When urging your audience to buy something, they might feel a bit skeptical about what you show them or send them (in textual form).
What they see, however, is a different story altogether. Visual merchandising is much more covert, seeing as how you put your product and merchandise on display for your audience to examine. While they may believe their own judgment to be completely unbiased, what they fail to see is the fact that they’re still examining a sample that you’ve hand-picked due to its compelling nature. Here are six traits you can turn to your advantage in this way.
1. Use comparative pricing to boost sales
Sometimes, when organising a store or an e-store, it’s worth your while to include a tad more expensive item to the menu, simply in order to make your less expensive products look more appealing. For instance, imagine a price that’s relatively low in cost (quality-to-type-wise) that stands alone in the store. Here, you’re basically relying on the lore of your audience, which, is not nearly reliable as you may believe it to be. All those – 20% signs are no longer as useful as they were in the past, seeing as how the frequency of their sighting has made people grow, more or less accustomed to them. So, in order to show them how frugal an item is, you might want to try using that good old show-do-not-tell technique.
2. Limited time offer
When you want to encourage your audience to impulse buy, you might want to try out a limited time offer. The above-listed – 20% sign examples may sound quite similar to this, yet, there’s one major difference. Ignoring a – 20% sign doesn’t really pose any loss for your audience while ignoring a limited time offer evokes an emotion of A) being left out and B) being at a clear financial loss. For instance, what if they see a 24-hour sales at your e-store or retail place and there are only 12 hours left? Do they really have the time to think about the time they have left? If not, they might just be forced to act on impulse.
3. Invest in your display
While most cafes find it sufficient to merely put a sign at the front, as a retail place, you can’t afford to do the same. Why? Well, simply because you are expecting of people to spend much larger quantities of money at your place, which would make it into a bad idea to be transparent in your attempts at a frugal marketing. In other words, what you need to do is look for a high-end window display system that radiates both elegance and respect for your customers.
4. Eye level
If you’re selling two separate items at your store, by placing the more important item at the eye level (of an average buyer), you’re increasing the chance that this item will be seen and picked up. In this way, you’re using a simple space manipulation in order to steer the attention of your audience whatever way you want. Seeing as how males, females and children, on average have different heights, you can use this notion to maximize the efficiency of your product placement by utilising every single level of your display to its maximum benefit.
5. Product grouping
When it comes to grouping your products, there are two things you need to keep in mind. First of all, you could take a more logical approach and group the items belonging to the same group together, for the greater convenience of your audience, or, you could scatter them across the floor in order to force your customers to explore as much of the floor as possible. The latter is clearly better for the retail place, whereas the first idea (thematic clusters) makes more sense for e-commerce businesses.
6. Boost your curb appeal
Finally, you might want to boost the curb appeal of your entire store in order to attract more audience. First of all, you need to start by organising a parking lot and ensuring that the store is visible from the driveway. This can be achieved through signboards, signs and banners, as well as signposts along the road. The above-mentioned window display is yet another method you could potentially use. Then, you should keep the place clean in order to send a clear message about the efficiency of your business.
In conclusion
The very last thing you need to understand is that not all of the above-listed methods are applicable to every industry out there. For instance, if you’re in a business where people value privacy above all else, you might not want to draw too much attention with your store’s front, whereas in most other situations this is exactly what you want to do. Either way, this is just one of those situational trends you need to learn how to work around.
Neil White is a student of a digital marketing, who likes to travel a lot. While you are reading this he is probably somewhere other than where he was yesterday.
