Lo and Behold, The Great Singapore Sale (GSS) is back again!
For retailers, this is the time of the year when we can get Shoppers to break out their plastics and do some serious retail therapy (ideally in our store).
With GSS, Shoppers have come to expect a whole lot of promotions and discounts and tend to suss out the best deals out there, before committing to a purchase.
Increasing your marketing spend during peak shopping period seems like a no-brainer, but if you do not get the following strategies right, not only are you competing with every brand out there, but at higher budget levels too.
So how can you as a retailer stand out and win big during GSS?
1. Come up with a Compelling Promotion
10%? 20%? Everyone will be throwing discounts at Shoppers, so how do you make yours stand out?
- Do a 1 Day Only Promotion on your Top Products especially if it is hardly discounted
- Go crazy with a 40% discount (or some attractive number), but combine it with a minimum spend that makes it worth your while
- Even better, create unique products that can only be bought during GSS
- Or, don’t give an upfront discount, instead give them a $50 voucher for their next purchase
These are just some ideas, but the point is you need to make your promotion stand out.
2. If Shoppers Don’t See it, They Don’t Know It [restrict]
Even if you do have a great promotion, you may lose the Shopper to a Less Compelling Promotion from a similar brand or product, simply because they don’t know about your promotion and product.
Here are just some of the ways you can tell your Target Shoppers about it.
- Use Influencers
Influencers already have a following and are experts at creating engaging content on social media. They also have good insights on their followers and how best to activate them.
As a brand, you will need to have a good understanding of who your target customers are. Based on that, identify the influencers whose content resonates with your target audience. Consumers are also more likely to trust the opinion of their peers than the brand itself, so partnering with an influencer to communicate your brand message is an ideal marketing channel.
However, it is often difficult to track and monitor results from this channel.
- Digital Marketing
With time-bound promotional campaigns like GSS, brands may have limited time to spread the word about their promotion. That’s when paid traffic e.g. Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Search or even Display Ads online can be one of the best ways to quickly get the word out about your promotion and product.
When executed properly, paid traffic can really take your business to the next level.
With paid traffic, it is important to know who your customers and who your most valuable customers are. Based on that, build up an audience set that best matches the profile of your most valuable customers. For those looking for an easy way to automate this process, check out marketing tools like SKALE that automatically learns and creates the most relevant target audience sets for your business, and even creates up customizable ads for your business in 4 Steps.
Using Paid Traffic, you can now tell your target shoppers all about your promotion within a short time, without being limited by the total number of social media followers you or an Influencer will have.
3. Make your product and ads look good
You need to make eye-catching ads that will get people excited about what you have to offer. A good ad will include the following components:
- Make it look good. All you need is a photo of your Product / Brand and you can customize how your ad looks with all these free Creative Tools.
- Strong Headline that Grabs their Attention (E.g. 70% Off This Weekend Only!). Here’s a link to 4 Copywriting Tips for writing Great Headlines
- Clear Unique Selling Point
- Concisely tell them what they are meant to do with your Ad (e.g. Click in and Redeem this Promotion Now)
- Avoid having too much text in your image
4. Use this Strategy to make them visit your store
Most advertisers and brands will agree that it is not easy to drive actual foot traffic to your store. Telling Shoppers about it (through influencers, paid digital marketing) is a good starting point but is often insufficient.
To succeed, a brand must be able to effectively create an incentive for Shoppers to find your store and convert in-store. 2 things are important
- Promotions must create a compelling reason for Shoppers to plan a trip down to your Store (even if they are already nearby) – See section above on Promotions
- Remind those who engaged but have not visited your store to do so.
Are you wondering how you could possibly remind Shoppers who are interested in the promotion but have not visited the Store? Especially since most Brands don’t have a way to identify who has visited the store and vice versa.
Here’s an example from our own experience with global sports brand, Under Armour. I first saw an ad online for a $20 off voucher from the Brand. Upon clicking into the ad, I was driven to download the Promotion Voucher, which was instantly sent to me via sms on my mobile phone. This created a more complete customer experience, with the brand engaging me on multiple channels and devices.
For the next week, I went back to my usual routine and unsurprisingly, I had forgotten all about the voucher. At the end of the 7 days, I received a personalized message from Under Armour, to invite me down to the flagship store. This was done in a highly personable (non-pushy / sales-like manner), and I found myself impressed by the various customer touchpoints from the brand that went significantly beyond the usual click on ad, and drive Shoppers to a website type of experience.
For Brands keen to rollout the above experience by integrating their digital marketing efforts with a downloadable digital voucher, check out Marketing Tool SKALE that helps you do all the above without any engineering effort (4 Steps Only). Here’s a short video contributed by SKALE:
5. Know what works, and what doesn’t work
Increasing your marketing spend during peak shopping period seems like a no-brainer, but if you do not get the following strategies right, not only are you competing with every brand out there, but at higher budget levels too.
So, how do you know what works and what doesn’t work?
Brands will need to find a way to track the source of the visitors or the Vouchers that are used in-store (e.g. Influencers or Facebook Ads)
For e.g. Retail Marketing Tool, SKALE allows Advertisers to use its “Scan” tool to scan and mark Vouchers that are used in-store as used. By scanning it, SKALE is able to immediately identify the source of the voucher (e.g. organic traffic, Facebook etc) and help advertisers better quantity the ROI from their marketing dollar.
Do take note that, SKALE’s Scan tool is only compatible with Vouchers created using SKALE’s Voucher management system though.
Still not sure if you can get all these things right?
Check out retail marketing tool, SKALE that has automated all the steps above to help retailers get their marketing strategy and process right from the onset. Remember, increasing your marketing spend because everyone else is doing it, may not be the most pragmatic way of doing things unless you are PREPARED to get the above 5 things right.
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