1. Improving efficiency with business intelligence

Dollar store franchises have a unique business model that has changed drastically in recent years. Many now offer name brands and a diverse range of products, something that was not always associated with the chains. Therefore, there is an opportunity for dollar stores to find efficiencies throughout their supply chain, shipping + inventory. Business analytics can positively impact these decisions by giving business owners foresight. With predictive analytics modeling, a gut instinct can be transformed into a data-driven decision and give your business

2. Developing a SoLoMo strategy

In case you weren’t aware, SoLoMo stands for social, local and mobile. For retail stores, it’s important to develop a strategy that integrates all of these. For dollar stores specifically, it’s a great time to get into the SoLoMo game and reach more consumers who are looking for deals in their respective areas. Social marketing + advertising allows for very granular location targeting. Local + mobile work together to bring consumers the best information about what’s around them. Utilizing the data you already know about your consumer and applying it on these channels can yield big results.

3. Better franchise management

Franchisors are always looking for better ways to ensure profitability of their franchise stores. Franchisees are always looking for additional help to manage their stores. Generating a data-driven report that analyzes the success of multiple locations is great for the Franchisor. Additionally, it allows the Franchisors to provide actionable insights to the Franchisees and help them improve their business. It’s truly a win-win.

These trends are just a tip of the iceberg. Business analytics + marketing intelligence can give your store the tools it needs to exceed the market competition. That 60 billion dollar industry can achieve even more.

Related Products + Services:

Epicenter

Operational Efficiency Intelligence

Related Articles:

How To Reach your Customers at Every Phase of the Purchase Cycle

Going Mobile: Tips for Retail Marketers

Budget Planning: Dollars + Sense eBook

Shoes that do more (for the world)

Due to the exposure of the Internet and social networks, consumers are growing more aware of global and ecological issues. They want their retail brands to do more to positively impact the world. Whether it’s recycling, using more eco-friendly materials, refining processes or giving back to the community, the brands that have the collective consumer conscience at the center of their business are poised to take over the market. TOMS shoes have changed the game; they offer the consumer the cache of looking good and doing good all at once.

Shoes that do more (for the consumer)

Consumers are not just about wanting their footwear to do more for the world, however. They also like the idea of a shoe doing more for them. The onslaught of “multi-purpose” shoes hitting the market should continue to increase over the next few years. Consumers want their shoes to tell them about their personal habits, like the Nike+ system. They want special technology that will help them tone problem areas, like Sketchers Shape-Ups claim to do. Wearable technology is becoming increasingly popular, with Google Glass and fit bands, so it’s important that shoe manufacturers stay abreast of this trend and continue to innovate. In a crowded market, it’s the added value that will cause a consumer to look for your brand out of all the others.

Special edition/partnership

Partnerships with a celebrity or artist and limited time promotions are on the uptick across retail. And shoes are no different. TOMS has partnered with various artists to make special edition shoes. Keds has Taylor Swift designing some flats for them. Payless has followed Target’s lead by offering limited time-only designer shoes at discounted prices, like their line with Christian Siriano. You may be thinking, “celebrity endorsements are hardly new-age,” but we’re not talking about endorsement as much as engagement. Knowing Taylor Swift likes Keds is much different than wearing Keds that Swift had a hand in designing (presumably).

Personalization

Online shopping gives the consumer the ability to find things that they might not be able to in their own community. Thus, they don’t have a limit to self-expression. It’s merely a click and shipment away. Therefore, it has become imperative to people that they have access to everything they want–even if it’s not on the market right now. Enter personalization of shoes. Sketchers and Converse have both entered into the game of personalization and consumers are willing to pay the premium to have something specifically designed by and for them. Personalization is made even better with an interactive website interface that is consumer-friendly and simple.

Digital can play a heavy hand in every aforementioned trend. With the help of business analytics + marketing intelligence, you can track which initiatives do the best with your audience and refine to make it better for your next campaign. The popularity of these trends is indisputable; it’s what you’re willing to do with them that matters.

Related Services:

Digital Marketing Strategy

Analytics Implementation

Related Articles:

Advancing your Analytics Technology + Intelligence

Retail Marketing Trends: The Future of eCommerce

New Study on e-Retail Consumers

Forrester says that pricing models should be based on the 5 C’s, which include customers, competition, commercialization, costs and communication. For the sake of brevity, however, I would like to focus on the importance of the first two C’s–customers and competition–and how these areas can be better leveraged with the help of marketing intelligence + business analytics.

