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Content marketing is essential in any digital marketing strategy if you want to attract and engage your audience. But creating an effective content marketing strategy is no easy task, with many potential mistakes you’ll need to avoid. To help you, we’ve covered 7 fall downs and pick-ups in content marketing. 

Importance of an effective content strategy 

An effective content marketing strategy is important for any business to help reach new prospective customers and boost sales. It’s all about delivering content that is both relevant and helpful throughout each stage of the customer journey. 

Content marketing is about showcasing your brand’s value to help build relationships and trust with your audiences. Effective content marketing will address your potential customer’s pain points and provide answers to their questions. 

Unlike paid advertising which results in short-term growth, marketing strategies provide long-term business growth. Around 67% of marketers report their content marketing efforts to generate leads, according to the Content Marketing Institute. 

It’s also worth noting that content marketing is one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Not only will an effective content marketing strategy win over your customers, but it will also boost your search engine rankings. 

To summarise, content marketing is important to: 

• Build trust 
• Increased lead generation and conversions 
• Stronger online presence and brand awareness 
• Become an authority in your area 
• Provide value 
• Higher website traffic 
• Increased sales 

Spotting these content marketing mistakes quickly and understanding how to address them can do wonders for generating leads and conversions. To help you deliver the high-quality content that your customers have come to expect, here are 7 content marketing fall downs and pick-ups. 

Fall down #1 – No plan or long-term goal 

The first fall down you can make with your content marketing strategy is not having a plan or long-term goal. Successful content marketing will need a plan or goal. You should be able to identify what it is you want to achieve with your content strategy. If you can’t, you’re in trouble. 

Without this focus, your content marketing strategy will be misguided and won’t be focusing on the bigger picture. Creating content ad hoc is a sure way to lead to an ineffective and failing content strategy. It’s pointless spending all that time and effort on content that won’t drive worthwhile results. 

The pick-up 

The pick-up for this fall down is to make sure you establish a long-term plan or goal for your content marketing. Ask yourself, what do I want to achieve with my content marketing? To improve the clarity and focus of your content strategy, make sure your goals are SMART: 

• Specific – clear and specific goals are easy to work with and achieve 
• Measurable – adding a measurable component allows you to measure success 
• Achievable – make sure the goal is achievable and identify the steps you can take to achieve it 
• Relevant – is the goal relevant to your business? 
• Timely – when do you want to achieve your goal? 

Fall down #2 – Ignoring or not using data 

Another common fall down in content marketing is ignoring the data. Many businesses will fall into the trap of developing content ideas they think would be a good fit for their business or customers. Throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks only leads to disaster. 

The pick-up 

Every content strategy should revolve around data. Data should be placed at the start and finish of content creation. Data-driven content strategies can help inform your content creation, allowing you to see what works and what doesn’t. 

Data should inform both the start and finish of content creation. Using data from Google Analytics and other tools allows you to measure the success of your content strategy against your goal and campaign KPIs. 

Fall down #3 – Not creating reusable content 

Creating high-quality content can take a lot of time and effort. Yet many businesses will fail to see the value of reusing existing content. Chances are you have a wide library of material you can reuse. Content marketing doesn’t and shouldn’t just focus on developing new content. 

A one-and-done approach to publishing content not only uses valuable resources but can also eat away at your return on investment. Content developed with a short shelf life that’s soon forgotten about is a waste.  

The pick-up 

Picking up from this content marketing fall-down is simple. Make use of what you have by repurposing content. Whether it’s a long-form blog post that can be repurposed into a guide or a tutorial that can be repurposed into a video. 

Secondly, most, if not all of your content should also be evergreen. Evergreen content is content that continues to stay relevant. Creating content on trending and topical issues is all very well at the time, but what happens to that content in the future? It becomes outdated and unusable again. 

Fall down #4 – Limited content types 

Another common fall down in content marketing is not taking full advantage of the wide range of content types available. If you are stuck in the process of continually churning out blog posts or social media posts, your content marketing strategy is experiencing another fall down. 

