Grow Social Media Pages With Paid Ads
The first tip is growing your store’s presence on social media. For consumer driven businesses like grocery stores, growing a strong social media following is beneficial because it provides a direct line of communication to customers. While it is possible for your store’s pages to gain some traction organically, it will not be enough to build a decent sized following. Also, organic posting won’t be able to reach potential consumers who are unaware of your business. When run properly, paid social ads can provide huge ROI.
Case Study: We ran a Page Like campaign for one of our clients, Fine Fare Lenox. With only $60 in ad spend, we gained 56 page likes in a week and reached over 5,000 people. These new page followers were not just anyone, but people who live near the store and fit into the demographic / behavioral groups the store’s management wanted to target. The average basket price for a store the size of Fine Fare Lenox is $45. If only 10% of those new followers go to the store once they will drive over $250 in revenue, a return on investment of over 320%. In addition to this immediate financial benefit, Fine Fare now has a direct line of communication with 56 new local customers.
In many ways email has stood the test of time as a reliable digital marketing method. 99% of consumers check their email everyday. As a grocery store, email can be an effective way to directly update your customers on upcoming sales, events, and promotions. The biggest challenge grocery stores will face is acquiring the emails of existing and new customers. Luckily, there are many ways to obtain emails from customers ranging from establishing loyalty programs that require an email to offering free samples in exchange for an email.
Community driven messaging
While you, a supermarket owner or manager, may view your store as objectively better than all of your competition, you still must convince existing and potential customers that this is the case. One of the most effective ways to do this is through community driven messaging. Sales and promotions are great, but many customers will prefer one store over another based on their personal connection to the staff and management. Try using posts and ads starring your store’s amazing staff to build a personal connection with customers.
Online Offers
Another effective tip supermarkets and grocery stores can add to their digital marketing campaign is to promote online services and coupons. Delivery services like Instacart are becoming increasingly popular and make a great service to promote through digital marketing. Other services like digital coupons are also a great addition to your campaign mix.
Video
Lastly, one way to stand out among the crowd online is to use video. Videos can be great for front-end ad creatives, posts, or as stand alone content. Ideally you should use videos under 30 seconds for ads and reserve your longer video content for posts. Check out this video we made for one of our clients.