Boost Your Sales With These 4 Retail Advertising Examples

Do you ever look at other stores’ promotional campaigns and think, “Now that is some clever advertising, I wonder how they do it?”

Success doesn’t happen by chance. Big brands run successful advertising campaigns because they have a team producing innovative, powerful marketing strategies. You might wonder how you can pull it off for your store.

It’s not as complicated as you think!

Imagine peeking behind the curtain of some of the most successful retail stores and gaining insights into their advertising strategies. What if you could draw inspiration from these examples and inspire your marketing efforts?

You can! This article reveals four of today’s biggest brands’ smartest retail advertising and promotion examples and how to replicate them to take your store to the next level.

How These Retail Advertising Examples Will Help You Win

Competition is notoriously fierce in the retail industry. If you want to acquire and retain customers, you need to find ways to stand out. And what better way to draw inspiration than looking at proven examples?

You can use various channels to reach your customers. It’s important to know where they hang out. For example, small boutiques might fare well on Instagram — with high-quality images and user-generated content — whereas a hardware store might find more luck with local advertising. 

Key channels include:

• In-store promotions: Window displays, product demos, on-site events, and signage near checkout will engage customers in your store.
• Offline: Print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, billboards, radio spots, and TV commercials are an excellent way to reach a broad audience.
• Digital: Email, search ads, social media marketing, online display ads, and influencer partnerships help target your ideal audience and generate engagement.

Budgeting for marketing will be unique to your store and your stage of growth. If you’re just starting out and want to generate buzz, you might focus on social media, email, and a one-time investment in local print ads. With a bigger budget, you can split it between multiple channels.

Related Read: How Using POS in Marketing Can Improve Sales

How will you measure success? If marketing is successful, you’ll attract more of the right people to your store, increase sales and transactions, and retain more customers. Many digital forms of marketing provide data, so you can measure success using that data.

Drawing inspiration from successful marketing campaigns is easier than starting from scratch, and you can model what resonates with real examples. Let’s dive in!

Example #1. Focus on Local Community

REI is a specialty outdoor retailer. As well as selling outdoor apparel and gear, they’re “on a mission to get 100 million folks outside in five minutes or less.” They’re working towards this by hosting bike rides, classes, hiking trips, and more.

REI taps into local markets and offers memberships. Why is this great marketing? Members can meet up at specific store locations and start their adventures. Giving customers a chance to make deep local connections will keep REI at the top of people’s minds. And who knows? If they get to the store, they might see something that catches their eye and make a purchase.

How could you get involved in your local community? For example, if you run a hardware store, perhaps you could offer DIY demonstrations or classes. Or, if you manage a garden center, you could teach customers how and when they should plant various seeds. The options are endless!

Example #2. Get Playful on Social Media

Target has 5.4 million followers on Instagram, and they find creative ways to engage those followers. Target posts social content daily, sharing memes, videos, and shopping hauls. They include reels with tutorials on styling rooms with Target products and “shop with me” vlogs.

They find ways to generate excitement around their brand with hashtags like #onlyattarget and #targetruns. They usually have a website call-to-action (CTA) for a product or article to create interest and engagement.

How can you use social media to create a buzz? How you show up on social media is essential. If you want to show your store is fun and inviting, use hashtags, and encourage customers to share their experiences.

Honorable mention: Lowe’s Spring Makeover Sweepstakes - Lowe’s held sweepstakes on Instagram and Pinterest, offering the chance to win a $10,000 spring home makeover. Users could enter by posting photos of their outdoor space needing a makeover.

Example #3. Hit Your List With Targeted Emails

Sephora, the beauty giant, uses email marketing to great effect. Engaging users throughout the customer lifecycle, they start with a welcome email highlighting the benefits of shopping with Sephora and encouraging users to join their loyalty program.

They also use replenishment triggers to remind customers it might be time to reorder their favorite products and cart abandonment emails to jog customers’ memories. Last, sending personalized emails to customers based on their purchase history is a great way to entice them back into Sephora’s stores.

Small businesses can replicate these segmented, personalized approaches on a smaller scale to drive results.

Are you making the most of the data you collect on your customers and store in your CRM? If not, now is the time to start! Not every email must be a sales email; you can send tips and tricks, helpful tutorials, and news about special offers and events in your store.

Example #4. Collaborate With Other Brands

When Starbucks and Spotify forged a partnership “offering artists greater access to Starbucks consumers and giving Starbucks access to Spotify’s expansive discography,” they tapped into two markets: music lovers and coffee drinkers.

This intelligent approach increases reach and provides added value to consumers. Of course, this is a large-scale example, but you can easily replicate it by contacting local businesses, artists, and brands.

For example:

• A home goods store teams up with a florist to offer a gift basket with a vase and flowers. Customers get added value and might tell their friends about the deal, especially around the holidays.
• To reinforce the buy local message, neighboring Main Street retailers coordinate recurring “Shop Local Saturdays” with in-store promotions, sidewalk sales, and co-marketing.
• A clothing boutique partners with a jewelry shop next door to host a joint sidewalk sale. They cross-promote to each other’s customers.
  
  

Using Your POS System to Implement Marketing Strategies

You might wonder how you can tie all of these marketing strategies together. How can you track results? Where can you store customer data that makes it easy to personalize recommendations? The answer is in your point of sale (POS) system.

You can execute, track, and optimize marketing campaigns with the right POS system. Here are just a few ways to use your POS:

• Segment and personalize emails: Leverage customer purchase history, order data, and profile information from your POS database to segment lists and customize email content.
• Build loyalty programs: Using data from your POS system, you can create tailored loyalty tiers and benefits based on customer spend. You can also automate points accrual and personalized promotions.
• Track event performance: For in-store events, use your POS to monitor and report attendance, sales, average spending, and more during the event vs. regular days.
• Offer discounts and coupons to customers: Create tracked promotions and coupon codes from your POS and apply them to customer purchases. Then analyze sales data to reveal redemption rates and revenue impacts.
• Ensure adequate stock: Integrate inventory management in your POS to track stock levels in real time. Be alerted or automatically reorder when hot promotional products run low.
• Schedule staffing: Leverage your POS system’s sales data and traffic insights to guide scheduling. For example, you might need additional staffing for anticipated busy events or traffic drivers.
• Create follow-up campaigns: Use your POS reporting on customer purchases and sales responses to events to inform follow-up marketing messages and improvements.

There are more ways your POS system can help, depending on the campaigns and channels you decide to use.

Retail Advertising Examples: Get Inspired!

Although we’ve barely scratched the surface of the many amazing retail advertising strategies, you can take inspiration from these proven examples and brainstorm how to make them work for your store.

Various strategies capture attention and drive engagement; without effective advertising, you’ll miss out on more customers and revenue. So, whether it’s leveraging the power of viral social campaigns, producing enticing content that engages, or collaborating across local communities, there are countless ways to make your marketing stand out.

The technology part? We have that covered. With data-driven technology, you can optimize your marketing. By leveraging customer insights, inventory visibility, and omnichannel execution, you can seamlessly execute even the boldest campaigns.

Our POS system gives you the tools to run your business and marketing. But don’t take our word for it; schedule a demo today and see for yourself!