On one side there are big eCommerce sites that are growing their market share in selling toys and on the other side, there are already established retail toy stores that are controlling a big chunk of local toy sales. In such a case, making your toy store grow consistently requires a systematic implementation of a robust marketing strategy. The toy store marketing ideas given in this blog post will make you conscious of the best methods that you can start executing to start selling more toys. So start reading the best ideas for promoting your toy store given below:
1) Revamp Your Site to Grow Conversions
A website must be the first medium that you must focus on in order to grow your toy store sales. This is because optimizing your toy store website will require very few changes and the results achieved will be in a greater proportion to the changes being carried out. Now, let us see what changes will be required.
A) Provide the option to let your site visitors buy directly from your website by uploading and updating your stock regularly on your site.
B) To boost the effectiveness of your website, have a high-quality video in addition to the text content on your website. The simple reason is that videos are much more efficient in convincing and converting than text.
C) Test the time taken by your toy store website to get fully loaded. If it is slow, resolve the factors that are making the site slow because just a 1-second lag in site loading can cause a loss of 6-7% of visitors.
D) Test the site resolution on various devices like phones, laptops, and tablets. If the site does adjust according to the screen size, then well and fine, else make the site resolution flexible to avoid traffic loss.
E) Testimonials, awards, achievements, coverage in newspapers/media, etc are some of the things that convey a sense of trust to the people visiting your website and help in increasing the chance of sales. So ensure to make these things present on your website.
2) Work on Site SEO to Gain More Visibility and Sales
Though SEO (search engine optimization) for your website is a slightly tough game to crack and requires a few months of work to get your site on the first page of Google, the results produced by a good-ranking site are just worth the effort. Getting visitors through organic traffic results in good conversion rates too because the visitors reaching your site through organic searches are actively seeking the products (toys, in this case) served by your business (toy store). Since too many factors go into SEO, the best way out to handle SEO for your website is to delegate the site ranking to a third-party agency that is good at ranking its clients online.
3) Get the Wide Range of Benefits from Press Releases
Press releases that appear on Google search results are not created with the sole purpose of making an announcement. They do have many extra and powerful benefits attached to them. From capturing traffic from search engines to building the brand value of a business, press releases cover these benefits easily provided a quality distribution service is utilized. They also give faster visibility and hundreds of quality backlinks to your website. Keeping all such factors in consideration, press release marketing is a must for your business and you must often send out press releases for your toy store.
4) Influence Your Traffic and Sales with Content
As the owner of a toy store, you can easily brainstorm the type of search queries (keywords) that people might type in their browser for availing toys locally (for example, “where to buy stuffed toys in [city/town]”). To get an extensive list of all such keywords, you can either use a keyword-finding tool like Ahrefs or can ask any freelancer to do it for your business. Once you have the list of all such relevant keywords, you can start getting content on them posted on your toy store website. This process of content marketing will start building up the traffic (visitors) to your website and in a few months, your business website will attract traffic in hundreds/thousands per day thereby getting you a free flow of customers consistently.
5) Build and Optimize GBP
To score more customers looking for toy stores locally, your business must definitely pay attention to getting your business details displayed in the “Google Local Pack” that appears on the first page of search results for local search keywords. Though the basic minimum requirement for getting displayed in this section is having a “Google Business Profile” (GBP) page created for your toy business, the display frequency is largely dependent on how well you optimize your business profile. You can learn to optimize this profile yourself or for professional support, you can let any SEO agency handle the work.
6) Start Availing These Benefits of Email Marketing
One common mistake many businesses (and services) do while promoting their business/service online is that they place too much weight on organic ranking in Google. They do forget the fact that the search engine rankings are volatile due to the growing competition as well as due to periodic Google algorithm updates. This is why we stress on the importance of collecting the email addresses of your site visitors so that you always have direct access to people who have shown interest in your business. Email marketing for your toy store is also important considering the fact that it helps to establish long-term relations with customers as a result of which you start building customer loyalty and can also promote new toys, new offers, and discounts, any time to your email subscribers.
7) Paid Advertising on Top-Tier Networks
The next good strategy for advertising a toy store is through paid ads online. Ads can be overwhelming to manage at first due to the presence of several factors that help in shaping a successful ad campaign. However, one can become familiar with these parameters easily as there are many free and paid tutorials and courses available online for most of the big advertising networks. Very few advertising networks online are capable of providing high-quality traffic and customers for your business and it is, therefore, best to stick to the most popular ones like Google, Facebook, and Bing to do paid advertising.
8) Tap the Potential of Social Media for Growth
Tapping into the potential of social media for promoting your toy business can open the doorways to a new medium for acquiring clients for your business. Apart from the usual paid ads on social media, you can organically build your toy store following on social media by regularly contributing good content in the form of photos, videos, text, animation, etc. Businesses that have remained consistent in growing their presence on social media organically have achieved long-term results and even indirect results in terms of improving the SEO benefits of their official website. As more local people start following your toy business on social media, your business will prosper even more.
9) Start Building Video Assets
Not only websites, but even videos tend to rank in organic search results of Google if they are relevant to a user query (particularly long-tail keywords). For this reason, making and uploading videos on YouTube for longer keywords (longer than 5-6 words) is a good strategy to open a new channel of recurring traffic (and sale) generation for your toy store. Since recording and making videos by yourself has become very easy due to the availability of many video editing software, you can start creating and uploading videos regularly for various combinations of local toy-related keywords and can start seeing sales growth for your business.
10) Give Extra Items, Get Repeat Customers
When people buy a toy from your store and get an extra item as a gift, it creates the potential to make the customer come again. This extra item should ideally be an inexpensive item like pen, mug, diary, etc with your toy store name printed on it. With many custom printing services available online, you can easily purchase such custom-printed items in bulk to use them for loyalty building.
