Array

How do I convert from the shopping aisle? Note these three things!

How do you get people from the shopping aisle to your own store? We will tell you about it and how digital signage is related to it.

In this article you will learn:

  • how do you do more distinctive marketing
  • what kind of content works best
  • how you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your advertising

The people who do their shopping in a shopping center are the best customer base for the stores. People come to the shopping center not only to buy something specific, but also to spend time and look at the general offer. So people are at least somewhat sensitized to buy. How can this willingness to buy be converted into sales?

First of all, it is worth remembering that the shopping corridor is a marketing battlefield. All the stores along it try to attract people to shop in their store with their own advertising. And not just with advertising. Potential customers’ first impression of the store is already formed before they have even stepped inside the store. Often, the impression is not formed at all, because nothing in the storefront and in front of the store attracts attention. That’s why our first advice is:

Make more distinctive marketing

A person walking down the shopping aisle only has a moment to make observations about the store. That’s why the store needs to capture the interest of the passer-by quickly, and distinctive marketing is needed for that.

Depending on where you live, the average Finnish person is slightly exposed to thousands of marketing and advertising messages per day. The competition for our attention is therefore fierce. Even a good advertisement can go unnoticed in this drumfire. In this situation the way in which the message is presented to us becomes more important than the message itself. A static advertising surface is starting to be classified as wall paper, so it does not pique interest in us. On the other hand, the magic of a moving image remains, because the movement itself attracts our attention even if we don’t want to. According to research, moving image attracts attention up to 400% better than a stationary, printed or text advertising poster.

A person walking down a shopping aisle will therefore notice advertising presented in video format significantly better. Videos on the displays visible from the windows of the store can attract the attention of passers-by, but even more effective is the display in front of the store, which is directly in the direction of the passerby’s gaze. There is a ready-made product for this – an affordable, cost-effective, light and easily portable Digital A-board

Create more engaging content

The purchase process on the customer’s end goes roughly like this: when we notice a product that interests us, the brain’s reward centers are activated and arouse the desire to buy. The price of the product accordingly inhibits this willingness. We make a quick mental assessment of whether the benefit or pleasure offered by the product is greater than the pain caused by giving up the money. If so, trades will be made.

The easiest, but also the most short-sighted way to increase the willingness to buy is to focus on the price. You can sell almost anything at a cheap price, but the road is short. It is more profitable to sell goods with a decent margin. Then you have to try to increase the customer’s experience of the necessity of the product, or even better, get the customer to create an emotional bond with the product, in which case the price may completely lose its meaning.

Read the article: How do I do good retail marketing?

The formation of an emotional bond between the customer and the product can be helped by highlighting the added value provided by the product. The experience of added value is individual and consists of the person’s own wishes and desires. Added value can be immediate, a benefit provided by the product, or it can be instrumental. For example, in branded products, the consumer doesn’t buy because of the product, but because of the brand it represents and all the associations attached to it.

In the online stores, it has been easy to use videos to create added value for the products by highlighting the product’s features, usage connections and, above all, visual narration that strengthens the product’s image. In the physical store, video has not been as natively available, but now the situation has changed. Digital signage offers the opportunity to use video in marketing, and various solutions are available, from affordable entry-level products to complete digital signage systems.

Test and strive for better all the time

There are many types of marketing – some work, some don’t. And it’s not even that the other marketing message or way of presentation is clearly worse. The effectiveness of an ad depends on many factors, such as the target group, the visual appearance or the content of the message. When the goal is to attract customers from the shopping aisle, more variables come into play, for example the duration of the ad.

However, advertising shouldn’t be a lottery, and it doesn’t have to be. Advertising displays in the store or in front of it offer an excellent opportunity for simple A/B testing of different ads. By showing different versions of the same ad, you can find out which one works best.

Before testing, it is important to determine whether you want to find out which version of the ad attracts the most customers to the store or which version generates more sales. Then create two or more different ad versions with clear differences in, for example, content, visual appearance, duration or target group. By presenting these versions at comparable points in time and then comparing the conversion rate or sales volumes, we can see which of the versions produced the best results.

However, the winner of the test is not the unequivocally best ad, which is then driven to the pinnacle of the world, but only the best of the tested versions. Therefore, it is necessary to continue testing regularly and always look for better and more efficient ways to bring more customers to the store.

Producing different ad versions may sound expensive, but it really isn’t. There are solutions for creating video content that can be used to produce advertising videos almost automatically.

You can read more about digital signage and its effective use here: What does digital signage mean?

Tips in a nutshell

Capture the attention of passers-by in the shopping aisle with the stopping power of moving image.

Create advertising content that adds value to the product and creates an emotional bond between the customer and the product.

Constantly test the effectiveness of ads and improve them based on the results.