There was a time when newsagents could put products on the shelves or the shop floor and it would sell thanks to the traffic for newspapers, lottery products, transport tickets and magazines. Now, with all these important traffic generating categories available elsewhere, traffic for most newsagency businesses is down year on year and too often nothing is being done to source net new traffic.
Take Loom Bands. If you had them in your newsagency what did you do to promote them outside your business? If you did nothing then you did not maximise the opportunity. If you promoted on your front window to passers-by kudos to you. If you created a flyer and handed this to customers, well done. If you promoted through a letterbox drop, using social media or in the local newspaper, fantastic! Newsagents who did this would have had more success with Loom Bands.
Now more than ever in our history newsagents need to engage in out of store marketing if we are to make the most of opportunities and attract business-essential new traffic. Such marketing does not need to be expensive. Indeed, anything is going to be better than the nothing being done by some.
We are each responsible for the traffic coming through our doors, no one else.
When we got Loom Brand is we promoted availability with posters facing into the mall. Being in a shopping centre this works well for us. We also positioned the product in a high traffic impulse purchase location. it worked. We sold through, ordered more, sold through and now have minimal stock.