Retail spaces are highly competitive owing to the sheer volume of product and brand choices available to the consumer, so even the slightest advantage could be the difference between sustained sales growth and stagnation or even decline of your sales.
One of the biggest advantages in retail comes from visibility, which can be achieved through a distinct and easily recognizable brand identity, strategic shelf positioning and Point of Sale marketing.
Point of Sale marketing offers the spatial advantages of strategic shelf positioning and the visual benefits of amplifying your brand. It can result in a significant increase in sales volumes and has the potential to improve brand recognition and customer loyalty. In this article, we will discuss five quick tips that can help your brand make the most of your POS marketing opportunities.
1. Focus on Impulse Purchases
The fastest-moving POS purchases are usually convenience products. Your brand can lean into this trend and provide small items that don’t seem like a big purchase. The low cost and small product size, combined with the immediacy of the gratification the consumer is likely to receive from the product, present very little mental friction for the consumer. This makes impulse buying significantly easier.
Leveraging the consumer’s propensity for impulse buying could also be a very accurate way to gauge the success of a new product or packaging design prior to its official launch and generate a ready market in advance. Smaller units of the actual product could be placed at the point of sale, where you can gather data about how often customers pick up, return or ask for the product. The data gathered here will help inform how the actual product will be launched
2. Use Your Point of Sale to Gather Data
As mentioned in the first tip, the point of sale is an excellent place to gather information about consumer behaviour and their responses to your product. Your retail campaign could use a variety of POS display types, in different locations within the store, with different combinations of products, all of which yield a wealth of information that could be used to improve future sales.
POS marketing is also a potent vehicle for split testing.
You could measure how well your product sells against a competitor or whether or not your product sales improve when placed next to a different product category. Alternatively, POS marketing could be used to test a product prior to the official launch.
All the data gathered during this testing could be used to inform a very accurate marketing strategy or even help test the market during product development. It is important to keep track of metrics like the volume of units sold, price per unit and margins per unit. These variables could be adjusted in different locations and tweaked to test how the market responds to what they are charged for the product. Having field marketing agents on site to talk to consumers who have purchased your product can also uncover a lot of qualitative data as well.
3. Be Mindful of Aesthetics
The most dominant sense in humans is vision, with more than 50% of the cortex being devoted to processing visual information. In a visually busy environment like a retail store, being able to have a distinct, attractive and tasteful POS display can give a massive boost to sales.
The idle time customers spend in checkout queues is ideal for drawing their attention and courting their interest with a well-placed and well designed POS display. The most prominently displayed products tend to generate the most sales.
Your POS display can also double as a small billboard. Customers that may not be interested in purchasing your product will at least see your brand and over time that grows into brand recognition and ultimately, brand loyalty. Investing in a POS display that represents your brand well is undoubtedly a good use of resources and will yield results for a very long time.
4. Add a Human Touch
Having a brand ambassador or field marketer on-site to interact with customers humanizes your brand.
A number of studies, including Professor Richard Wiseman’s Lost Wallet experiment, have shown that we tend to have a more positive reaction to human faces. Further studies by different researchers made it evident that there is an extra layer of context and we react differently to individuals of different gender and age depending on the context. In general, seeing another human being triggers a neurological response that makes consumers more likely to purchase your product.
Additionally, well-trained brand ambassadors and field marketers have very intimate knowledge of the brand and its respective products. They can help consumers get past any internal resistance and choose to purchase your product. Recommendations from a trusted source (such as a representative of the brand) can be a very useful way to upsell a customer or convince them to try a new product.
However, it is important to make sure the field marketers or brand ambassadors are not too aggressive in their pitch, consumers tend to recoil from people who are too “salesey”.
Conclusion
Point of Sale marketing sits at the convergence of all the crucial elements of the retail experience. The retailer, customer, product and money are all brought together at these points. Understanding how to leverage this convergence to increase your sales and make your brand more visible contributes to the long-term success and growth of your brand in a very sustainable way.
If you are looking for an experienced field marketing agency to help you achieve success with your POS marketing campaigns, please do get in touch. We would be happy to talk about growing your brand in retail spaces.