It is no secret that supermarkets have long been pouring large quantities of money into marketing their businesses in the hopes of increasing their customer expenditure. By taking into account customer and social behaviors, you can build a successful supermarket marketing plan that will increase your sales and boost your profits. Not only that, but there are new methods and technologies to create these promotions that are not widely known. Using high productivity marketing applications, promotional campaigns that wouldn’t have been realistic now make sense as a sustainable way of building a retail business.
In this article, we’ve decided to curate our top 12 simple yet effective supermarket marketing strategies to help you come up with some of the most creative ways possible to attract your customers – and to identify the most efficient marketing technology to ensure that they can be implemented easily.
Our Top Approaches for Supermarket Marketing
Personalized In-Store Advertisements & Point of Sale
Using in-store supermarket advertisements and announcements, you can inform your customers of any promotional offers in the specific areas of the store that they need to find things.
You should always advertise with your branding; it should match your general store’s color palette and typography so that your customers can begin to create strong and positive associations with your brand.High-impact marketing showing the current offers at a large size – either digitally or in printed form – can have a big impact on consumers. Multi pack offers, discounts and 3 for the price of 2 offers entice users to spend more. The question is how do you achieve this impact in a sustainable way? It starts with strong brand design using the elements of design that create impact – typography, color and images. By having your agency or graphic designer create templates for these elements, you can easily populate those templates with your promoted items.Here are some ideas for point of sale items; Large hanging signs over aisles and for end of aisle campaignsDigital signs which are displayed on screens‘Shelf Talkers’ which catch the shopper’s attention as they pass byPricing cards which emphasise the product and the offer.
High Speed Design without using an agency or a designer
Have you been spending a considerable amount of money on designers and agencies for your business to get your key marketing messages across? Are your emails full of over and back conversations with your designer, with every price update? Of course high impact design is a specialized creative skill that requires experience and specific skills. However, once your designer or agency has designed templates once in Adobe InDesign, it’s possible to use that design continuously for your campaigns without being a designer or having the skills to use complex Adobe applications. Using Tweak, you can create hundreds of point of sale elements in minutes by connecting your Adobe brand templates with your image library and offer promotion (in excel format). You can continue to create point of sale material using admin and checkout team members very quickly at a much reduced cost. Learn more
Seasonal Campaigns
Supermarket owners might be under the impression that seasonal campaigns can only happen when moving from fall into winter. Well – you no longer have to wait between seasons for Halloween, Christmas, and Thanksgiving to come around for your supermarket to cash in.
Creating marketing campaigns around Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s and Father’s Day can help you earn year-round, with much smaller interim periods between seasonal days.
Unfortunately, people tend to see larger supermarket chains with often negative connotations. While this is not always true, you might still need to work hard to change your clients’ opinions. Focusing on your country and county’s national holidays can help you gain a positive reputation with your customer as less of large corporations' standoff-ish personality.
For example, as an Irish supermarket chain, you can equally focus on marketing your products around St. Patrick’s Day and more regional events such as a National or local sporting event.
Print & Digital PromotionConsumers are very keen to ensure they get the best value for money and that they’re aware of any promotions that are offered. You’ve got to reach those customers in the channels they use, so you’ll need to create campaigns showcasing those offers where your users are browsing. Here’s a channel by channel strategy for creating those promotions.Weekly Circulars & FlyersIt’s really important to have your agency or designer create impactful designs with templates for various page formats including front covers, single and multiple product pages with a mixture of ‘hero’ products and products with a lower profile. The designers need to take care to create certain versions which are optimized for various shapes of products – for example you may need to have a version of a template which features wine and spirits – those image boxes need to be vertical in shape. Also consider some templates for odd shapes like toothpaste, aluminium foil etc. It's a smart strategy to create templates in single pages with the appropriate amount of content boxes. Within Tweak, you can then combine a variety of template pages to optimize the use of space for your promoted products.
Newspaper & Magazine Ads
If you’ve already created circulars and flyers, you can repurpose some of those designs into ads of various sizes. Try using odd shaped ads where the editorial of the newspaper or magazine flows around the ads. This way, you’re buying less space but creating a novel visual presentation for readers. Experiment with single product ads too, using them across consecutive pages (or right hand pages, which tend to perform better than left hand ones).
