31 Do's and Don'ts of Grocery Advertising in 2024

Industry Insights

31 Do's and Don'ts of Grocery Advertising in 2024

Dec 05, 2023 • 8 min read

Do you know what resonates with your customers? The grocery industry is constantly changing, and navigating this landscape to reach your customers effectively with advertising campaigns can feel next to impossible.

Competition in the grocery industry is growing every year. It’s become an arena where only the grocery stores with the best advertising can survive.

For grocery store owners, failing to adapt to the rapidly evolving advertising norms isn't just a missed opportunity; it's a direct path to becoming obsolete in a market where consumers are bombarded with choices and their loyalties shift swiftly. How can you set yourself and your store up for success?

Understanding grocery advertising is essential for surviving and thriving next year.

Grocery store marketing and advertising is critical — but it doesn’t have to be a headache. In this article, we’ll highlight how to optimize your advertising for success.

Grocery Advertising in 2024: Tips for Successful Campaigns

To set your store up for success, you need to evaluate and plan your grocery advertising strategy for this year and beyond. An effective ad campaign isn’t enough to buoy your business by itself, but it can certainly provide critical benefits to your store and your bottom line, including:

Boosting traffic and sales
Increasing brand awareness
Educating customers on your offerings
Highlighting promotions and deals

When selecting advertising channels, consider your target audience. Where are they looking for updates and promotions on grocery items? Where are they most likely to engage with your messaging?

For example, social media ads can reach younger demographics on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but these platforms are unlikely to resonate with older audiences. Local radio spots may resonate with a broad local audience during drive times, but will be less effective if your market isn’t made up of regular commuters. Email marketing can be effective in building relationships with existing customers. The right channel depends on your goals and customer base. A good starting point is to test your messaging on different platforms with smaller budgets to determine effectiveness before allocating more cash to any one platform.

Budgeting for advertising as a grocery store also requires careful planning. Set aside a portion of your grocery store marketing budget for paid ads. Start small with initial tests, then monitor performance indicators like impressions, clicks, store visits, and sales lift. Look for the channels that deliver the strongest results for your spend, and increase budgets while cutting underperforming platforms. Don't spread your budget too thin across too many outlets or overinvest in advertising that isn't working. Agile budgeting that follows the data will make your ad dollars go further.

With this in mind, let’s dive into our list of grocery advertising do’s and don’ts.

Grocery Advertising Do’s

Let’s begin examining some key “do’s” of grocery store advertising. The tips on this list offer great starting points for your next ad campaign, and might provide context for grocery store owners looking to level up their advertising efforts.

Use Targeted Digital Ads:
Targeted digital ads can be very effective for retail advertising. You can create targeted advertisements based on customer data and demographics, then serve those advertisements to specific shopper segments. Base your targeted ads on data like location, age, gender, and browsing history.
Highlight Quality:
One of the most critical things customers are looking for from your grocery store is fresh, quality food. One of the best ways to entice customers to try your store is to highlight the freshness of your produce and meat. Include imagery of vibrant fruits, vegetables, and butcher counters to show off your top-notch selections.
Focus on Organic Products:
Modern audiences in most markets are health-conscious. Grocery stores can leverage this trend by focusing on healthy or organic products. Use your ads to promote specialty items like organic produce, natural meats, and gluten-free offerings.

Promote Convenience:
The modern era is also the age of ready-to-eat meals or convenient meal kits. Your store should offer prepared food meal kits and other easy weeknight dinner solutions. Promoting these offerings can help you appeal to busy professionals in your customer base.
Offer Exclusive Deals:
Another winning strategy is offering personalized and exclusive deals to loyalty members. Create a loyalty program for your store and incentivize enrollment in your loyalty program by advertising special offers and coupon deals for members only. You can use a robust point of sale (POS) system, like Markt POS, to manage these loyalty programs.
Partner With Local Influencers:
A creative way to reach a younger customer base is to partner with local influencers and personalities. Collaborate with popular local influencers to tap into their audiences and use their platform for an authentic endorsement of your store.
Share Behind-the-Scenes Content:
Behind-the-scenes content is a great way to share your business and let customers get to know you and your store better. Share posts and videos of your store’s inside operations to bring customers into your inner circle and to build stronger relationships.
Use Visual Elements:
Your grocery store is a colorful place! Don’t let that go to waste — use it in your advertising. Create compelling content using appetizing images and other visual content that showcases your product offerings.
Leverage User-Generated Content:
When you connect with your customer base online, you have many unique opportunities. One such opportunity is user-generated content (UGC). Use reviews and social posts to your advantage by reposting and highlighting customer photos. Sharing these real customer experiences helps you connect and build trust with your audience.
Use Geotargeting:
Targeting customers online can seem tricky, but with geotargeted ads, you can easily target customers near your store locations. Create a geo-fence around your store to serve ads to nearby shoppers and drive foot traffic.
Leverage Humor:
You don’t have to take your advertising so seriously! If your customer base is younger — Millennial or Gen Z customers — using humor and witty copy connects and creates a friendly, playful dynamic.
Offer Curbside Pickup:
In recent years, online shopping and buy online, pickup-in-store (BOPIS) options have become increasingly popular. Advertise delivery and curbside pickup offerings to win customers looking for convenience.
Advertise With the Season:
Staying relevant can seem challenging, but it doesn’t have to be! You can keep your store relevant all year long simply by promoting holiday-specific products and bundles. Spotlight seasonal items around occasions like summer BBQ packages or holiday meal solutions to maximize your advertisements’ impact.
Highlight Initiatives:
Causes and initiatives drive modern customers. If you want to reach your audience on a different level, you can highlight sustainability initiatives and corporate social responsibility efforts. Share any commitments you have to reducing food waste or increasing local sourcing to win socially conscious customers.
Retarget Lost Customers:
Did you recently lose a regular customer? Or did a customer visit your e-commerce store, put items in their basket, and then bounce? You can run retargeting advertisements reminding customers of your store’s offerings and their abandoned online carts. Re-engaging site visitors can help them remember what they liked about the items they initially showed interest in.
Track Performance Metrics:
Finally, remember to track your results. Tracking performance metrics can help you optimize your ads and get the most. Use a cloud-based system to give you access to your numbers whenever, wherever. Then, look beyond vanity metrics like impressions and social media engagement, and optimize your efforts based on key conversion goals and revenue targets.

