Retailers big and small are hungry for sales. With as much as 50 percent of annual sales ringing up the six weeks before Christmas, retailers bring out all the stops to entice shoppers to buy their goods and services.
The national big-box stores launch the heavy artillery through Black Friday, Cyber Monday and multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.
But independent retailers don’t have the volume discounts to offer loss-leader pricing. They don’t have the staff to operate 5 a.m.–midnight. They don’t have major distribution centers to process online sales. So how does David compete with Goliath for the mighty holiday shopping dollar?
Here are five strategies for independent retailers based on feedback from center city businesses:
1. Own a niche. Most independent retailers don’t function as department stores and can’t be all things to all people. Owners should focus on what they can do better than anyone else and grow those markets. For instance, Springfield Hot Glass has built its reputation on quality hand-blown gifts and accessories. It recently expanded its selection of custom jewelry, but has remained true to its core product lines.
2. Cultivate relationships. Having defined a niche in the marketplace, it is important to cultivate relationships with customers, neighboring businesses and the community to reinforce the quality goods and services offered. Global Fayre is very active in local fair trade organizations and schedules times at area churches where it will take products to tell the story of the store and the larger fair-trade movement.
Fusion Stained Glass on historic Commercial Street offers classes for customers to learn how to design and create their own stained-glass windows. Through the classes, the customers have a greater appreciation of the art, the pieces in the store and the owner as a person.
Vintage Vice uses its contacts on Facebook and the coffeehouse blog culture to interact with its customer base. Social media tools are a low-cost and increasingly popular form of two-way dialogue retailers and customers.
3. Market strategically. Small businesses are inundated with marketing options almost daily – newspapers, radio, television, cable, special events and Web sites. The dollars budgeted for paid advertising are precious and should be used as effectively as possible to cultivate relationships with likely customers (current and new) and reinforce the brand. Retailers should listen to customers about what they want, find out how they heard about the store and how they prefer to communicate about special deals.
Staxx is one of the most active advertisers downtown and is very deliberate on the media it selects. The store has a designated staff person to coordinate marketing campaigns, including an active e-blast distribution list –another low-cost method of reaching out to customers.
4. Collaborate to create a larger experience. Due to limited marketing dollars and time, independent retailers often collaborate to create a larger experience than what they could offer individually. A center city example is First Friday Artwalk. The owners of the retail shops, art galleries and restaurants realized they could offer the community an entire evening of entertainment.
Other center city retail collaborations include Downtown Dollars (offering something comparable to a mall gift certificate), the Downtown Holiday Shopping Guide (inserted as an advertising supplement to Springfield Business Journal), a holiday store window decorating competition on the weekend of First Friday, and Dinner and a Movie (the $5 movie tickets available at 12 participating restaurants through Valentine’s Day).
5. Promote buying local. The final strategy is to emphasize the importance of buying local. Customers aren’t just buying a gift. They are voting with their dollars that they want to support independent retailers and the alternatives they offer. The 3/50 Project cites at
www.the350project.net that for every $100 spent at independently owned stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, jobs and other spending. If the $100 is spent in a national chain, only $43 remains in the community.
With customers recently more deliberate in where they spend their limited discretionary income, it’s critical that independent businesses offer exceptional quality and strategically nurture relationships.
Rusty Worley, executive director of Urban Districts Alliance, can be reached at rusty@itsalldowntown.com.[[In-content Ad]]