This marketing tip is for this last ten days before Christmas when every newsagency should be at their busiest. With all the marketing activity from major retailers now is not the best time for small businesses to spend as your voice will be drowned out. Instead, focus your marketing attention inside your business. Work to leverage existing shopper traffic.
Change things around. Move your highest traffic items to a different location to disrupt shopper flow so that they see the products they may have missed before. Newsagents often complain that shoppers don’t notice things. This is because the newsagencies don’t change that much.
By making two or three tactical moves you could get existing shoppers spending more. We did this just over a week ago with a significant move for weekly magazines. In the last seven days to last night weekly magazine sales are up 7%. This is more than overall growth for magazines.
Its been fun doing that.
First thing we did on taking over was move the customer service point from directly facing the magazine/newspaper area to the opposite side of the central island we have. Old area is filled with plush, impulse buys, etc and STILL they stand there trying to hand over piles of magazines. 🙂 Hard to change people.
OTOH, we have a bit of stock we probably should not have taken at stocktake, that on closer inspection (as evidenced by the accumulation of dust / dirt) has been on the shelf too long. Once it is cleaned and moved elsewhere it sells.
We have bought very little new stock (less than $2000.00) so I am loving the customer comments about how many “new” things we now have.
So, my mantra now is “If I need to sell it, I need to move it”.