Retail Holiday Readiness: Get found

Welcome to Week 3 of Retail Holiday Readiness, our month-long series that will get you prepared for the 12% increase that the holiday season might bring you. Last week we talked about stocking up and scaling up, today we’ll cover getting those customers.

Once you and your shop are ready for the influx of holiday sales, how do you make sure you get them?

You can reach out to your current customers and leads (through promotions, emails, and social media), but let’s turn our attention to brand new customers. You know that during the holiday season more people will be looking for new products, so how can you make sure that they find you?  Let’s look to how the tech titans do it, and scale their strategy to your online shop.

How the retail tech titans do it?

Shop.org has a great explanation of the strengths of the retail tech titans (Amazon, Apple, Ebay, Facebook, and Google)...but even though you don’t have the  the resource (and engineers!) of the giants, you can apply their strategy to what you’re doing.

Product search and discovery.

The simplest way to get new customers is to be what they find when they search. Search Engine Optimization for your site, products, and pictures ensures you’ll show up in Google...but if you sell something with a lot of competition (like, jewelry), it can take years to become effective. That said, your competitors are likely ignoring alltogether, so it’s worth your time and effort to improve your SEO, as a long-term strategy. What works even sooner is to make product discovery easy using the new social tools, such as Pinterest. Make every item in your shop pin-able (which allows browsers to tell their friends they love your product!). Find more tips for using Pinterest for product discovery here.

The App(le) Affect

Thanks to the tech titans, your customers are always connected. This means they’re taking pictures in your shop, scanning barcodes to sign up for newsletters, sharing their location, and tweeting their favorite products. Work with them to make your physical shop as mobile-friendly as possible (with barcodes to scan for more information, using FourSquare promotions, etc) and you’ll make it easy for every customer who walks through your door to tell all their friends in a few clicks. If your shop is primarily online, your job is even simpler. Make it easy for every item to be shared on all the major social media channels by adding Share buttons to every single page. Create events and contests for your customers to take part in, to incentivize them to spread the word far and wide: Pin it to Win it contests, hashtags, newsletter discounts.

Invest in innovation

What sets the tech titans apart is that they embrace a new, faster, more networked ways of working with their customers, their partners, and their suppliers. You can do the same by streamlining your product acquisition (might I suggest Vianza?), simplifying your shopping cart, and creating systems for staying in touch with your past customers.

Instead of competing with the “competition”, take a closer look at them: what else are they doing that you can apply to your own shop?

Tara Swiger, author of Market Yourself, is Vianza’s Content Strategist. She’s also a right-word-crafter,yarn-maker and Starship Captain, and would like to talk about peppermint mochas with you on Twitter

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