Material Retail Dumps

For retailers with limited resources and tight budgets, marketing efforts can be a huge undertaking because of the time, effort and knowledge you need to get your marketing off the ground. If you’re ready to start marketing your shop like a pro, here’s 6 tips that when implemented can have a huge impact on your store.

Create an Online Destination

If you don’t already have a website, now’s the time to tackle the world of e-commerce. If you do have a website, you’ll want to make sure you’re creating the best possible experience for your customers. This means making it easy to find, easy to navigate, pleasing to look at, and true to your brand.

Here’s some key things to keep in mind as you set up your website:

Make It Easy For Customers To Find Your Website

Having a website is great, but you want to make sure customers are aware of your website. You can do this using a few different strategies.

Have a memorable URL that makes sense for your shop. Something like “yourstorename.com” or “shopyourstorename.com” or “yourstorenameboutique.com”.
Remind customers about the option to shop online by putting it on things like your receipts, your packaging, your social media accounts, etc. The more they see it, the more they’ll remember it when they’re on their next at home shopping spree.
Have strong SEO. When customers search “Clothing Stores Near Me” or “Clothing Boutiques” you don’t want to be buried under the Macy’s and Amazon’s of the world who can afford to spend millions of dollars in ads each year.

Make It Easy For Customers To Navigate Your Website

Once customers reach your online destination, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly & easily. If customers can’t easily find the product category they’re looking for, they’ll get frustrated & click away before you get the chance to show them everything you have, which is why optimizing your website navigation and homepage is critical. Every store’s navigation can vary slightly, so here’s some things to keep in mind:
Make it clear & concise. Customers want the latest & greatest, so make it easy for them to find the newest items in your shop by having a tab for New Arrivals. For the rest of the navigation you’ll want to list your broader departments and use categories to specify the styles of those products.
For example your navigation would read: New Arrivals, Clothing, Accessories, Shoes, Handbags, etc. Then nested under each of those categories would be your subcategories. So under Clothing you’d have dresses, tops, bottoms, etc. This lets the customer quickly get to exactly what they’re looking for, without having to scroll through tons of products they might not be interested in buying.
Optimize Your Homepage. If your customer doesn’t quite know what they want to buy, or they’re just browsing, your homepage should convince them to click further into the website. If they don’t immediately click on your navigation, chances are, they’ll scroll down the rest of the page to get a glimpse of what you carry, what you’re promoting, or what you think they need most.

Think of it like they’re shopping in your physical store. If they walked in as a first time shopper, you’d want to help them navigate through your store & give recommendations about things in your store they can’t live without. You wouldn’t ignore them and make them figure it out on their own!

Make Your Website Visually Pleasing

Customers form a first impression about your website almost instantly. In fact, it only takes people about 50 milliseconds to decide whether they like your site or not. You can only make a first impression once, so it’s worth it to invest in the best possible site design available to you.

Luckily, you don’t have to be a pro in photoshop to have a beautiful website. Using resources like Canva with thousands of pre-made templates should do the trick. Just resize them to fit your website dimensions, and change the text to reflect what you want your homepage to show.

Once you have your designs ready, put them on a website builder that’s reliable and easy to use, like Material or Shopify. That way you can take your designs and plug them into their designated container and have a beautiful website in a matter of minutes.

Of course, if this all seems like too much, you can always outsource it by using a Marketing Agency for small businesses, like Material Managed Services. Or, find a graphic design student at a college near you, and pay them a small fee. They’ll be thrilled to gain the experience and make a little extra change while doing it.

Prioritize your Brand

A pretty website is a must - however, don’t lose your own branding. You want your website to be an extension of your store windows (if you have a physical storefront) and if you’re an online only boutique, you want to remain memorable and unique to customers who could potentially be browsing hundreds of sites per month. If your website looks like everyone else’s, it will get lost in the shuffle, so when you’re creating your online destination, remember what makes your store unique, special, and why customers should pick you over any other store.
To do this, incorporate key factors of your brand like:

Making your logo visible at the top of every page
Finding ways to incorporate your key store colors & fonts
Have a clear & visible “About Us” page. You can showcase how you came up with the idea for your store, why you’re passionate about it, and what sets your store apart from others. Let customers know about you and the team that supports you. Your about us page should capture the charm of your small business and remind customers that they are shopping from an actual person, not a large corporation.

Leverage Email Marketing

Keeping in touch with your customers is essential. Since they are the lifeblood of your business,
You’ll want to keep them up to date with everything happening in store and/or online. This means things like letting them know about store sales where they can save big, showing off new merchandise, or just sending them a small “hi” every few weeks to remind them that you’re still there.

