By Holly Pavlika, Collective Bias
After two months of gorging ourselves on rich food and drink, January means getting back to reality. The same harsh fact is true for retailers. Following the two most important months of the year, January is often marked by slow sales and low shopper enthusiasm. In order to remedy retailers’ holiday hangover, the following tips can help re-energize sales and customer enthusiasm.
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Don’t Push Merchandise. Push Experiences.
People are still reconciling all the money they spent in December and working on paying off bills. A message to “buy more” is not going to resonate with the January consumer. Instead, push unique experiences featuring your brand or products from your store. Create and share stories about how the item fits into consumers’ daily lives. Show multiple uses for the product in creative and useful ways. Shoppers aren’t looking for sexy, but they are looking for smart and valuable content that helps them solve problems. The brands that help them do just that are on their way to building loyalty and relationships. Lowe’s does an incredible job of this, with their short Vine video series. These videos are interesting, helpful and inspire the consumer to go fix or build something.
Get Social With New Customers.
You likely acquired a few new customers during the holidays. January is a great time to engage and interact with them. Think about running an influencer campaign that leverages their passion to jumpstart conversation, bring in new audiences and showcase why your brand is a connected brand. Social is also a great customer service tool. For example, social enables you to make your brand a known resource for shopping inspiration and finding what shoppers need. An independent data company looked up loyalty cardholders of a specialty grocer and correlated loyalty membership to Facebook “likes” and engagement. No surprise, the customers who were also Facebook fans shopped more and spent more.
It’s time to marry online to offline. Customers don’t separate the two. Your brand is your brand no matter where it lives. But again, don’t be a pain by selling all the time. Give your customers useful information. Better yet, ask them what they want and then give it to them. They’ll love you for listening.
Start (Or Reactivate) A Blog
Competition is tough for every retail dollar. The easiest way to separate yourself from the pack is through a corporate blog. Stop for a moment to think about the all-important Millennial demographic and their $200 billion in spending power. They are voracious readers of blogs, Facebook posts, video and more — reading upwards of 18 hours of content a day. They want to be informed and they care about what the companies that they buy products from stand for. The Container Store is just one of many brands that uses its blog to give customers and prospects a glimpse into what makes them tick, specifically with its What We Stand For campaign.
Blogging is one of the best ways to attract visitors to your webpage and generates five-times the traffic as compared to companies that don’t blog. Having a strong blog helps business in three critical ways: Better online visibility, increased credibility and improved lead generation. Smart retailers make blogging at least once a week a core part of business operations. Use January as a time to share value through blog posts, setting the stage for returning visits the rest of the year. And here’s a helpful tip: Remember to keep in mind that the ideal length of a headline is six words, according to Kissmetrics, and the ideal length is seven minutes of reading, according to Medium.
How will you jumpstart 2015 sales?
As SVP, Brand Strategy at Collective Bias, Pavlika oversees marketing and PR and Social Strategy. Pavlika, also a blogger, founded MOMentumNation while serving as the Executive Creative Director and Managing Director at Big Fuel, a pure play social media agency. She is an award-winning creative marketing industry veteran who was recognized in 2012 by Klout as the “most influential agency person” and uses her voice for social good with 10X10 Educate Girls, Every Mother Counts, Global Poverty Project and the UN Foundation Shot@Life campaign.
