Marketing. It’s a word that can cause fear and pangs of regret, for those who haven’t had successful campaigns. Yet for retailers who get fantastic returns when they spend money on advertising and marketing, it’s music to their ears.
The terms marketing and advertising are usually used interchangeably. But in fact, advertising is just one form of marketing. Think of marketing like a city, with lots of raods cmiong in. Each one of those roads is a conduit to get people to identify with your brand, like word of mouth, instore marketing, point of sale displays, side bar advertising on your own website, writing blog posts, or content marketing. Paid advertising is just one of the roads that can get you to your destination.
If you haven’t cracked the marketing nut yet, here are my 4 Most Misunderstood facts about marketing.
- Marketing is a cost, not an investment
In your accounting software, you’ll find advertising and marketing listed as an expense. And it’s true, that you will be spending money. But that’s where the ‘expense’ mentality should end.
When you have a strategic marketing plan and a process (or sales funnel) in place, then the money that you’re spending, is actually and investment towards growth.
A growth in your customer base, and a growth in sales.
- You don’t need to follow up if you’re in retail
Many retailers feel like they have no way to follow up with a customer once they’ve left the store, or hit the back button on a web browser.
This attitude towards the follow up process, is costing you money, and curtailing your customer base growth.
In today’s connected society, there are many add-ons, plugins and retargeting options, that can allow you to stay in contact with someone who appears to be anonymous to you. Failing to invest a small amount of time to research what’s available to your website, and investing a small amount of money to capture lost sales, is like throwing money away.
Similarly, if you have a shopfront, what are you doing to capture those customers?
- There’s no point in sending out newsletters
How often do you send out a newsletter? What are your open rates?
There are two parts to gaining a customer.
Traffic and conversion.
When you have someone on your email list, you’ve got the traffic part covered.
The fact that people actually OPENED your email, is proof that they want to hear what you have to say.
However, when you fail to make any SALES from your emails, you have a conversion problem. What you’re telling the receiver is not compelling enough to make them purchase.
This does NOT mean email is dead. In fact, far from it.
I did some research, and according to Mailchimp, if you have an ecommerce site, the industry average is a 16.75% open rate, with a 2.32% click through rate. In the Retail industry, its 20.96% open rate with a 2.5% click through rate.
Compare that to Facebooks current organic reach of around 2-6%, you can see that your email list is the actually the most valuable piece of real estate.
- Your shop is not a brand
Many retailers believe they just have a shop. But in reailty, great stores have a brand.
What’s the difference? Well a shop is a place you go to buy things. There’s no loyalty, there’s no affinity.
But a brand is about the culture, the feelings and wanting to be associated with a particular store.
The aim of this episode was never to delve into all of the different marketing streams (if you’d like to do that, check out The Boutique Academy) it was to highlight the mental barriers that we can have, that curtail an effective marketing campaign.
Now that you’re aware of these barriers, you’ll be able to go back and analyse your marketing campaigns, with a fresh set of eyes, and tweak different aspects, to see what results you can get next time.
