5 Supermarket Marketing Strategies To Start Today

Is your grocery or supermarket business’s marketing starting to feel stale? If you’re not attracting the kind of customer attention you wish, try shaking up your campaigns with these five supermarket marketing strategies to start today. You’ll learn about some of the best modern marketing strategies and how to implement them for your business.

Free Samples

Free samples are one marketing strategy that all supermarkets should be taking advantage of. Supermarkets have the benefit of selling food and drink items, which not all retail stores can do. Produce and food items make the best options for free samples, even above beauty products and free gifts. Everyone loves free food, so take advantage of your products by offering samples of your new or fresh items. If your supermarket has a connected bakery, consider offering smaller portions as samples. If you’ve just brought in a new item that you want to build customer awareness for, you could create a free sample display with this product to encourage customers to buy full sizes of it.

The promise of free samples alone is enough to bring some customers through your door, which helps your customer retention and brand awareness levels skyrocket.

Seasonal Displays and Advertising

Get creative with your seasonal displays and advertising. Don’t limit your displays to the big holidays like Halloween and Christmas, but instead embrace your seasonal items year-round. For example, the upcoming spring season brings excited grocery shoppers for big football games, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day, just to name a few. Many people associate certain foods and meals with these times of year, such as party snacks for football games and baked hams for Easter.

You can also tie certain meals and foods to the larger seasons and time of year. For example, the current winter season is perfect for displaying comfort foods like soups and warm baked goods. People closely associate these items with winter and the cold, depending on your local weather. Overall, don’t just go through the motions of seasonal items at the end of the year—do some brainstorming with your marketing team and see how many holidays you can add to your marketing list.

Limited-Time Promotions

Offering limited-time promotions is a great marketing tool no matter what business you’re in. Promotions and deals that offer customers a chance to save for only a limited time excel at building a sense of urgency in shoppers and encourage more sales in this window of time. Even if you’re a smaller-sized supermarket and can’t afford to mark down your products by a high margin, you can still take advantage of this marketing opportunity to encourage sales and build urgency. Your current customers will be eager to get in on the savings, and the discounts may even attract new customers to your business!

Make sure to spread the word of these discounts in as many ways as you can. Utilize both traditional marketing media in-store and modern digital and online technology to notify more potential customers of your deals.

Loyalty Programs

All customers like to feel appreciated for staying loyal and shopping with your store. If you’re a small business and every customer matters, show them how much they matter to your business by starting a loyalty program. Loyalty and VIP membership programs reward your customers for their continued trips to your supermarket. Utilize a POS system that can collect and keep track of your customers every time they shop with your store. All you would need to do is create a customer profile for each new and returning customer, then you can create rewards for your frequent shoppers. You might reward customers with points that go towards a discount or a gift.

You could even use information collection systems like these to keep track of customer birthdays to provide them with an extra discount or gift on their birthday.

Offer Grocery Delivery and More

Increasing numbers of modern supermarket chains are starting to advertise and offer grocery delivery and pickup services. If your supermarket has an online website and digital presence, you may want to start offering these services as well. Even something as simple as implementing a “buy online, pick-up in store” service would save customers some of the hassle of spending more time shopping. These services help expedite the grocery shopping process, which many customers are looking for nowadays.

How To Advertise Your New Campaigns

Now that you have your new marketing campaigns to work on, how are you going to advertise them and spread the word? Implementation of these new strategies won’t be enough—you must spread the word to your customers as well. Use a combination of in-store marketing to target your current customers and digital marketing to expand your reach.

In-Store Marketing

In-store marketing could consist of more traditional forms of marketing, such as signs, announcements, and displays. These eye (or ear)-catching forms of traditional media will educate your current customers who are already familiar with your store. You can even utilize outdoor signs and posters such as sidewalk A-frame sign holders to catch the attention of potential customers passing by. These marketing strategies will help you keep up your customer retention all the while attracting new customers as well. This is why you should also incorporate digital media into your marketing to expand this reach.

Social Media

Social media is a great example of modern digital marketing and the audience it can reach. Start accounts on several social media platforms for your business and start posting about your new products, upcoming promotions, loyalty programs, and more. Over time, you will start to gain a following and you’ll be altering more people to your business’s presence. You could even set up social media advertising to target local users and further target your marketing.

Now that you know the five supermarket marketing strategies to start today and the best ways to market them to your audience, your grocery store will be bustling in no time. And if you need some traditional marketing materials to keep up with the new customer pool, check out our supply of signs and other media stands here at The Global Display Solutions.