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Store Marketing Ideas

by Jonathan Roe

Overview

Unless you have a high visibility location with a lot of traffic passing by every day, it is imperative to get the word out about your store. Creating and implementing an effective marketing strategy can help you get the customers your store needs. This strategy can include both traditional and non-traditional methods and is only limited by your imagination.
Word of Mouth

Every marketing guide touts the benefits of word of mouth as the best type of marketing out there. It's cheap and it's effective because a relationship already exists between the person suggesting your store and the potential customer. The only problem is that for most businesses, it takes a long time for word-of-mouth marketing to generate any meaningful sales. Let's be honest. Few people are going to rave about a wholesale copper plumbing supplier or a carpet store. Providing good service along with competitive prices helps, but to jump-start the process, consider offering discounts or commissions to anyone who refers business to your store.

Promotions

To get someone to come into your store, you have to provide them with a compelling reason. Offer limited-time promotions, discounts, and coupons to get people to stop putting off a trip and come in now. Coupons and promotions can take any form. You can do typical things like reduce prices or offer "buy one get one free" promotions---or you could get creative. If, for instance, you're a tire dealer, offer a free car wash with every new set of tires a person buys. Just make sure you're not doing promotions so often that you cheapen your brand. If you do, people might not buy unless it's on sale.
Online Pay-per-click Ads

You might not think online pay-per-click advertising applies to your local store, but I guarantee that it does. Most pay-per-click programs allow you to only advertise to people searching from a specified geographic area. Selecting the geographic area you are located in greatly enhances the value of each click. Instead of getting someone who is searching for "car dealers" and is located in Shanghai, you can restrict it to people who are located only in your city. The key to making pay-per-click work is to build a web page that is narrowly focused on what the person searched for---and provides some sort of promotion that causes the person to come into your store.
Billboards

Billboards are a great way to advertise to local residents. Who hasn't been stuck in traffic or going along a road and read a billboard? Billboards help establish brand and awareness about your store, but they do not lend themselves to overly complex messages. Use billboards to grab people's attention, but make sure you have contact info either on the web or in a phone book---so they can get in touch with you for your store's location.
Viral Marketing

Viral marketing can generate a lot of free publicity, but it's much more difficult to pull off. Since you are relying on people's reactions and the media's willingness to cover your stunt, the public's perception is largely out of your hands. One viral marketing effort that generated a ton of attention from the media was Cartoon Network's Adult Swim promotion in the Boston area in January 2007. They received tons of air time from the media, but ultimately had to pay several million dollars in damages because their stunt was mistaken for a terrorist attack, which shut down much of Boston. The bottom line is that stunts are a potentially cheap way to skyrocket a business, but if you're not careful, they can do serious damage.