If you want to see more results from your marketing and advertising campaign, it’s important to incorporate shopper marketing. But what exactly is shopper marketing? How can you learn about it? And how do you start using it in your campaign?
Shopper Marketing Basics
We’ll start with the basics. According to NewPoint Marketing, shopper marketing is a strategy designed to maximize engagement and persuade the behavior of a specific target audience. Rather than generically appealing to a mass market, you’ll be focusing on one specific segment (or multiple individual segments), crafting messaging, providing resources, and even developing products that are specialized for this group.
Shopper marketing applies to almost every stage of the sales funnel and across all your communication channels. You’ll use it to design better products, build a more engaging website, choose where to sell and market your products, and even communicate with your fans and followers.
The strategy is effective because it allows you to specialize. Your messaging is going to be much more relevant to your target audience if it’s focused on them – and you’ll be much more likely to reach your audience members in their natural environments.
Learning About Shopper Marketing
We’ve only covered the basics here, so how can you learn more about shopper marketing?
One of your best bets is to look for online content. Between blog posts, case studies, and eBooks, you can learn a ton about shopper marketing for free. This does take some dedication and some effort, but even an amateur can become a competent shopper marketer if they’re willing to make the investment.
Beyond that, if you want to be effective in shopper marketing, it’s important to learn as much as you can about your target audience.
These are some of your best tools for doing it:
- Aggregated demographic data. The United States Census Bureau, research institutes, and even think tanks are great sources of aggregated demographic data. There, you can learn a great deal about your target audience and what makes them different than other audiences. It’s a great starting point, especially if you’re trying to figure out your initial product market fit.
- Surveys. If you’re ready to start cultivating more information about your audience and their perceptions of your products, consider conducting surveys. Quantitative and qualitative questions will give you a much more robust understanding of how your audience thinks and how they perceive the world. From there, you can learn how to persuade them.
- Focus groups. You can learn even more about your target audience’s behavior with the help of a focus group. In these small, focused settings, you’ll test a new product or service with members of your target audience to see how they react to it.
- Real-time experiments. Finally, you can conduct real-time experiments, trying out different platforms, different messaging angles, and different positioning strategies. With ample measurement and analysis, you can quickly figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
Working With a Shopper Marketing Agency
If you’re new to the world of shopper marketing, consider working with a shopper marketing agency. They’ll help you with every step of the process, from initially defining a target audience and better understanding them to executing your campaign. It’s technically cheaper to conduct shopper marketing on your own, but a shopper marketing agency will net you a higher return on investment (ROI) in most cases.
Getting Started With a Shopper Marketing Strategy
If you’re ready to get started with a shopper marketing strategy, do the following:
- Do your research proactively. Before you start marketing or advertising anything, do your initial research. The more market research you do, and the better you understand your audience, the more likely you’ll be to succeed. With more demographic and behavioral data, you’ll be able to choose more appropriate marketing channels, design better displays and advertisements, and ultimately engage with your audience in more meaningful ways.
- Build customer personas. Customer personas are designed to make your target audience easier to understand and more intuitive for your marketing team. These essentially function like fictional characters who represent various segments of your audience. For example, if you’re target audience is suburban, middle-aged moms, you might design a customer persona named “Cindy,” who embodies these traits and characteristics. Spend some time cultivating and polishing your customer personas, so they can guide the rest of your tactics. Customer personas are especially important for communicating target audience requirements (and messaging guidelines) across multiple departments within your organization.
- Document your overarching strategy. Create thorough documentation covering your shopper marketing goals, principles, and processes, including brand guidelines, your overall marketing strategy, your sales funnel, and procedures for measurement and analysis. Make sure everyone on your team understands these documents inside and out.
- Coordinate departments and communication channels. Shopper marketing is cross-departmental in many ways, incorporating efforts from marketers, advertisers, salespeople, and sometimes even customer service reps. Make sure all your departments and communication channels are aligned; it’s your responsibility to break down inter-departmental silos that might otherwise lead to conflicting goals and priorities (or total miscommunications).
- Experiment. Don’t be afraid to experiment and take risks. Experimenting with new channels and tactics is the best way to learn what resonates with your target audience. In your course of experimentation, you’re bound to experience some failures – some instances of wasted time and effort. But these instances won’t be true wastes, because they’ll give you valuable information and insights you can use in your next campaign.
- Measure, learn, and adapt. Measure all of your outcomes, consistently and uniformly, and preferably at all stages of your marketing/sales funnels. Analyze the data you collect and use it to further adapt your strategy. What worked best, and why? Which tactics didn’t work, and are there ways you can improve them in the future?
Shopper marketing can be used in almost any business for almost any audience. The important thing is that you’re customizing your strategy to specifically appeal to your most important demographics. Keep learning and improving if you want to keep seeing better results.
