How to Drive Footfall to a Retail Store Through Social Media

Social media in today’s age takes a peak in all domains, which means social media platforms is growing from strength to strength. From a retailer’s point of view, social media in today’s era is one of the smartest and more attractive medium to promote a brand. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, pinterest etc. plays a vital role in attracting different profile of consumers.  It’s just not youth, which defines social media, but these days’ people of all age are inclining towards it for an easy and comfortable communication.

The paradigm shift in marketing, which the world is gearing up for, is mobilization of the marketing efforts to the right audience at the right time through the right device/channel.

The factors that make the new age media more efficient than the traditional media are

“Right Time Marketing” and “Re-Targeting”

What is RTM and what are the factors making Right Time Marketing possible?

In digital medium a marketer can select the host of websites where the ads needs to be placed. In-fact one can select the particular page within the website where the ad needs to be placed.

For example a company selling products for 0 to 12 years of age group would be grouping the ads in different segments.

Chances of conversion = Attention + Relevance

This freedom of placing an AD on the relevant pages catches the prospects at the right time when they are looking for the related products/ services.

What is Re-Targeting?

An interesting process that makes your advertisement more reliable, more precise and niche targeted! In this process the advertisers generate a code from Facebook or Google called the Custom Audience or Re-Targeting Pixel code and is integrated with the website. This code tracks the visitors and places your advertisements on visitor’s Facebook timeline.

Let’s do a simple task:

Visit “a particular website” and you will start receiving ads from “that particular website” of the merchandise you searched for, on your Facebook timeline or on Google Ads Network.

You would have noticed this quite often with e-commerce sites the moment you check out shoes or T-shirts but decide not to buy. You later start receiving ads of the same shoes that you showed interest in on Facebook and Google ad network. In this case, there are different pixel codes raised for different URLs and products in order to make for a precise targeting.

Re-Targeting is one of the smartest ways to impress or haunt your audience. Some people feel excited about the ad and some really get annoyed so you need to be smart enough in creating different ad variants and not to target your customers with the same ad copy!

Always remember, your visitors on website come from across different sources (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Search, Direct visitors and more) and they spend more time on Facebook or they are searching for stuff on Google most of the time! Wherever they land after they visit your site, they see your ads and that’s just the BEST WAY FOR STRONG BRAND RECALL!

While executing the digital efforts one should keep in mind the target audience’ devices which they will use as the first touch point which will lead them to your store. The experience created for high-end devices might work miserably on low-end devices, or an experience created for low-end devices might get under-rated while checked on high-end devices, and the resulting customer decision of coming or not coming to your store would effect to a great extent.

At the end of the day content is the key. The content in social media marketing attracts consumers as they are short, crisp, engaging and most importantly simple. This is the reason digital campaign is gaining immense popularity. Also, make your communication entertaining and exiting enough for customers to get glued to your brand.

So let’s go social is the new mantra for marketers.