Modernizing marketing materials gives brands a competitive edge and facilitates better connections with new and existing customers. Understanding your in-store and online user experience will give your business the insights you need to revamp your strategy and generate higher returns on investment. 

Research Current Trends

Whether your brand is newly launched or a big name, having a clear understanding of how your customers view and perceive your brand image plays a key role in how you plan and modernize marketing and messaging tactics.

Researching the latest market trends helps you break down your brand’s customer perspective and understand it better. It also helps you get better insights into the brand’s characteristics such as personality, image, recall, and more.

Furthermore, researching current market trends also helps your brand become more customer-centric by understanding your audience’s specific needs, wants, and expectations. This knowledge can then be used to segment the audience into smaller groups based on similarities and differences, allowing brands to effectively serve specific consumer needs.

Note Your Customers’ Preferences

Consumers today are in control of what they want and decide how they’d like to receive notifications, offers, or information from brands. For businesses with thousands of existing and potential consumers, they must note and prioritize each consumer’s preference if they wish to create an effective, personalized experience.

If your business knows exactly which consumer to reach out to and what marketing materials to use, you will be better equipped to connect with the consumer. These insights minimize ineffective marketing costs and drive higher sales conversions. It also allows your brand to capitalize on channels that your audience is present on and lets you actively engage with your clientele. 

Repurpose Top Content

Another way to modernize your brand’s marketing material is to carefully choose the top content, in the form of graphics, images, and messages, that will form the basis of your branding revamp. Once done, it’s time to update and print new marketing products.

When you analyze content performance, product popularity, and prioritize customer feedback, you can create a dynamic multichannel marketing strategy. If certain blog topics perform particularly well, repurpose this content in the following formats:

• Host an in-store event related to the theme
• Send direct mailers with condensed messagings
• Start a social media category dedicated to this topic
• Highlight the product related content with shelf signs
• Create video content related to trending topics for your website

For instance, if a new packaging design or mission statement resonates with consumers, you can channel these insights into revamping your brand’s logo, product displays, outdoor signs, indoor posters and banners and social media graphics. 

Automate Personalization

Today’s customers are using more and more channels to complete their shopping journey. Many of them are just as confident and trusting of a brand’s website as they are of heading into a brick-and-mortar store. This shift makes it essential for brands to automate many of their processes, communications, and marketing strategies.

However, in order to entice and delight customers, the methods used must be personalized or tailored to their specific needs and delivered in such a way that makes your customers feel special. Certain programs like Mailchimp allow you to automate personalization and segment your audience to improve targeted conversions. Moreover, employing CRM software and channeling that data into your marketing campaigns can empower your personalization initiatives that fuel new business growth.

Revamp Your Referral Program

Referral networks are invaluable to any brand and serve as one of the best and most trusted marketing approaches for both small and large businesses globally. This is a type of unique marketing strategy that aims at increasing the number of new customers through word-of-mouth referrals and is usually done by offering rewards, incentives and encouraging existing clients to expand your brand with word-of-mouth recommendations. 

Revamping your referral marketing is a great tactic that allows your customers to become your company’s brand advocate. Referral programs build trust and that trust corresponds to longer-lasting relationships and increased sales. If your business isn’t using a referral program, you are leaving money on the table. Here are some easy-to-implement referral program ideas:

• Give existing customers a punch card to track rewards
• Offer digital coupons for new email subscribers
• Give discounts to customers who shout your brand out on social media 

Digitize Your Signs and Flyers

From advertising your products effectively to promoting your upcoming sales, signage can serve many purposes. Brands have used print marketing materials like posters, custom banners, decals, and vinyl graphics for a long time, but today there are many ways to revolutionize your print marketing with digitization. For instance, you can print QR codes on menus, direct mail flyers, and shelf signs so customers can look up items they wish to order on their phones. 

Connect Digital and Physical Storefronts

The key for retailers and brands today to excel in both the perfect physical and digital environment is to seamlessly connect the two, creating a convenient retail experience. To offer an immersive experience that attracts & entices shoppers, businesses need to ensure that the physical store offers a clear path for customers to easily transition to their digital device and back to the physical setting.

What is required here is an engaging in-store experience that finds the right balance between self-service through modern technology and face-to-face physical interaction with in-store associates. This is simply because shoppers today no longer think in terms of individual channels. Here are some multichannel strategies to consider:

• Use checkout counter signs with QR codes to encourage app sign up
• Offer hands-free payment options
• Share the same message on storefront signs and homepage web banners 
• Offer Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) to customers

These strategies are easy to implement and do not come with massive price tags. A bit of research can propel your digital and physical marketing to new heights.