Member Article

Socialise with your shoppers

Retail is a key sector for us here at O, with clients across online shops, retail chains, shopping centres and independents. With an increasing number of brands interacting with customers by utilising social media, it’s essential to engage with your shopper on a level that creates a participative experience from tweet to till.

Nowadays, retail isn’t just about the point of sale or the physical rails and racks. Brands must embrace digital, engage potential buyers, and develop an end-to-end experience that takes the consumer on a combined personal shopping journey both in store and online.

Some retailers have recognised the opportunities available, for example Burberry recently announced record profits of £461m, attributing its 8% increase in profits to “continued digital leadership engagement, operations and commerce.” *

Here are just a number of ways that retail brands can integrate social into their shopper marketing strategy:

#CREATEIMPORTANTCONVERSATIONS

Tough to read? Important to understand! Hashtags are a great tool in any social campaign to tie digital conversations in with real life ones, and reach a wider audience. O PR recognised this when working recently with Dr. Martens. Ahead of its Newcastle store launch, we wanted to find local brand ambassadors who stood for individuality, self expression and the true spirit of DMs. We contacted fashion bloggers and local people on Twitter, and asked them to tell us what they stood for- using the Dr. Martens hashtag #STANDFORSOMETHING. The result? A social media buzz across a number of social platforms during and after the launch night was stitched together with the #STANDFORSOMETHING message.

A key number of influencers using the hashtag will stand you in better stead. But how you find these groups?

We were just getting on to that…

BLOGGERS ON THE FROW & IN YOUR STORE

Fashion, music and lifestyle bloggers can all be vital in helping to get your brand seen by the right eyes. Their readers tend to take their word for it, whether it’s a positive sentence about a new season collection or a negative paragraph about bad customer service. I’m sure you know which one you’d rather have. Tesco’s fashion line F&F recognised this recently, and created a paper doll party for key fashion bloggers. They sent out beautifully packaged parcels filled with biscuits, mini-designs of their latest collection, along with small imitation paper dolls of the blogger they sent it to. The element of personalisation worked extremely well, with these social influencers engaged in the conversation and posting about how imaginative it was.**

Chat with these influencers, invite them to events, let them road test your products and ask them to create your social content. It’s a sure fire way to reach your audience at a peer to peer level they will identify with.

TAKE EVENTS INTO THE HOME

Topshop knows all too well how to push customers along a shopping journey that, more often than not, starts on social and ends with a full shopping basket. They’ve been connecting with online audiences for a while now-during London Fashion Week last year, they partnered with Google+ to allow fans to preview their Unique AW 2013 show with a series of behind the scenes clips and model interviews prior to the show starting. Not only this, but during the show, models wore micro cameras barely visible on their fancy garments streaming their point of view to the World Wide Web. Viewers could ‘be the model’ while sitting on their sofa with a smartphone.***

More recently, Topshop got on board with Instagram video to showcase its clothing range. The first video received 2000 likes within minutes of being uploaded, according to We Are Social. Short form video is quick, simple to understand, and relevant to Topshop’s online audience.

With more and more digital platforms springing up, it can be difficult to predict what the next trend in shopper engagement will be. One thing you can be sure of is the physical and social world of shopping will only get closer.

*Source:http://www.burberryplc.com/investor_relations/results_and_presentations/preliminary_results_centre

**Source: http://www.elanders.com/uk/elanders-join-ff-paper-doll-party/

***Source: http://www.businessoffashion.com/2013/02/fashion-2-0-topshop-and-google-plan-data-savvy-digital-runway.html

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by O Communications .