Want to remain occupied with more customers in your convenience store? Your convenience store will not improve its sales significantly unless you become proactive in promoting it. As there is no comprehensive source online where you can learn more about convenience store marketing ideas, this article is aimed to provide a systematic and comprehensive list of all great promotion strategies for a convenience store. Let us start exploring these ideas:
1) Start Off Marketing With a Website
As the marketing of your convenience store will definitely involve the component of online marketing, having a website is the basic minimum, to begin with. Mobile-friendly design with fast loading time is a necessity to ensure that a significant percentage of your visitors don’t abandon your site. You can display your current offers and discounts on your website and can also provide the option to place orders directly from your website.
2) Mark Your Ranking in Google
Not every potential customer is going to discover your convenience store while doing a journey. Whenever any person voluntarily tries to locate a convenience store by using search queries like “convenience stores near me”, you will have to defeat other competing businesses to appear on page 1 of Google. By working on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors, your convenience store website can easily rank higher and can attract more visitors and sales. SEO agencies are the most suited alternatives in case you want to get this task handled professionally.
3) Build Your Reputation With Press Releases
If you take the services of some high-end press release distribution services, you can conveniently get the name of your convenience store across some of the world-famous news websites like Associated Press, Fox Affiliated Sites, etc. Once you secure your business name on such sites, you can easily display (in your marketing materials) that your convenience store has been featured in big news portals. Along with this, the links that result from this distribution will also help your business to achieve a higher ranking in search engines. Press releases, therefore, provide a very easy way to promote your convenience store across many websites along with attracting additional benefits.
4) Make Use of Google Maps and GMB
Google My Business (now Google Business Profile) and Google Maps are two good lead generation sources for businesses that know how to utilize them in the right manner. By creating a detailed business profile on the Google Business Profile page and by working on getting reviews and citations for your business, you can outrank many other businesses when it comes to displaying local convenience stores. This would result in more footfalls to your convenience store. To get it handled effectively, you can also get the process managed by any qualified agency.
5) Utilizing Other Directories to Grow Your Business
Often high authority directories also find a place in the top 10 results in Google for various local keywords. If you add your convenience store business details in such directories (like Yelp, Manta), your business can get a new channel of traffic and sales. Furthermore, if you utilize the paid advertising mediums that some of such sites offer for better visibility, you can get more people to arrive at your convenience store using such directories.
6) Social Media Marketing
In an era where billions of profiles exist on social media, it will be detrimental if your convenience store business doesn’t mark its presence there. However, just keeping a profile on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is not that useful. You have to do some starting groundwork to raise these profiles into ones that have a following of at least a few thousand. This is achievable by constantly posting good content on such platforms and by interacting with other local communities and influencers. If you want to ease out this process, you can get assistance from any social media marketing agency.
7) Power Up Your Business With Email Marketing
By hearing the term email marketing, many people think of sending emails randomly to thousands of people. However, email marketing is a systematic and professional way to boost your convenience store business. If your convenience store works towards collecting the email addresses of your present or potential customers, your business can soon have a ready-to-send list of thousands of people to whom you can announce your new offers and products at any time you wish. Collecting emails is not a quick process as it requires persistence but the results are much bigger than the efforts applied. So get email opt-in forms ready on all your digital assets wherever you can.
8) Text to Win Contests
If email marketing is one source of remaining in touch with customers, SMS is an even better method. This method requires collecting the mobile numbers of prospective customers which can be done creatively by holding a “text to win” contest. Such contests require texting a message along with opting to future messages in order to be eligible for the rewards. Once you have collected a big userbase of local numbers, you can send out your offers and convenience store advertisements at any time you wish.
9) Food Truck and Coupon Combos
You can distribute coupons to local food trucks and can ask them to offer them for free to their customers. In order to redeem these coupons, people will have to make a purchase of some amount at your convenience store. You can use such coupons for discounts on items that have a high margin so that the purchase by the customer along with the coupon will still be profitable for your business.
10) Eye Catching Banners Across Your Store Route
Before people visit your convenience store, have banners and boards displayed across the road for a few kilometers before your actual store location. This will create more attention to the proximity of your business and will drive more people to your store. Banners and billboards are one of the most common offline advertising methods for convenience stores.
