Grocery Store Marketing Plan Example: A Quick Guide for Grocers
Executing a marketing campaign or strategy without a plan is like driving to a new destination with no map. You can head out onto the road with a clear picture of your destination and all the best intentions… but without a plan for the twists and turns along the way, you’re more likely to end up hopelessly lost than making it safely to your destination.
As a grocery store owner, you know that your competition is fierce. Standing out from the crowd can be a challenge, but with the right marketing plan in place, it's possible to differentiate yourself and thrive. From boosting brand awareness to targeting new customers, a successful marketing plan is essential for your grocery store’s success.
However, we know putting together a marketing plan can feel daunting. That’s why we’re here to help!
We’ve put together a guide for grocers to follow that includes five quick tips that can help you build a strategic marketing plan designed for success. We’ll also provide you with a killer grocery store marketing plan example you can model and a powerful tool that can help drive key components of your plan. (Hint: You might already have one! And if you don’t, we can help with that.)
Grocery Store Marketing Plan Example: The Building Blocks of Success
Not all marketing plans are made equal, and just because you invest in marketing, that doesn’t mean your in-store traffic or revenue is going to increase. Marketing needs to be rooted in data and customer trends in order to set yourself up for success.
A grocery store marketing plan should be tailored to the specific needs of your store and target audience. This plan is designed to show successful marketing efforts and ultimately lead to increased profits for your business.
Marketing without data often leads to wasted time, effort, and little to no ROI. It’s important to put the right systems in place to track and manage your store's metrics and data, otherwise all of your marketing efforts will turn into leaking buckets.
If you want to drive sales and grow your customer base effectively, here’s an outline that will help.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan is your organization’s blueprint for reaching new customers.
Documenting your plan of attack is important as it helps you outline what it is you’re going to do, and identify potential obstacles or challenges that you can plan for. A marketing plan should be as detailed as possible, and serve as a guide for your team so they know what needs to be done and when.
A successful grocery store marketing plan should encompass a target audience, your goals, results, and what your marketing strategies look like.
Your grocery store marketing plan needs five core components. We’ll discuss them in detail, and show you how to pull them together into a cohesive plan destined for success.
Without further ado, here are the five core elements that make up the grocery store marketing plan example you’ve been searching for.
1. Identify a Target Audience
Who is your ideal customer?
Identify their demographics and their shopping habits. This information will help you create effective and compelling marketing campaigns. A common mistake people make in marketing is not identifying who their target market is, and assuming that all marketing campaigns or efforts will be relatable to everyone.
This is almost never the case.
Identify personality traits, attitudes, and values of your target audience, which can help you create marketing messages that resonate with them.
Once you’ve identified who your ideal customer is, this should help drive the creative aspect of your campaign: colors, voice and tone, and overall messaging.
Create a detailed profile of your ideal customer, including their demographics, psychographics and shopping habits. Campaigns tailored to specific needs and interests have an increased chance of a positive response — creating a loyal customer base that feels seen, and that resonates with your store on a deeper level.
Example
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Meet XYZ Grocery! (Creative, we know.)
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They recently opened in a suburban town in Orange County, California.
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They take a look at the people that live around the area and determine their demographic is middle to upper class families and young professionals.
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They create a clear profile of who their ideal customer is.
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Clean-cut, simple designs, with a friendly and inviting voice and tone would be the right approach here.
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Potential promotions can include pairing pasta and premade sauces at a discount to promote quick and easy meals for families or young professionals on the go.
2. Set Clear Marketing Goals
Determine what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts, such as increasing brand awareness, driving foot traffic or boosting sales.
Building customer loyalty is necessary for sustaining any business. You want to increase the chances of every customer returning to your store. Once you’ve capitalized on a specific demographic or market segment, you could look to target a new group of customers to bring into your store.
Ensure that your goals and efforts are specific, measurable, and achievable.
Each goal should be clearly defined, with a specific target and a set time frame for achieving it.
Example
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Now that XYZ Grocery has their target demographic, they set the goal of increasing traffic by 120%.
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They also want to increase retention of the target demographic so that shoppers are coming in on average twice per month.
