Shop It! Digital Strategy

I don’t know about all of you but I personally love to shop. I am all about local businesses and supporting my community. The big problem I face is KNOWING about these places! Sure there’s a chance I will see a place and stop in sometime but that is not likely. A digital strategy is necessary for any small business in today’s world. I will be outlining my strategy for a small boutique called Shop It! in this post.

This is a great example of a picture for any social media page or site. It is crisp, clean and shows the store is ready for you!

The first step to a solid marketing strategy in any form is customer loyalty. Convincing a customer to come back and tell others about your place without them even realizing it would be ideal, but not always possible. For example, handing out coupons to every customer after checkout for a deal on their next purchase is a great way to bring em back. Plus if they do not personally use that deal they could potentially give it to someone else! I know when I wont be able to make it back somewhere but have a good coupon, I give it to my sister. Word of mouth can be a game changer!

Hosting fun posts and comments online is a way to encourage participation. Making it look like you want genuine responses and not just to sell the customers something is harder though. Don’t post things like “What dress would fit your sign?!” that just looks tacky and begging for service. Instead post things like, have you seen this new trend? Tell me about it!

Giving that positive customer experience is the cornerstone to any successful business. In a small clothing boutique you need to properly assess any customer that walks in to what they want. I know that I don’t want attention from an employee (other than a friendly hello) unless I specifically seek it. Such as: do these shoes go with this belt?). So reading the customer and giving what they want will garner more favor quickly upon entry. Do they want to be waited on? Do they want to browse without pressure? Do they need something super specific? Try to read them as best as possible and FAST.

As a local business, Facebook ads can be a great resource to invest in for people near you. Set up your advertisement to run in a specific radius (say 50 miles) and then go to target the type of people you’re looking for. This will allow people near you to see your clothing boutique is near and ready for shopping!

Focusing on some specifics about the boutique will allow you to build a niche. Facebook and Instagram will help with that! This is where hashtags and keywords come in SO important. Instagram hit over 700 million monthly users, compared to Facebook being over 1 billion, and ad revenue makes a difference. The amount of companies using Instagram to advertise has doubled since 2016 according to this website. That is a great sign that it WORKS. According to the same site Facebook now owns Instagram and can wildly help with all of your platform concerns! All data from both is at your disposal now!

Email is a solid starting place for growing a digital marketing strategy. Set up an email chain where people can subscribe to your newest information! Send emails about sales, new items, satisfied customers, links to your website! Send coupons, personal stories about how you started, how you choose what you carry. Getting people on the email subscribe list will crazily rocket interest if done well.

Finally, after getting all of that going you need to watch. You need to be observant at what is working and what is not. A great starting place for that is monitoring your virtual ads and keywords. Google Advertising has a specific section, which you can find here, that will show you the way to that. A few points from that article are the following: how to view ad performance, how to view keyword performance, finding your clickthrough performance and quality scores of each.

All said and done, this is not yet an exact science. Customer relations, choosing the right platform and keeping up on all of this is tricky to say the least. Being vigilant and on top of your game is ESSENTIAL. Never give up. Always be looking for better and bigger ways to set yourself apart from the crowd. I have explained some information from right now but it could change tomorrow. Being always watchful of how to do this right is most important. At the end think to yourself, what would I want for a small business to connect with me? What would draw me in?