Grocery Advertising Don'ts

Next, let’s get negative and cover the essential “don’ts” of grocery store advertising. Steer clear of the pitfalls on this list to maximize the impact of your advertising efforts.

Rely Solely on Traditional Channels:
Legacy media still has a place in your grocery advertising campaign. However, you shouldn’t rely solely on print ads and other traditional channels. If you neglect digital platforms and social channels, you will miss a large portion of your potential audience.
Be Too Sales-y:
Your advertisements are designed to sell products, but that doesn’t mean they have to be overly sales-y. Avoid high-pressure tactics and pushy, promotional language. Instead, aim for a helpful and conversational brand voice to connect with your customer base.
Ignore Mobile:
More than half of all web traffic happens on mobile devices. If you aren’t optimizing your e-commerce platform and online ads for mobile, you’re missing a major opportunity. Ensure ads and site content display properly on all devices.
Neglect To Track Performance Metrics:
We mentioned the importance of tracking metrics in the “do’s” section, but it’s important enough that it bears another mention here. If you neglect to track your ad campaigns’ performance, you risk wasting cash on efforts that aren’t resonating with your customer base.
Retarget Too Aggressively:
Retargeting customers is a strong strategy to win back business. However, you don’t want to inundate customers with too many retargeting ads. Limit the frequency of your retargeting campaigns and nurture contacts with valuable content, not just constant promotions.
Create False Urgency:
Urgency can be a strong motivator in advertising… but only when it’s genuine. Including deceptive calls-to-action (CTAs) stating “24 hours only!” — if the offer isn’t truly scarce or expiring — will only create a sense of mistrust in your audience.
Over-Advertise on Your Website:
Your website’s key purpose is to be an easily navigable platform for your customers. Instead of plastering your site pages with excessive banner ads and other clutter, prioritize the user experience and let your offerings do the talking.
Send Irrelevant Offers:
Your audience wants a curated shopping experience. Instead of blasting irrelevant promotions out to your entire email list, send targeted ads out to segmented lists based on demographics and purchase history.
Reuse Stale Content:
Your customers will get tired of seeing the same stale images and content over and over again. Refresh creative elements of your ads regularly instead of running the same static, dated assets repeatedly.
Neglect To Use Short-Form Video:
Short-form video is one of the fastest-growing content styles online today. If you underestimate the impact of short-form video, you’re missing a large opportunity. Leverage TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube to connect with audiences where video usage is surging.
Promote Only Discounts:
Do your ads focus on price and discounts over quality? If so, you may want to rethink your strategy! Highlight price discounts… alongside quality, selection, and service advantages.

Advertise Out-of-Stock Items:
Your audience will become frustrated if they see a compelling online advertisement, click the link, and find it’s already out of stock. Sync your advertising campaigns with your inventory and reordering processes to avoid these challenges.
Ignore Search Engine Optimization:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical if you want to improve visibility and reach local customers searching for grocery stores near them. Follow SEO fundamentals and best practices to reach new customers.
Have Inconsistent Messaging:
You need to reach your audience across a variety of channels. The key here is to ensure your messaging is consistent across all touchpoints, campaigns, and channels. Creating inconsistent messaging can lead to confusion, frustration, and other challenges.
Hesitate To Stop Underperforming Campaigns:
Last but not least, you need to be flexible with your grocery advertising. If you see a campaign is underperforming, don’t hesitate to stop that campaign early. Reject the sunk-cost fallacy and take steps to pause ineffective ads, rather than waste additional budget.

Key Takeaways for Grocery Advertising Success

These do’s and don’ts provide a solid foundation for you to plan your grocery store advertising campaigns for the coming year. One of the most important things to remember is that your advertising should lead with value, not price.

But strong advertising is only one step in your journey to running a profitable grocery store. If you want to manage and retain the influx of customers your new advertising brings in, you need a point of sale system that doesn’t slow you down.

Markt POS offers a strong point of sale solution designed specifically for grocery stores and markets. With our solution, you can manage inventory, integrate key hardware like scales and barcode scanners, and access key sales data with ease.

Check out a free software demo of Markt POS today to see how our solution can help you capitalize on your advertising and take your store to the next level.

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