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Once the target has been reached, they identify a number of senior communities in the area that they can also target
3. Explore Paid Ads and Email Marketing
Create a plan for creating relevant and valuable content to put in front of your target audience. Now that you’ve determined your audience, and set achievable goals and targets, it’s time to actually create the content.
Build a social media presence with platforms like Facebook, instagram, and Twitter to connect with customers, share promotions and create a sense of community around your store. Use email and social media campaigns to promote deals, events and special offers.
Regularly measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts so you can make adjustments as needed. (With Markt POS, you can use real-time data to find your most popular products, and create campaigns around those items!)
Example
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With the target demographic in mind, XYZ Grocery decides to join local community groups on Facebook, and run paid ad campaigns on Instagram.
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Knowing that the mothers usually do the primary grocery shopping, they target Facebook community groups and mom groups to better reach them.
4. Consider Influencers & Partnerships
Influencer marketing can be an interesting way to explore your brand identity, and find influencers that you resonate with.
Identify influencers in your community and build relationships with them to help promote your store. Partnering with social media influencers who have a large following in your target audience can be an effective way to reach new audiences quickly and build trust with potential customers.
Be careful however, as people will associate your store with their brand, so make sure to find influencers that align with your vision and how you want your business represented.
Participating in community events and sponsorships can help increase brand awareness and drive foot traffic to your store. Co branding involves a partnership with another brand to produce a product or service that is jointly marketed and sold - beneficial for reaching new audiences and helps increase brand awareness.
Example
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Social media influencers aren’t the right choice for XYZ Grocery, but they know they have considerable overlap in customer base with the yoga studio nearby.
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They run a coordinated promotion by offering a free class to anyone who spends $50 or more in a single order
5. Track Progress and Performance
It’s absolutely crucial for you to establish clear metrics for measuring the success of your strategies.
Focusing on areas such as sales, traffic, customer retention and social media engagement will serve as a guiding light in the improvement of your strategy.
By tracking your marketing efforts, you’ll be able to tell whether your campaign was successful, or if there are certain changes you need to make. Maybe the audience was right, but the channel was not. If your target audience are soccer moms in the suburbs, but Facebook wasn’t the right audience, find out where those moms gather. Partnering with youth sports leagues to offer discounts or promotions for being a member could be another effective channel.
It’s important to track your budget and ROI of each activity you undertake, in order you make data driven decisions. There’s no point continuing with a campaign if there’s no return on your investment.
Set up a system for regularly reviewing and analyzing these metrics in order to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to your strategy. Not having these metrics also means you don’t know if your store is doing poorly until you see it reflected in your accounting, and at that point it’s too late for you and your store.
Implementing the right tracking and reporting from the get-go can make a significant impact in getting your store started on the right foot.
Example
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XYZ Grocery provides surveys to customers to see where they heard about their store to track the success of their various efforts
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They see that the yoga promotion works really well, but the Instagram ads don’t lead to much traffic
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They double down on the yoga promotion and partner with even more local businesses
Grocery Store Marketing Plan Example: How a POS System Can Help
Successful marketing plans and campaigns are rooted in data driven decisions and strategies.
This is where a POS system comes into play.
POS systems can help you track important data and metrics that will help you understand how well your campaigns are doing, and help give you ideas of promotions or campaigns you can run.
Real-time sales data can help you track revenue and traffic hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and more. Product sales reports can tell you which products are popular and that you can promote to attract new customers.
Markt POS also has customizable loyalty programs that can help with customer marketing and getting your community to be loyal to your store.
Grow Your Grocery Business: A Proven Marketing Plan for Success
Successful marketing is rooted in data, metrics, and analytics, and requires your business to be flexible, ready to make changes if the data calls for it. It’s important to always be on the lookout to improve your marketing plan, whether that means testing new strategies or adjusting existing ones to better reach your target audience.
Spending time to research and understand the market is ultimately what will drive your marketing plans success. Identifying a target audience, setting clear goals, tracking metrics, and executing specific strategies are key to reaching the growth you need.
Markt POS is the swiss army knife you need that can help drive key data points in putting together your marketing plan, and has features designed specifically to help your store grow.
