The retail industry is getting more competitive by the day, and even though the online retail space has been booming during the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no denying that the offline retail sector is reaching new heights in the post-COVID-19 world. Now that retailers are opening their doors to the public again and that shoppers are once more coming in en masse, business leaders in the sector need to rethink their processes and improve their promotional strategies in order to stay ahead of the competition.
This can encompass many things, but today, we are going to focus on the important task of improving the customer’s experience and journey by making standout product displays. We’re also going to delve deeper into the shopper’s psychology to achieve this, and take a look at an important digital marketing tactic that can boost your offline efforts.
Let’s put all of this into perspective and talk about the best ways you can make your products stand out, sell faster, and how you can encourage repeat business.
Create a narrative and an immersive display
When people are shopping online, they’re often swayed by those online stores that have the most compelling brand narrative, the best product messaging and stories, and the most immersive visual presentation. So why should we think that they expect to get anything less than that when they’re shopping at a brick-and-mortar retail store? They don’t, and in fact, because they have gone through the trouble of actually visiting your store in person, the stakes are even higher.
The modern customer is very picky about the store they visit, and if your product displays don’t somehow pop or stand out, they’ll have no problem hopping over to the nearest competitor. That’s why your displays need to tell a story and create an immersive environment.
Depending on the type of products you sell, you should cater to the unique sensibilities of the audience. For example, fitness aficionados want to see your clothing and fitness gear displayed in a familiar environment, like a gym. Outdoor enthusiasts would, on the other hand, much more prefer to see your products up against a nature backdrop.
Use your products to create an immersive set, and always follow up the display with some motivational messaging.
Let people touch and try your products
Not everything can be tried in store, but that’s one of the main advantages that retail stores have against their Ecommerce counterparts. One of the main reasons why people go to brick-and-mortar stores is to see, feel, and try out the products before buying, so it’s important to give them that opportunity.
Regardless of what you’re selling, you can always offer samples, but you can also take things further by creating an interactive product display. Encourage people to go up to the display and take the products into their hands, try them out, and tell you what they think. Be there to assist them as they’re trying the products, and offer additional choices along the way.
Use SEO to reduce customer effort
Without a doubt, one of the top ways to motivate people to buy more and keep coming back to your retail store is to minimize customer effort as much as possible. For that, you can optimize the store’s floor plan, and do several other things to streamline the shopping process. However, you would be wasting valuable sales opportunities if you didn’t complement those efforts with search engine optimization.
A great example of how this works comes from Australia, which is a competitive retail market where leaders need to use digital strategies to ensure offline success. Retail managers will work closely with a Sydney SEO agency to optimize the store’s visibility online, but most importantly, the visibility of their amazing products. By uploading quality images to the web, and optimizing them for Google, stores can ensure brand consistency online and offline, which is extremely important to the modern customer.
Because the customer will make sure to research you online before coming to your store, it’s important that you give them an amazing product display during that initial contact, and then follow it up with the same display offline. This way, good SEO practices can help you bring quality customers to your physical store and inspire them to buy.
