Opinion: 3 Tips to Get the Most Out of Marketing

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — To get the best return on investment (ROI), convenience retailers should create a comprehensive marketing strategy, spending their marketing budget in a variety of places, including traditional methods like billboards and radio, but also shopper marketing and merchandising, which is often underused.

Here are three tips to help retailers get the most out of their marketing dollars ...

Without a measurable goal, retailers have no way to know if their strategy is working or if they’re getting good ROI out of their marketing budget. Define what success looks like, whether it is increasing units per market basket or another specific goal.

Before setting goals, retailers should get intimately familiar with their sales history. They should know their baseline and what percentage of sales comes from each product category. They should also know which products sell the most and which products drive the majority of profit, which are not always the same.

With this knowledge, retailers can create specific goals to increase sales of the most profitable items. It will also help them create a strategy that uses best sellers to cross-merchandise high-margin items that have high market basket affinity. For example, cigarettes are notoriously low margin, but by identifying the higher margin items that historically are purchased with cigarettes, retailers can build a bundle or promotion to advertise together.

As soon as customers drive onto a c-store property—even before—subtle (and not-so-subtle) marketing efforts should influence their purchases, both to drive fuel customers into a store and to increase market-basket size.

Everything from forecourt signage to integrated display screens at the dispensers, window clings and shelf talkers in the store can increase sales. A loyalty mobile application can even become a shopper marketing strategy by using geofence-based push notifications and showing appropriate messages based on transaction history. This should be an integral part of an overall marketing strategy instead of only focusing on off-property advertising.

That shopper marketing strategy should be based on anchor products and services that have a high likelihood of being sold. Then, retailers can advertise other products with high market basket affinity to drive up units per transaction and profitability. Technology can help retailers review historical sales and analyze market-basket affinity by time of day, time of year and even historical weather information to provide insight into which products should be advertised when.

Don’t forget to advertise the things that make a business unique. For example, many convenience stores started out as dairies, which now sell milk for competitive or even lower prices than grocery stores. Educate consumers in addition to advertising promotions. For single-store owners, advertising that you are locally owned and operated could be beneficial at a time when people want to shop with local businesses.

While a robust shopper marketing strategy is undoubtedly beneficial, it also requires oversight to ensure the messaging is cohesive and the different touchpoints are working together. This can be accomplished by staff or a third party to manage each different channel, or through a tool that allows you to manage it all through a single portal. From that point of view, it’s easier to ensure that all marketing has a cohesive look and feel that represents the store brand.

Without integrating all touchpoints, retailers risk sending a disjointed message that confuses the customer and does not accomplish the goals of converting customers from fuel-only or increasing market-basket size.

Clutter also can decrease the effectiveness of your different marketing channels. Many CPG vendors provide coolers, signage and more to display their specific products in a convenience store. While these can be great free forms of shopper marketing, they can also be distracting. Accept such freebies carefully; if there is too much to look at, most customers will simply look at nothing. That said, choosing a few key CPG items that integrate well with your overall strategy can often help fund some of your larger marketing initiatives.

Once retailers understand their historical sales and set marketing goals, they can create a strategy that relies heavily on shopper marketing to increase market-basket size and bring more fuel-only customers inside the store.

Brian Nelson is COO of NewsBreak. The Knoxville, Tenn.-based company is a programmatic merchandising platform for the fuel and convenience retail industry that converts fuel-only customers to multi-product purchasers with an automated multichannel network.