The recent years have seen a significant boom in e-commerce and businesses that heavily rely on online sales for revenue.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced brick-and-mortar businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and focus more on online sales. Despite the uncertain effectiveness of digital ads and a recent decline in ad spending, brick-and-mortar stores invested heavily in digital marketing channels.
In 2022, some businesses reaped the benefits of this shift, while others questioned its impact. As normalcy returned in the second half of the year, brick-and-mortar retail saw an improvement in prospects as customers sought in-person experiences once again.
Reverting to pre-pandemic levels in marketing, sales, and other areas is impossible. Brick-and-mortar stores can draw insights from their digital counterparts and apply those lessons in the real world. This underscores the increasing importance of marketing automation for the success of brick-and-mortar retailers.
The Significance of Modern Automation in Brick-and-Mortar Advertising
The digital marketing revolution has paved the way for automation, offering new possibilities for streamlining and optimizing various marketing processes. While brick-and-mortar businesses have embraced digital marketing trends, the same cannot be said for automating trade-marketing operations. To stay competitive and thrive alongside direct-to-consumer brands (D2C), brick-and-mortar brands must adopt automation. Here are some reasons why:
1. Challenges of Real-world Data Analysis
Evaluating marketing performance in the digital realm is straightforward, with nearly every click and impression trackable and attributable. However, measuring performance in the physical world poses greater challenges. Determining the appropriate performance metrics can be complex.
Brand Regulator, a software solution specializing in automating trade marketing for brick-and-mortar brands, identifies this as a major hurdle. While sales-based metrics offer insights into physical collateral performance, inadequate consumer and market data can lead to less accurate comparisons.
Ineffective marketing automation can impact large brands, leading to coordination issues between regional directors, HQ-based planners, and retail outlets. This can result in outdated or subpar in-market activations, complicating campaign analysis and scalability. Automation is crucial for precise reporting and real-time data collection in trade marketing.
2. Limitations of Standard CRMs and ERPs
Many brick-and-mortar stores view standard ERPs and CRMs as cost-effective alternatives to specialized tools for in-person marketing automation. While solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, or ActiveCampaign are reputable, they are tailored for digital marketing, not retail trade marketing.
Attempts to utilize standard ERPs and CRMs for trade marketing automation often result in complex, time-consuming customization processes that seldom yield desired outcomes.
3. Complexity of Trade Marketing Campaigns
Trade marketing campaigns in brick-and-mortar settings present various challenges, including managing multiple collateral iterations, ensuring a clean physical footprint for collateral, navigating the intricate process of designing and evaluating new collateral, handling orders for replacement or new collateral, fulfilling collateral orders from printing to installation, and managing trade marketing budgets within a broader marketing strategy.
Given these demands, marketing automation is not merely a luxury; it is essential for success. By automating repetitive, high-volume tasks, your core team can focus on more strategic, creative endeavors, maximizing efficiency and productivity.
4. Dynamic Nature of Physical Marketing Collateral
Managing the complexity and constant evolution of physical marketing collateral without robust automation and scalable processes is challenging. Maintaining quality control is a primary concern for large-scale trade marketers, involving tasks like ensuring correct fixture placement, preventing damage during transit or installation, and verifying compliance with brand guidelines and team instructions.
Transitioning from text-based systems to platforms allowing shared uploads accessible to marketing and installation teams can save significant time and reduce errors, enhancing performance tracking.
Simplifying Brick-and-Mortar Marketing Challenges
While discussions in 2020 hinted at the demise of retail shopping, the resurgence of brick-and-mortar in 2023 suggests otherwise. The pandemic underscored the importance of multichannel sales strategies and highlighted the benefits of digital marketing automation on a large scale. These lessons can inform brick-and-mortar merchants' physical trade marketing strategies, even skeptics of marketing automation software.
Marketing automation represents a substantial investment, yet a worthwhile one for brick-and-mortar sellers aiming to cultivate robust, engaged customer relationships.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the major types of marketing?
Marketing is the process of communicating ideas and values to consumers. It is common to hear “marketing” interchangeably used with advertising. Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is all communication that promotes and markets a product or service.
Three key components of marketing are branding, promotion and distribution. Branding is the way a company presents itself to its target audiences. Promotion is the act that draws attention to your brand by using paid ads, free promotions, or other public relations efforts. Distribution is the method of delivering your message to your target audience. Although distribution can be done using traditional methods like television, radio or print, it is now easier with the advent of new technologies.
What is the difference between advertising and marketing?
Advertising is a type of communication that promotes products and brands. Advertising typically has a clear call-to-action, such as “Buy now!” Click here.
On the other hand, marketing is a way of communicating your company's mission, vision, and values to potential customers. Marketing helps you build relationships with your current customers as well as prospects.
Marketing can be used, for instance, to tell the story about your company and what you offer. You might talk about your background, philosophy, or commitment to quality. You could also share testimonials from customers who are satisfied with your products. Perhaps you can even hold an event where people are encouraged to visit your website by giving away free shoes.
