and market your products. Videos tend to have a unique way of helping to increase engagement on your website particularly when they are used to demonstrate the use of products or to suggest uses. They practically tell a convincing story which can help your brand to resonate effectively with its target audience. Thus, videos can become very powerful outreach tools when they are produced in a conversational, measurable and actionable way especially personalized to the consumer.

3. Generously Use Enticing Giveaways

Generally, most people love the prospect of getting something for nothing no matter how token the object is. Giving something related to your brand away as a token gift is one creative way to market a brand or to attract customers. This is why many businesses use branded products like ballpoint pens, calendars, branded mugs, tea sets, stress balls, customized dress socks and neck ties, face towels, handkerchiefs, key holders, notepads etc etc, during such events as product launches, trade shows and product promos.

4. Design and Use Graphics for Branding

Images and graphics if well designed and deployed always have a very unique ability to arrest customer attention. They help to provide a seamless website experience for your website visitors. That somehow enhances the overall customer satisfaction for those website visitors. Images/graphics convey to your target audience at a quick glance what your business is all about and represent a brand that has something of value to offer them. When creatively used, images/graphics eloquently tell the story of your brand to visitors. The reason they’re very effective marketing tools. With good images/graphics on display, a visitor’s experience on your website actually starts even before they click to access the homepage. Therefore, for your online digital marketing strategies to actually work to effectively inspire visitors to click through to your website, the graphic design used in your ads must prioritize creative marketing strategies that match the target customers in terms of culture, lifestyle, and messaging. That enhances their real effectiveness.

5. Promote on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media for one reason or another. When used creatively, the popularity of social media can be deployed to provide a huge advantage for your promotional efforts.  Social media is an excellent platform to showcase authenticity in a very graphic way. With the ease to share updates of content and photographs regularly, social media manages to keep the attention and engagement of your reading audience for prolonged periods. It easily promotes customer interaction by allowing customer comments on your posts and photographs. This tends to amplify messaging to reach new markets which are likely to share important characteristics with your initial contacts. By responding to these comments, the brand not only further fuels sharing but also makes contacts feel valued. That is good for trust building, leads and conversions. If social media is used creatively, it allows for improved market performance without having the audience feeling as if they’re being sold an item or service.