Marketing Strategies for Retail & Online Grocery Businesses

by Your RetailCoach YourRetailCoach

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Grocery as a business in India is unique due to the sheer variety and the number of distribution models that are available — from small Kirana stores to huge supermarkets to online grocery stores. But the important thing to be noted is that the majority of the grocery business still happens in the unorganized space through small stores. With over 12 million small stores and estimated sales of USD 500 billion, India’s F&G retail market is considered the third-largest in the world.

Generally in India, the mom-and-pop stores are operated with a healthy sense of camaraderie within the societal surroundings they operate in. There is a healthy sense of trust among regular customers. This might change in the future with new entrants with a corporate “no-frills” approach.

There will be new entrants and a new generation of entrepreneurs who will do business differently from how it was done in the past. There will be an eagerness for new strategies and they would not hesitate from breaking traditions to adopt new approaches of conducting the business.

In this post, we shall highlight a few effective marketing strategies for grocery businesses in the offline setup as well as emerging strategies for their online counterparts.

Marketing strategies for retail grocery stores

· Product visibility: In-store product visibility is vital for generating customer interest and action. The time a customer spends in a store must be fully utilized. An average customer comes with a planned list of purchases. Visibility can generate even unplanned purchases. What in-store product visibility effectively does is it tickles a customer’s memory about requirements which could not make it to his/her shopping list. The better the visibility of the merchandise, the higher are the prospects of increased sales. The know-how of visual merchandising and shelf-space management are bonuses given the constraint of an average store size in India.

· Competitive pricing: The label price is flexible downwards and it would be naïve to assume that a sensible customer would not see through that. Grocers who do not use this flexibility are bound to lose customers to competitors with the rest of the offering being similar. However, competitive pricing needs to be synced with the expected increase in sales and its effect on the overall profitability. Also, grocers need to be transparent to customers with their discount and delivery policies.

· Home delivery facility: In the grocery business, you are dealing with products of everyday usage and there is every possibility that people run out of essentials at any time. To grab all the available opportunities of making a sale, you will have to align your business to become more customer-friendly. Make home delivery one of the highlights of your store and it would bring in more customers wanting to avail the facility. This will also attract bulk monthly grocery purchases from customers.

· Implement technology: Every business today is incorporating relevant technologies to streamline their operations. Implementing digitization or automation for better monitoring of your sales and inventory will bring in better inventory management and record-keeping would become smoother. An added advantage of digitization is access to accurate business data that enables better planning to prevent excess/under stocking and meet market demand consistently. Something as simple as a WhatsApp business account could help grocers receive orders online or address customer enquiries and complaints in a shorter time.

Marketing strategies for online grocery stores

Digital marketing

· Search Engine Optimization (SEO): An online grocery store must be able to optimize on-site content in such a manner that it gets easily indexed by Google and gets ranked high for prominent keywords. There can be numerous keywords to choose from but a brand must do a good job at keyword research and be able to anticipate keywords that are more likely to be used by prospects. Developing a comprehensive SEO strategy must involve writers working in tandem with SEO specialists to get optimum results.

· Social Media Marketing: Given the multitude of multiple social media platforms available, you will have to focus your efforts on those platforms where the majority of your target audience is active. The objective here is to increase online visibility, establish brand communication with your target audience, enhance customer relationships, and create opportunities for conversion.

· Paid advertising and promotion: Achieving organic growth in search engines and social media platforms is a tough task nowadays. The paid route allows businesses to get preferential treatment in terms of outreach on a platform. Pay-to-play models have become the norm of the day. Besides, there are effective tracking and monitoring to ensure your ad money is well spent.

Conventional marketing

Conventional techniques can be also effective for enhancing visibility to local audiences in target market geography. These can be in the form of advertising in the local newspapers, pamphlets and flyers, hoardings, electronic billboards.

Digital analytics

Digital analytics play an instrumental role in understanding and improving the customer journey and experience. It can reveal insights on web traffic, browsing time, popular product categories, geographical concentration, conversions, the performance of social media campaigns, etc. It lets you better gauge your target market segment in terms of how smoothly they are moving along the customer journey and also how they are responding to your digital marketing initiatives. Such insights help you come up with more effective marketing strategies.

Competitive Pricing

The pricing war is not just between close competitors but is also cross-channel. With conventional grocers resorting to selling below printed prices, online grocers always need to keep that in consideration. The latter should also refrain from making home-delivery service an expensive burden for customers. The grocery business is flourishing in India driven by an increase in grocery consumption demand. But a striking feature is that the conventional stores reign a massive 98% of the grocery retail market leaving only a paltry share for the organized players including the ones in the online format. It also indicates the massive opportunities that lie ahead.