Marketing is all about telling stories. Advertising is about selling products.
What are the 4 functions of marketing?
Marketing is the art of creating demand and products.
It gives information about the company's offerings and its values and how they affect customers' lives.
Marketing also stimulates interest in an offering, builds awareness of the offering, and ultimately drives action (or purchase) in response to an invitation to act.
Marketing has four functions:
- Create Demand – This involves building relationships with potential buyers to convince them of the value in your product or service.
- Stimulating interest – This is when you increase consumer awareness about your product or service.
- Building Awareness – This is the process of making sure that your customers are aware of your product or service, and why they may want to purchase it.
- Driving Action – This means ensuring that consumers make purchases after becoming aware of your product or services.
Social Media Marketing offers a great opportunity to promote your business online. It's a great way to build brand awareness and generate leads. Here are five methods to leverage social media marketing to increase your business.
- Make a Facebook fan page – This will allow you to interact directly on Facebook with your customers. You can also upload content such as photos, videos, and other files.
- Twitter Promotes Your Business – Twitter can be used to promote your business and connect with others. To increase visibility, use hashtags
- Upload videos to YouTube – People love watching videos. If someone likes what they see, they may click to visit your website.
- Host Live Events. Organizing live events allows potential clients to meet face-toface. They can ask any questions about your services and products.
- Respond to Customer Reviews – Positive reviews help build trust with your clients and encourage repeat purchases. Respond quickly to any negative comments.
What does marketing have to do with business strategy?
Marketing is part of every business strategy. Without marketing, there would be no way to tell the world what your company does. Marketing is not possible without sales. Marketing is an essential part of any business strategy.
However, not everyone is aware of the importance and value of marketing. Marketing is often viewed as just spending money on advertisements. Marketing goes far beyond advertising campaigns. Marketing is everything you do to promote your company's brand and position in the market.
As you consider your business, think of these questions: What image do I want to project? How will my customers see me? How should I present my self to the world?
If you don't answer those questions, you haven't thought about marketing yet.
What are the best digital strategies I can do at home for marketing?
Digital marketing is a powerful way to reach customers online. This is also a great way to generate leads for you business.
To promote your brand, you can use social media platforms such Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also send emails via email marketing tools to prospects or clients.
There are many other marketing options that you can use to promote your product or services using digital media.
If you're able to use these channels effectively, it shouldn't be a problem getting started.
What are the four types of marketing?
Marketing can be broken down into four distinct categories: Direct Mail Marketing, Traditional Advertising and Public Relations. Each type of marketing has different purposes and should be used for a specific purpose. You can combine them to achieve your goals.
Statistics
- According to statistics, 60% of online shoppers worldwide actively search for coupons before purchasing from a virtual shop. (influencermarketinghub.com)
- Today, 81% of brands around the world have affiliate programs. (influencermarketinghub.com)
- 81% of brands employ affiliate marketing, and eCommerce sites are particularly good candidates. (blog.hubspot.com)
- This allows us to deliver CPCs that are 80% less than average and CTRs 4-5 times higher than average. (marketinginsidergroup.com)
- Many experts recommend you share 20% of your promotional content and 80% of other valuable content you find. (marketinginsidergroup.com)
External Links
hubspot.com
neilpatel.com
moz.com
- SEO Learning Center- Moz
- [Case Study] How Moz Ranked #1 for High-Volume Keywords in Less Than 3 Months – Moz
statista.com
How To
Online Marketing Tips and Tricks from Top Brands
When creating content for online marketing, ensure it's relevant to your audience. Your audience won't care if you don't offer your product or service. Why would they care about your blog content?
For example, if your website is about fashion accessories, make sure your content is related to fashion accessories. Not general web design tips.
Promote your business using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Social media platforms allow businesses to connect with customers and share their information.
Social media sites also provide a great opportunity to connect with existing and potential clients.
Engage users by creating content that inspires them to share with others. Shared content is more popular and can increase traffic to your website.
Regular updates are a great way to keep your content updated. Posting every other day or weekly is more effective than posting once per month.
Because readers expect new content, a lot of engagement is given to posted content.
Include links within your content that lead back to your homepage. This makes it easier for your visitors to find additional resources.
Mobile-friendly content is a must. Mobile devices now outnumber desktop computers. According to a recent survey, more than 50% of internet users access websites via their smartphones.
It is important to test it on different mobile and tablet browsers in order to ensure that the content appears well on small screens. Mobile-first should be a top priority for any developer or website owner.
It's not about aesthetics. Mobile websites are more likely than desktop sites to convert well. Mobile websites are more user-friendly than desktop sites. They also load faster, due to their smaller size.
Make sure your content is relevant to your audience.
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By: 6422
Title: Modern Automation: The Key to Successful Brick-and-Mortar Advertising
Sourced From: internetlib.org/modern-automation-is-key-to-successful-brick-and-mortar-advertising/
Published Date: 3/14/2023 5:31:48 PM