Luckily email marketing has become extremely simplified with its popularity. It’s super easy to use a visual email builder to drag and drop your content right into a template & send.

If you feel like you don’t have enough customers to send to, or you have no customer data at all, check out our post on First Party Data and how it can help your business grow.

Make a dent in the Social Media Landscape

Social media is the main way to speak to your customers in this day and age. It can also be a powerful tool to build your brand, and grow your awareness and sales. With so many different platforms & options it can be overwhelming and it’s easy to just let it fall to the wayside. Here’s some important things to consider when engaging on social media.

Choose the right platforms for you. Since social media is a big undertaking, we recommend starting with one platform and really perfecting it. Once you’ve established that, it will be easier to branch out to the others. The big 4 you’ll want to focus on for shopping & engagement are:
Facebook: Users are typically 27+, and because Facebook and Instagram are so interconnected, to have one you have to have the other. Facebook will give you the option to sell on both platforms, schedule posts in advance, and post slightly longer content.
Instagram: Users range in age, so you can really interact with everyone. This platform is great for visual brands selling things like clothing, art, home goods, beauty, etc. It also has a shopping aspect tied into facebook, so tagging products is easy. Try not to be only promotional on this channel. You’ll also want to offer substance and inspiration for followers. You can also create video content very easily on this channel using their reels tool.
Pinterest: Users range in age, and typically use it for inspiration or aspirational goals. You can create boards for different categories in your shop, and link all pins back to your website for a seamless checkout for customers ready to buy. This channel is more about engagement & reach than sales—like an extra catalog for customers.
TikTok: These days, almost everyone has TikTok in some capacity. We recommend perfecting your instagram reels, then transferring the style to TikTok. Posting daily is key and using the right promoted hashtags can help you reach customers around the world.
Keep up on community engagement. Customers might comment on posts or slide into your DMs asking questions about a product or your business. Treat these like any other customer service task and answer them promptly and clearly. This will make them feel valued and seen by you!
Be authentic in your posts. If you’re constantly pushing product, it becomes inauthentic and predictable for the customer and they have a tendency to lose interest. Instead, you’ll want to create a lifestyle around your brand and your page; Sprinkling in promotional posts but also posting about your community, your customers, behind the scenes at the store, things that inspire you, polls and user-generated content.
Use effective hashtags & keywords. This is especially important for channels like Instagram and TikTok. Start by researching popular hashtags in your industry and avoid generic hashtags like #love and #clothing - they’re not really doing anything for you at that point. Make sure not to #hashtag #every #word #in #your #caption as that is hard for customers to read and isn’t an effective use of hashtags.
Have fun with it! Get your followers involved and engaged as much as possible by showing them exactly who you and your shop are. This will help convert those followers into lifetime customers.

Work with Brand Ambassadors

Starting a Brand Ambassador program is a great way to get your customers more involved in the shop, and grow brand awareness through your community. You’ll gain access to customers, friends of customers, friends of friends of customers and so on.

Brand Ambassador Programs don’t have to be costly.
Give your original brand ambassadors a shopping budget to pick out what they like from the store – typically 2-3 outfits and decide on their expected deliverables. Maybe you ask for 3 instagram posts, 2 stories, and a TikTok in exchange. Give them a unique promo code to offer their friends at checkout so they can try out some items from your shop.

To pull more people into the program, create an easy-to-access google form or other intake form to get their information and get them into the program quickly without all the back and forth.

As the program grows, you’ll not only have a ton of great content for your website, social media, and more, but you’ll have more sales, more reach, and more customers. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Delegate, When You Can

Trust us, we know all of this sounds like a huge undertaking, but don’t feel like you need to tackle this all on your own. You can strategically hire employees that have a passion for social media or graphic design, and add that to their daily duties in addition to selling on the sales floor. For more strategies on how to do this and to learn from other business owners their best techniques, check out our blog post on hiring.

If you don’t have room to hire more employees right now, delegate tasks to them when it’s quiet at the shop! You can create a task list for employees to tackle when they’re not selling and you have the opportunity to teach them something new!

If your employees are stretched thin and you need help elsewhere, you can always hire an agency to tackle some of the heavy lifting of your store’s marketing. Programs like Material Managed Services can help with everything from data entry to graphic design and social media strategy while keeping your costs to a minimum.

Effective marketing machines don’t happen overnight!

Take it slow, and make small progress every day and you’ll start seeing a return after just a month of implementing these strategies. If something isn’t working for you, don’t be afraid to pivot or ask for help!