1. Customers

You have undoubtedly heard about brands that have tried to increase their prices and been met with extreme backlash from their customers (think Netflix when they tried to charge double for separate services). What the customer thinks is important to the success of your business, especially in the age of social media when your brand’s message can be accepted, denied or acted against quite quickly. The power lies with the customer, so it is important that they are happiest.

So how might you assess what your customers want from your company? With the power of social research, it’s easy. You can find out what your customers are saying about the spirits industry, including your brand and your competitions’ brands. How do they assess the value of their alcohol? What outside forces impact their decision-making to buy your product or service? What variables can you control in order to help the customer convert? What assets or added value can you provide that will help you sell to your target audience? Finding out what is most important to them through social research can help provide you with actionable insights that you can use to positively impact your business.

2. Competition

Competitive research is the cornerstone of a great digital marketing strategy. It’s not about looking at their pricing models once. It’s about continuously monitoring your product value and pricing to be competitive in your industry. You now know, thanks to social intelligence, what your customers want. How can you use this information to upstage the competition? Perhaps you find out that most customers search for your products on search engines (which is true for most businesses).

When you do competitive research, you realize that your competitors are bidding on high-funnel keywords like “champagne.” You see an opportunity to marry mobile and search with a hyper local strategy to show people where to buy your champagne in their specific markets.  Perhaps your customers want the option of being able to buy their spirits online. How can you enhance their user experience? Shipping discounts? 1-click purchasing? Specials, promotions and limited edition bottles? All of these ideas can be generated from a little investigative research into the competition.

By marrying historical data and industry trend analysis, you can create a predictive model for the spirits industry. You can leverage this information to optimize your pricing on various spirits throughout the year. For example, everyone knows New Years is a huge time for champagne. But how can you capitalize on other times of the year when champagne might be popular, like wedding season for example? Predictive analytics can show you where the opportunities for improvement lie and allow you to make pricing and inventory decisions based on data.

Related Services:

Price Sensitivity Analysis

Social Research

Related Articles:

Goal: To Better Align My Business with Consumer Needs

Using Social Research Insights to Build Search Marketing Campaigns

Reflect on your Journey: Learn from Analytics

5. Confusing your homophones 

Common examples: they’re, their, there / two, too, to / whose, who’s

Homophones are words that sound the same (homo = same, phone = sound). This is just a simple thing to fix because all of these words sound the same, but mean something different. Learn what they mean and in what context they’re used.

They’re = they are (They’re finally here!)

Their = plural possession (Their animals are unruly.)

There = location/place  (Your hat was lying right there last time I saw it.)

Whose = possession (Whose papers jammed the printer?)

Who’s = who is (Who’s responsible for bringing the doughnuts to the meeting?)

Maybe we’ll graduate to “how to use whom” next time.

4. Misspellings 

Common examples: achieve, accommodate, conscious, effect/affect, a lot

Technically misspelling a word falls under a spelling mistake and not a grammar mistake, but it needs to be addressed. Misspellings in your marketing + online communications simply look sloppy or careless. When in doubt, look it up.

“A lot” is two (not to or too) words. An “alot” is a fictitious creature created by fellow grammarian Hyperbole + a Half.

3. Subject/verb agreement

This can be difficult at times and is not always easy to pick out when incorrect (frankly because so many people do it incorrectly). The main thing to remember here is to figure out whether your subject is singular or plural. This will help you figure out whether your verb needs to be singular or plural. When people aren’t sure whether or not the subject is plural or singular, they make mistakes.

A few common subject/verb agreement mistakes explained:

When a person (or his friend) isn’t sure about a subject, he or she might mess it up.

Since it’s an “or,” you accept that the subject is singular and thus use the singular verb “isn’t” instead of “aren’t.” Note: Do you hate using “he or she”? Then simply make your verb plural so you may use “they” instead.

When a person (and his friend) are ready for the concert, they’ll call.

Since it’s an “and,” you accept that the person and his friend are one plural subject and thus use the plural verb “are.”

2. Semi-colon + comma confusion

Remember that time your teacher told you to put a comma in the sentence where there is a “natural pause”? Well, it seems that many people on social networks are naturally pausing a lot (not alot). I won’t get into every comma rule ever created, but let’s stick with the basics. Use a comma with a conjunction only if the phrase coming after the conjunction (or, but) can stand alone. If you want to take the conjunction out, simply use a semi-colon.

