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How can Signage help with in-store marketing?

In-store experience

With today’s market constantly fragmenting, and online shopping growing at a rapid speed, retailers need to become faster and even more creative in order to capture and preserve the much-needed attention of the consumer.  MarketingProfs just reported that most adult consumers in the United States still prefer to shop in physical retail stores rather than online. But will it last? Brick-and-mortar retailers and brands can win this race by building a better customer experience, and the in-store experience for your customer is playing a crucial part in this game.

In-store experience can include many techniques such as customer service, product sampling, product demonstration, visual merchandising, brand experience, promotions as well as making customers aware of the various in-store promotions that are taking place also known as signage.

Creating an in-store experience through signage

Retail industry generally uses a significant amount of signage to lure the customers to their stores and buy. When it comes to larger global retailers with many locations, signage budgets are massive and in the Millions requiring processes to plan and execute campaigns and have multiple vendors bidding and fulfilling work for a campaign. The process involves planning, printing, packing, and distribution of all signage for a campaign and requires a significant amount of effort and investment.

CrossCap work with several large international retailers, and recently, started noticing trends in the industry where certain signage may not require a specialized printer and a need to print locally.

Large format signage for windows or banners definitely require specialized printers but when it comes to pricing or promotional signage in the store, do you really need a specialized printer to produce these signs?

This is a question several retail visual marketing departments contemplate and the reasons we’ve heard from the industry include:

  • Not certain of the quality if printed in the store.
  • Definitely, don’t trust the stores with creating and putting up their own signage.
  • Impact on brand and quality of marketing for marketing within our stores.
  • Not sure we can easily manage the printing process with our store managers & associates.

These are all valid reasons to be concerned when it comes to ensuring you have the marketing needed in your stores to drive in-store traffic and ultimately sales. However, these points can all be addressed by simply implementing a retail signage software platform along with a service to manage your printers, ink, paper, and toner in stores.

Retail Signage Software is crucial to help manage and drive this process as it will be one system to help the corporate marketing teams manage which programs will go out to the printer and which will be printed at the stores. This single system operates on top of a store profiling solution that allows the corporate marketing teams to plan, estimate, deliver, reorder and review the signs that are relevant to a specific store.

All the campaigns planned in the retail signage software system are available for the stores to review once they’re ready for execution. Stores only see campaigns and signs that are relevant to them.

In today’s highly fragmented market, it’s crucially important retailers keep the brand’s consistency across all channels, and signage can really help with that. Whether it’s an event, sales promotion, a pop-up shop, or a new product promotion – precise and cost-effective execution of in-store marketing programs for various campaigns and multiple locations, can help maintain brand consistency, gain more in-store traffic and hit those sales goals.

This operating model is different from a standard model that requires printers to print and ship material to stores and will realize huge savings for the retailer at the same time significantly reduce time to market as it eliminates the process of printing and distribution from a remote location.

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