Helping our customers sell more
Whether you’re a newcomer to retail or you’re a veritable veteran, it can never hurt to swot up on the basics for a bit of a refreshers course. The Marketing Donut has condensed all you need to know about retailing into five perfectly manageable bullet points. The list includes familiar faves such as the four ‘P’s and being nice to customers or whatever. Definitely worth a quick read-through if you’re a retailer who wants to know how to retail good.
ISME (Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association) has just released their timetable for this year’s briefing sessions. These sessions are free but places are limited, so register online to guarantee your spot.
The sessions will take place from Wednesday 9th of September to Wednesday 30th of September in over twelve locations across the country including Dublin, Galway and Cork. The events promise enlightening perspectives on business from industry leaders including ISME’s own CEO, Mark Fielding.
If you’re a small/medium business owner looking to earn a few more business-savvy brownie points, this is the place to do it. For a full timetable, check out the link above.
The millennials have been the target of a barrage of advertising over the last two decades in the hopes of tiding over the materialistic new kids on the block. However, now that the millennials are aging gracefully into the ripe old demographic of 20-37 year olds, it’s about time for marketers to start shifting their attention to our new and shiny batch of impressionable youths: Generation Z. While only having been born in 1995 or later, these up-and-comers have already established new ideologies and media consumption patterns totally different to their predecessors.
Marketo have compiled a very useful infographic breaking down the characteristics of this new Gen Z which will prove to be vital for any retailer looking to appeal to this new audience. Know your enemy and all that, right? However bear in mid that all of the figures cited in the graph pertain to American Gen Z kids, but it’s still a fairly good stab at what Irish kids are doing nowadays too.
In this unforgiving capitalist world of ours, social media seems to ever be on the rise as a means of connecting with your audience. However simply signing up for a new-fangled account on Facebook or Twitter or the next big thing of the next three months won’t be enough – you need to engage with social media smartly so as to benefit not only you but also your customers. Here’s a fun guide from RazorSocial detailing how you can get the most out of your social sites to guarantee you’re reaching the audience you want and delivering the content they need. And if you’re hungry for more after that, RazorSocial have plenty of pieces on business and social media to keep you going.
While you’re here being interested in social media and all, why not another cool reminder to check out our Facebook, the ultimate paradigm of business savvy and the genuine power of friendship? It really is some solid stuff.
It can be difficult enough finding a target audience to target with your assortment of amazing goods and products, which is why it’s important to not automatically write off any particular group of potential customers. In their study ‘Grey is the New Black‘ conducted on the behalf of Retail Excellence, Behaviour & Attitudes found that many retailers dismiss older people as a potential demographic because they are all notoriously stuffy and penny-pinching and upsetting to look at obviously. However if we let go of these misconceptions, it becomes clear that this significant portion of the population (nearly 23%) is continuously undervalued as a possible market. For example, over 82% of the age 65+ demographic agreed that they had no large financial commitments as opposed to only 23% of the age 25-49 group. While this study was conducted in 2011, many of the observations still ring true today, maybe even moreso now than back then; the study remarks that while older people are not associated with being tech-savvy, many in this group have come to embrace such technologies as Sky+ Television and Skype. This study is an excellent read if you are looking to expand your market into this underappreciated demographic as it not only includes statistics and figures but also market research into this group to see what older people appreciate in their customer care.
Wikihow is a pretty wonderful resource on most everything you’re gonna have to face in life, including your business. This particularly excellent article on upselling is a really handy guide on making a closer connection with your customer and convincing them to get more bang out of their buck by splurging on a few more items. All the while the guide is illustrated with an anime-esque young woman staring sultrily and directly into the camera with a fairly distressing number of close-ups dedicated to her hands – it’s a win-win all around, honestly.
Here’s a handy video on selling techniques from Evan Carmichael. This channel is packed with videos on tips for success and here we see an especially helpful rundown of three golden rules when it comes to convincing customers to buy what you’re selling. Running just under seven minutes, this video is definitely worth a watch!!