11) Use Fast Food Incentives to Halt More People
Food is a common and natural attention seeker. By giving space to fast food businesses (or any other food-related business) on your premise, you can give more reason for people to halt their vehicles at your convenience store. You can again give coupons for your convenience store using this fast food stall/shop to give additional reason to people to check out your convenience store.
12) Mobile App for Your Convenience Store
You can get a mobile app made for your convenience store so that people can select and add products to their basket to collect them later from your store (also called as curbside pickup). Apart from this, your business can push offer notifications from time to time using your app thereby promoting your best offers and products.
13) Growth Using Data and Consumer Behavior Analysis
By making use of data collected through sales at your convenience store, you can better manage and showcase products. By studying sales data, you can come across some patterns regarding the choice of customers, seasonal changes in demand for products, best-selling products, etc. The more insights you get on your sales, the better you can manage your business and can avoid wastage or stock jams.
14) Social Media Contests
Social media contests are a great way to get attention and participation from people. Usually, social media contests that include sharing the contest with a few friends are a great way to initiate a chain reaction and to grow your reach. There are many apps available nowadays that allows easily creating and managing such contests.
15) New and Unique Product Ranges
To gain an extra edge over the competition, have a good range of unique or less available products. You can set up Google alerts or can subscribe to feeds of news sites to be informed of new products in the market followed by getting these products on the shelves of your convenience store. By having these products and actively announcing the availability of these products, you can raise the footfall of your convenience store.
16) Loyalty Program
By introducing a loyalty program, you will add a new reason for your one-time customer to become your repeat customer. There are many applications using which your convenience store can set up the loyalty program.
17) Partner With Nearby Crowded Businesses
Distribute bulk coupons to all the nearby businesses where the footfall is high. Ask these business owners to distribute your coupons for free to their customers. By getting these coupons into the hands of more people, you will soon see growth in the number of customers to your convenience store.
18) Offer Regular Gadgets
Many times people forget essential gadgets while doing travel. Some of these products are chargers, batteries, headphones, etc. Start keeping varieties of these products too and display them so as to get more sales per customer. Keep a note of all such gadgets that people ask for in your convenience store and depending upon the frequency of its demand, start stocking them.
19) Online Order and Curbside Pickups
You can take the sales of your convenience store to a next level by providing home delivery. You do not need to hire extra personnel to enable home deliveries. You can easily contract out home delivery options to services like Postmates, Doordash, etc. Along with home deliveries, your business can also make use of curbside pickups to provide more convenience to your customers.
20) Community Events and Sponsorships
Let more people become aware of your business by regularly participating in community events. By local participation, it will also generate an impression of being a familiar and trustworthy business which is helpful for the growth of your convenience store. You can start sponsorship programs and can announce them in schools and colleges to make your business more known among people.
21) Special Events
For special occasions, come up with unique events to gather crowds. Be its independence day, labor day, some big football match, etc, have something unique to pull more people towards your business. You can also announce incentives and rewards during such occasions.
22) Food Items Variety
With people becoming more health conscious, include fresh food varieties for more sales. You can go through YouTube videos and can find many new fresh food combinations and recipes. The more unique items you have, the more will be your USP and ultimately more sales.
23) Boost Sales With Window Displays
As a business owner, you know the frequency of sales of different products in your store. To further boost your revenue, arrange all the best sellers on your window display so that more people can see and buy them.
24) Maintain Stock
Maintaining stock is an essential part of a business to ensure that depleting stocks can be refilled as early as possible. More people returning empty-handed from your store means more loss of potential revenue. Therefore have an efficient stock managing mechanism.
25) Competitor Review
Always be attentive to what your competing businesses are doing. Send a few of your people to other famous convenience stores to study how well they are performing and what are they doing to boost sales. By doing this, you will remain competitive with the rest of the businesses in your niche.
26) Customer Reviews
Many people might simply opt not to come to your convenience store if they find many negative reviews or even less number of reviews. On the other hand, having a good number of positive reviews will entice more people to visit your store. So ask your customers to leave feedback online or even give them some reward coupons to leave feedback online.
We hope that this list of ideas for advertising your convenience store gives you diverse options to grow your business. If you feel that something is unclear, is missed out or if you want to share your thoughts on this subject, just reply below.