Examples:

John and his father went to see the Beatles in March 1970, but little did they know that the band would break up just a month later.

John and his father went to see the Beatles in March 1970; little did they know that the band would break up just a month later.

John and his father went to see the Beatles but left early. << No comma needed because “but left early” cannot stand alone.

1. Using I vs. me

This rule is actually fairly simple to remember. Simply remove the party before you in the sentence to figure out if you should use “I” or “me.” Read the sentence aloud without the omitted words. If it sounds incorrect with “I” or “me,” use the other. Read aloud again. Now you can put back in the previously omitted words.

Incorrect: “I took this picture of Tori and I while on vacation.”

Take “Tori and” out of the sentence. Using “me” would be correct.

Correct: “This picture is of Tori and me while on vacation.”

Many people will use the reflexive pronoun “myself,” as in “Tori and myself on vacation.” In this case, it works.

I hope you have enjoyed this grammar lesson + take the time to make sure your online content is both compelling and grammatically correct. Still need help? Here are a few online grammar resources:

The Purdue OWL

Grammar Girl

Grammarist

Ask not what your customer can do for you, but what you can do for your customer.

Ah, the elusive “what do my customers want?” question. These days, it doesn’t have to be a guessing game. In fact, there are ways in which you can listen to your customers, trend their conversation volume + sentiment, and enact changes in your business from month-to-month or year-to-year to better serve their needs. Serving the customer is what will lead to an uptick in sales and conversions, so it’s important that you find out what they want. How do we propose you do this? Through social research.

Social research is a process in which you collect data about your target customers. You aggregate conversation on social networking sites, forums, blogs, blog comments, and more with an online tool. But now what? Here are a few quick tips when implementing social research + making it work for your business:

1. Remember: the tools are not perfect

Let’s face it, tools are not perfect. Though they’re a big help, they can only do so much. It’s important that when mining social conversation for actionable insights, you have the right sentiment for each comment. A tool simply may not be able to code it all correctly. For example, if a tool sees this comment: “Don’t you just love how ice cream melts so quickly? #theworst,” it might code it as a positive comment about ice cream. It may not be able to ascertain sarcasm. Therefore, it might be important for you to comb through the conversation and have a human assign sentiment.

2. Look for trends

Keep a running tally of trends from the past few months or over the past couple of years. What might you be looking out for in the coming months in terms of conversation volume? This can help you make better business decisions throughout your initiatives. You don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign to assess how it’s going. For example, if it’s fall, maybe you should watch for conversation surrounding your winter product line. Are people planning to purchase ahead of time? How might this affect your promotional deals or marketing messaging? You can suss out trends in conversation about things other than your products or services, too. What are people most excited about regarding your industry? If you’re an eCommerce business, maybe it’s free shipping or a “ship to store” option. If you’re B2B, maybe it’s new software or a platform that makes their day-to-day easier. Either way, use this data to capitalize on these trends.

3. Enact change throughout your business

It’s not just about marketing. Insights gleaned from social conversation can help you make fundamental business decisions that impact staffing, finances or pricing. Say, for example, that conversation surrounding your brand is low April-June of each year. How does this match up to sales? Could your business operate more efficiently with fewer people during these months? When you look into competitors’ conversation volume, you see that it is high. Perhaps running a promotion during this time, or tailoring marketing efforts, could take business away from your competitors.

4. Find out what else your customers care about

Perhaps you have higher operating costs than your competitors and cannot edge them out with just price. In what other ways can you provide value to your customers? In recent years, customers have placed more of an emphasis on things they care about. Does your brand give back to the community? Does your company recycle or aid ecological initiatives in some way? Can you provide excellent customer service? It’s things like these that communicate added value to consumers, and that can create brand advocates. With social research, you can find out what your customers care about and who they’re sharing it with.

5. Anticipate their needs

One really great thing about social research is that if you log trends each month, you can see more and more what is important to the customer. And this means that you are able to anticipate what they will want next (and in real-time, depending on how often you pull reports). Gone are the days when you have to be reactive; you can now be proactive. If you see a new trend of people responding to a certain marketing campaign or hating a new product line, it can inform your future business decisions.

It’s important that you find out what your customers want, so that you can be prepared to meet–and exceed–their needs and expectations. This is just the beginning of what insights social research can provide with the right tools and the right team.