Social Media Campaigns & Online Ads
Attractive social media ads can perform really well if they are presented in an attractive format. By designing templates not only for the platforms, but for various shapes of products and different product configurations, you can experiment with multiple types of ads to measure what’s most effective for your audience. Design templates for the various platforms in the correct sizes for the platforms and make versions that are suited for various shapes of products – wide, tall, very wide, very tall and square. Consider the day and time of day for the audiences – young Mums may be online at very different times to those with grown up families and tailor your offers accordingly.
Email & WhatsApp Flipbooks
More supermarkets are now offering online purchasing options which offer really interesting options for a completely digital marketing option. Customers who have signed up to receive marketing collateral can receive digital Flipbooks or flyers targeted offers based on their demographic and/or previous purchases. By creating offers based on target customer segments/gender/age, digital campaigns can easily be created to create custom offerings for these different customer types. What’s even more impactful is that the customer can flip through the digital pages and click on a product which brings them to the buy button on the product page.
Advertise Multi-Use Products
Often supermarkets will make the majority of their revenue from existing customers, who already know the shop's quality and the brands they offer. Because of this, the majority of new sales and increase in sales will come from convincing existing customers to spend more – rather than attracting new customers.
If you advertise a product as having more than one purpose, you will give people an extra incentive to buy. This can be as simple as advertising carrots as a great dinner side and as a snack when sliced to have with hummus.
Host Cooking and Educational Classes
Every locality has a chef personality or someone with a cookbook that they need to promote. Why not have them host a cooking class where they use your supermarket’s ingredients in their recipes?
Afterward, if they post about it on social media – all the better!
If that doesn’t seem achievable, another option is to create videos in the creative style of Tasty, showing delicious but straightforward recipes showcasing your own produce.
With videos that only need to be a few seconds long, you can make a remarkable difference to your business and the traffic your other posts will receive.
The classes you host don’t always have to be cooking. Instead, you can have nutritional classes or classes about shopping on a budget – all of which are topical and popular.
Promotional Prices
There’s no denying that everyone loves a good discount. Even though it’s far from subtle. One of the best marketing techniques for supermarkets is to offer promotional discounts when you can. If your supermarket offers discounts for a limited time only, people will likely buy in bulk.
With promotional pricing, you can also create loyalty coupons and loyalty cards to draw customers back to your store, people base where they do their grocery shopping on where they can receive value.
Better yet: digitize your coupons and loyalty cards as most shoppers have their smartphones in their hands as they shop!
Work with Brands
It’s likely that your supermarket, like most nowadays, will have a card where your customers can gain points in exchange for deals and discounts. Why not make some of those deals with products from fashionable brands?
Finding a brand that designs beautiful kitchen utensils or plates can really entice your customers to return to your store for the smallest things, which on a mass scale counts a lot.
Try where possible to use local brands. This will gain you positive feedback within your local community that is most certainly worth fostering.
Free Samples
How often have you walked into a supermarket and found that there was a small stall offering free samples around a particular aisle? If you sacrifice a small amount of produce in the name of free samples, you will inspire people to invest in that product.
After all, there is very little that shoppers love more than free food – especially during their weekly shopping. Improve the experience of those you are wandering your store, and you can make it easier for your brand to win over regular shoppers.
Loyalty is the bread and butter of the supermarket business—showcase items with complementary ones. Offer a taste of guacamole with some new tortilla chips, and then you have double the advertisement!
Social Media Campaigns
It’s no secret that the world is social media crazy, and as a result, businesses have to be. Social media campaigns have been a whole new revenue source for companies in the past few years, and there is no reason supermarkets cannot have a Facebook page or Instagram and Twitter account.
Supermarkets can market their produce exceptionally well on social media platforms. Having an image-based Instagram account can be hugely beneficial. Showcase all of the different ways in which your business interacts with the community.
You can also take advantage of national and international food days, such as National Doughnut Day, and be creative with hashtags and images.
If you feel creative, you can develop a newsletter that can entice readers through digital coupons for different products depending on the season, availability, and interest.
For example, on Valentine’s Day, you could consider offering coupons for hot chocolate, flowers, gift bags, and celebration cards.
Charity Work
Suppose you work hard to affiliate your business with prominent charities. In that case, this will help you to gain a positive reputation as a supermarket that cares not only about sales – but also about your local community.
Offering charity events such as coffee mornings helps the charity and your business as you draw in existing and prospective customers with events and the kindness your supermarket has shown