11) Explore and List on Other Powerful Sources of Traffic
If you search Google (the first 10-20 results only) for many variations of keywords related to local toy stores like “toy store near me”, “toy stores in [city/town]”, etc, you will certainly find a few such directories (for example, Yelp) that will allow listing of businesses and services. By providing your business details on these sites, you will certainly get a few new customers every month from these sources. This process will also create new backlinks to your toy store website which is an added bonus of this method.
12) Impact Local People Socially Through Influencers
On social media networks, find a few local (from your city/town) social media influencers and get them to share content about your toy store. As followers on social media are affected more by content shared by their influencers whom they follow, such type of promotion will yield better results in marketing your toy store. To add a new twist to this influencer marketing technique, you can announce influencer-specific discounts to make this marketing method more special.
13) Give Good Reasons to Get Referred
While quality service and good communication skills are natural ways to make customers come back to your store, you can print referral coupons to give to your customers to make them refer new customers or to avail of such coupons on their next visit. This method of giving referral coupons is more effective than simply asking your customers to refer your toy store.
14) Grow Sales with In-Store and Online Kids’ Contests
Host contests in your toy store as well as online with kids as the participants. Announce these contests through ads in local newspapers and through school staff. Give toys and your toy store coupons to the winners and participants respectively. This will bring more attention and customers to your toy store.
15) Do Marketing Through Donation, Participation, and Support
Donate to local NGOs working for children, participate in their events, and support their initiatives in order to get media coverage as well as public attention. Since such NGOs have an easy reach to many schools and child-related events, you can utilize this reach to promote your toy store side by side.
16) Take Part in Community-Level Gathering
Any occasion that causes the gathering of the local crowd gives a good marketing environment too. However, the modes of marketing will be different depending on the type of gathering. At some local gatherings, you can become a sponsor/co-sponsor while on the other, you can get your toy store coupons distributed. You can also book your toy store stall in case of events promoting local businesses.
17) Use the Marketing Blend of Psychiatrist with Local Print Media
Most print media houses welcome contributions from doctors and healthcare professionals. To market your toy store indirectly through articles published in local print media, you can associate with a psychiatrist to get articles published on various benefits of toys on growing the creativity and thinking ability of children. As these articles will have a tinge of your toy store being mentioned in the article, this will cause your toy store branding and sales growth.
18) Make Your Store Layout Bring More Sales
Most marketing decisions made by people are impulsive rather than conscious. If you start seeing your toy store with the eyes of a potential customer, you will uncover many tiny details that, if improved, can add more growth to your business. A great influencing factor in attracting people to your toy store is the exterior layout of your toy store. Take a look at the best store exteriors online and use those ideas to make your toy store eye-catching and compelling for passersby.
19) Do “Watch and Upgrade” Marketing
The speed at which a new range of toys is being produced in the market is high enough. However, to get the best results for your toy stock, you must keep an active watch on which toys are becoming popular followed by stocking them at your toy store. So keep a watch on all famous toy-selling e-commerce stores online along with on social media to find out the latest varieties of toys becoming popular. If you are fast in stocking the latest popular toys, you will see the sales benefits in real-time.
20) Use Extras for Extra Income
To make extra income, you can provide more products and services apart from toys. Some good and relevant product ideas include providing video games, baby diapers, children’s books, etc. As a service add-on, you can partner with music classes, dance classes, etc, and can start referring them and can make commissions on the people referred by you.
21) Use the Power of “Exclusives”
If you can grab toy items with “exclusive” rights to sell in your region, then it can immensely help you to create a small monopoly of your toy store which will benefit you in the form of more sales and customers. New and upcoming toy companies are the ideal partners with whom you can easily make the deal of exclusive rights.
22) Increase Your Turnover with Third-Party Listings
If you consider putting stock of your toys on mega-traffic sites like Amazon, you can easily scale your sales to new locations very easily. To generate the first few sales and reviews on such e-commerce platforms, you can use the respective ad platforms. After getting the first few initial sales and reviews with ads, it becomes easy to get sales to grow organically on such platforms.
23) Get Your Advertisement Moving on Roads with Vehicle Wraps
The advertisement of your toy store can start moving across the streets if you cover your vehicle with an eye-catching vehicle wrap or banner. Such a method of toy store promotion can increase your branding too. By renting space in more vehicles, you can create a bigger marketing impact.
24) Make Use of the Duo of Discount + Social Marketing
Many people nowadays carry their mobile phones with them everywhere and hence have instant access to their social media profiles. If you start offering discounts on your toys to every customer who shares the name of your toy store along with toy pics on their social media, you will get word-of-mouth publicity on social media because these posts made by your customers will have a much better impact than the traditional advertisements done by you directly.
25) Market Your Store with School Competitions
Hold competitions in schools and offer discount vouchers for your toy store to every participating student. Even if 5 to 10 percent of these students turn up to your store with their discount vouchers, you can see big sale numbers.
26) Extend Your Offline Influence
While most of the younger demographic are active online, this is not the case with the older demographic which is why offline marketing finds a valid reason to be included in the promotion of your toy store business. Further, the brand image of a business/service is enhanced when the product/service is been viewed by people in both online and offline modes. So do make use of the common offline advertising methods like getting your toy store ads on billboards, ads in local newspapers, banners, leaflets, etc.
27) More Positive Reviews Means More Business
Reviews are increasingly becoming significant as many people in the newer generation first seek online reviews before making a purchase. So maintain a good image of your toy store online by asking your customers to leave feedback on your toy store.
With the knowledge of these toy store marketing ideas, the only thing distancing your toy business from growth is the execution of these ideas. Liked this article? If yes, then kindly share it on your favorite social media. Feel free to ask away any questions or doubts below.
