In today’s competitive consumer packaged goods (CPG) landscape, brands must innovate to stand out on crowded shelves and connect with shoppers at the point of purchase. Shopper marketing—the intersection of retail and digital marketing—offers an unparalleled opportunity to engage consumers in a meaningful way. Here are essential strategies to help your brand drive success and stay ahead of the curve.
1. Understanding the Shopper’s Mindset
We must begin with the shopper. To influence purchase decisions, brands must delve into the psychology of shoppers. Emotional and rational factors shape buying behavior, with consumers increasingly drawn to products that align with their values, lifestyles, and hearts.
- Emotional Connections: Beyond functional benefits, emotional associations—such as sustainability, inclusivity, or wellness—create lasting loyalty. For example, brands that highlight eco-friendly practices often build stronger emotional bonds with environmentally conscious shoppers.
- Behavioral Insights: Use AI and analytics to uncover what drives purchases. Behavioral data allows brands to craft messages that resonate deeply and encourage loyalty in a competitive marketplace.
2. Leverage In-Store Displays with Modern Technology
In-store displays remain a cornerstone of shopper marketing, but their evolution in 2024 includes integrating advanced technologies like digital screens, motion sensors, and AI.
- Interactive Displays: Digital displays that adapt based on time of day or shopper demographics enhance engagement.
- Eco-Friendly Designs: Sustainable display materials align with consumer values and reinforce brand commitment to environmental responsibility.
- QR Codes: Our in-house brand, Perfy, uses a QR code from Flowcode paired with Aisle’s rebate technology on its retail marketing collateral, which we’ll dive into later in this article.
3. Create Thoughtful Promotions
Promotions play a vital role in driving trial, conversion, and loyalty.
- Limited-Time Offers: Create urgency through exclusive discounts or flash sales. Work with your distributors and buyers to facilitate. And have a resource that can manage your yearly promotional calendar by retailer and channel.
- Digital Integration: Offer app-based rewards or personalized mobile coupons that cater to individual preferences, making promotions accessible and tailored. Instacart and Ibotta are great places to start for this.
- Gamified Experiences: Engage shoppers with gamified elements, such as earning points for completing challenges in-store or online. This is a digital retail tactic that e-commerce rewards apps can help with.
4. Omnichannel Optimization
In today’s digital age, integrating online touchpoints with physical retail experiences can enhance shopper journeys. Utilizing technologies like QR codes, AR apps, or personalized messaging through mobile platforms allows brands to bridge the gap between the digital and physical, ensuring that they capture consumer interest across touchpoints. Such integration enriches the in-store experience and provides personalized offers that cater to individual preferences, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
This digital integration strategy must be seamless, ensuring that the transition from offline to online, or vice versa, is smooth for the consumer. For example, a shopper who uses an app to find product information in-store should be able to effortlessly transfer that interaction to an online purchase option if they choose. Destini and Pear Commerce do a good job of this by dynamically identifying what SKUs are being scanned in specific locations.
5. Ambassadors, Creator Marketplaces, and UGC
Shoppers who embody your brand’s ethos can be amongst your best marketers. Encouraging customer advocacy through loyalty programs or exclusive brand communities helps build organic brand influencers. Nurturing this connection amplifies authentic brand messages and fosters a sense of belonging among core consumers. Utilize your social channels or UGC marketplaces to delve deeper. I like to use native creator marketplaces on Instagram and TikTok to find regional influencers/creators to support retailers.
6. Optimizing Product Placement
Where you’re merchandised matters. For Perfy, we always perform better in the refrigerated functional set or produce. But when we cannot land those placements, we’ll aim to achieve incremental placements near those areas during TPRs/promotions. At the very least, you want to do sampling demos as much as possible to drive the trial. However, defining when and how to leverage these is crucial to prevent overspending on trade rates.
7. The Low Hanging Fruit
- Optimize your store locator. It doesn’t need to be anything expensive to start. But as you level up, you want to use something like Destini (pronounced Destiny) or Pear Commerce.
- Use your house file (also read as roladex or owned media) to support your retail partners. Geotarget everything. Create segments in your email service provider (ESP) specifically for retailers or regions.
- Share your retail promotions on your Instagram Story or Instagram Channel (not your feed). I don’t think a retail promo makes sense for feed unless it’s nationwide. Even then, if you do it, others will ask for the same support—even the smallest independents. So be thoughtful here.
- Self merchandise as much as you can when visiting stores you’re in. Also leverage your brokers and other resources in other markets to make sure the fundamentals are set up; you’re in the right placement, right amount of facings, and the shelf tags are up…to name a few.
8. Instacart
Instacart is as important as Amazon. Read that again. Set up your Instacart account (or pay a group like Growthbuster) to set up your account and run small but intentional campaigns. As you see the turns, increase the budget like a profitable paid acquisition channel. Instacart has several different products to choose from or use in tandem to win over new customers. And at the end of the day, more and more people are shopping on digital shelves versus physical ones. Don’t sleep on Instacart!
9. Aisle
I like to use Aisle instead of M&R or Inmar. It’s more modern. More nimble. And a little bit cheaper. Here are the pros and cons:
Pros:
- About $300-400/month vs. Inmars $7k/year just for the tech. Not even the redemptions and clearinghouse fees are included. As your redemptions scale with Aisle, your fees will too. But this is cost-saving for the scrappy startup for sure.
- You know who redeems! Something old-school IRCs (Instant Redeemable Coupons) can’t do.
- You get deep basket analysis
- You the phone number
- You can remarket to opt-ins
- The redemptions and clearinghouse fees are included
- The monthly fee covers the redemptions until you go over. For example, if your fee is $400/month and your offer is worth $4, you won’t pay anything until your 101st redemption.
- There are more, but this feels like an Aisle ad. It’s not.
Cons:
- Customers don’t like taking the extra step to save money. They want to just hand a coupon to the cashier and call it a day. As a result, there will be a dropoff. However, your conversion rate should be about 30% of everyone who scans the QR code.
10. Collaborating with Retail Partners
Strong partnerships with retailers can enhance the effectiveness of shopper marketing campaigns. Aligning with retailers’ goals and leveraging their insights can create mutually beneficial strategies that elevate the shopper’s experience. Collaborative efforts provide opportunities to refine customer touchpoints, enhance visibility, and deploy mutually crafted marketing tactics that align with consumer preferences. This synergy often leads to increased exposure and sales, leveraging the retailer’s unique insights into customer habits and preferences.
Open communication and innovative collaboration pave the way for impactful campaigns that are responsive and proactive. Joint promotions, shared data insights, and aligned marketing strategies are a few ways these partnerships can manifest into groundbreaking successes.
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