Today, we share practical no cost and low cost marketing tips designed specifically for independent toy shops – local shops, high street shops, shops that are competing with mass retailers, national retailers and online retailers with big budgets.
We are sharing these tips because we believe in small business, independent business, because we will do everything we can to help local toy shops as they are bread and butter customers for our toy shop software.
When it comes to retail business marketing, we like to keep it simple as we have found simple works best in our own shops. here are our marketing tips for local toy shops:
- Run a championship. Choose a simple and fast to play fun game and host a local championship. Like Connect 4 – in a day and a series of heats in-store you could fine a champion and give people a heap of fun.
- Run a community noticeboard. A toy shop is a perfect place for a community noticeboard where families can share games and toy ideas with other families and where games clubs can let people know their news. Be an information hub.
- Create a community gallery. In a quiet part of the shop, create a gallery where people can share photos of achievements relating to what you sell. Photos could be of a completed jigsaw, a completed craft item, a winner of Monopoly, a completed Lego project and more. The idea is to give people a place to shaw their achievements.
- Customer reviews. Include customer reviews of games and toys with products in-store. Personalise and localise your business.
- Toy of the week. At the counter, pitch a specific item each week. Make sure the pitch explains why.
- Staff picks. Near the front of the store have a shelf or several shelves for displaying staff picks for this week. have a card next to each with an explanation, in their own words.
- Leverage collectibles. For those collectible items people will buy regularly over time, offer a reward when they reach a certain number. It can work like a coffee card. It locked them into purchasing from you.
- Share your knowledge part 2. People like buying from people who know what they are talking about. You can show off your knowledge through videos, which you have made, on Facebook, videos on your website and in-store.
- Share your knowledge part 2. Include product car and use information on receipts. This can be handled easily by your software.
- Support community groups. Offer a fundraising deal where group members purchase from you between set dates and they get a discount and the group gets a rebate. Your software can manage this. You help the customer and you help a group they love.
- Use loyalty rewards people understand. Any any customer today what 100 loyalty points are worth and they will not have a clear answer in most situations. Ask them how much a $10.00 voucher is worth and they will, for sure, say $10.00. Offer $$ as loyalty rewards and leverage this to get people to spend more than they used to. It’s done easily on your receipts.
- Bring them back. Use email marketing tools to thoughtfully invite shoppers back because they bought a particular item or brand or they bought for an annual occasion, like a birthday. Collecting a small amount of data in the sale and having your POS feed data to an email tool can make this email invite easy to achieve.
These are some of the marketing tips we have for local and independent toy shops. We love helping local indie retailers to thrive. We hope these ideas are useful and that they inspire you to create your own.
Small business rocks!