The pick-up 

There are lots of different content types, including written, visual, and audio. A successful content strategy will make use of a variety of different content types, not just one. When planning your next piece of content, consider if it works better as another content type, such as: 

• Infographics and images 
• Short-form and long-form videos 
• Podcasts 
• Webinars 
• Checklists and how-to guides 
• Whitepapers 
• Case studies 

Fall down #5 – Not understanding your customers 

Similarly to not using data, not knowing or understanding your customers is another fail. No matter how good a piece of content is, if it’s not right for your audience, it’s irrelevant. 

You cannot deliver value to your customers through your content if you don’t know who they are. In many instances, there is a gap between what a company thinks its customers want and what their customers actually want. 

Around 63% of customers state they don’t feel understood by the brands they love, according to a study by IBM. This content marketing fall down can be easy to get into, but a tough one to try and get out off. 

The pick-up 

To ensure you are developing content that is right for your customers, you should be creating buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your customers. An effective buyer persona will be informed by the data and insights you gain about your customers. 

A buyer persona will seek to identify: 

• Who your audience is (demographics) 
• What are their needs or behavior (behavioral) 
• Values, lifestyle, and interests (psychographics) 
• Goals and challenges 
• Habits and preferences 

A well-defined buyer persona will be supported by research. Nothing in your buyer persona should be purely speculative otherwise it doesn’t accurately reflect your audiences. For the best results, you should develop a buyer persona for each of your audiences (limiting yourself to no more than 5). 

Fall down #6 – Lacking a schedule 

How often do you publish a piece of content? Do you stick to a schedule? If not, your content marketing strategy is experiencing another fall-down. If you want to be growing your business online, you need to be sticking to a schedule to help create consistency and keep you organized. 

Without a schedule to provide the bigger picture, your content strategy will lack focus and become chaotic. It also reflects badly on your target audience if they have long periods without any content updates. 

The pick-up 

For each month, consider setting up a content schedule for the content that will be created and published. Try to keep this calendar as visual as possible and easy to understand. Using your content schedule, you should be able to plan your campaigns across different platforms too. 

Your content schedule should also include a review or approval process. No piece of content should ever be published before it is checked. Every piece of content needs to reflect the style of the brand. Content can also contain inaccuracies and mistakes, which can easily be avoided. 

Make sure at least one peer reviews a piece of content before you hit the publish button. Monitoring the review process can be tricky, but using a project management platform can make it much easier. Trello, ClickUp, and Asana are project management platforms to consider. 

Fall down #7 – Pushing promotional or sales content 

Being over-promotional or pushing out too much sale-related content is one of the biggest content marketing mistakes many businesses make. While every business wants to try to increase sales or usage of products and services, taking an overly promotional approach is the wrong way. 

It’s a similar situation to someone who is always bragging about how good they are. People get bored and tired of listening surprisingly fast. The same goes for your customers. Constantly putting out content that tries to gain a sale will just cause people to unfollow. 

No matter what type of content you use, the same rules apply. When people view your content, they are not interested in how great you are. Whether it’s a blog post, a social media video, or a podcast, none of the above content marketing tips will be worthwhile. 

The pick-up 

The pick-up for this content marketing mistake is obvious. Stop being overly promotional or sales-focused in your content marketing. Instead, create content that focuses on your customers and what matters to them. In the long run, this will benefit your business much more than just another sales blog. 

By no means does it mean you cannot publish promotional content, far from it. You need to create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey. Not just those at the awareness or consideration stages. The general rule of thumb is an 80/20 balance. 

80% of your content should be tailored to your audiences by providing relevant and helpful solutions to their questions and pain points. The other 20% is about your business. You don’t have to stick right to these numbers, but it gives you a good idea of how to balance your content creation. 

Conclusion

Developing an effective content marketing strategy is not easy. With so many easy fall downs, it can be hard to continue providing value to your customers. But being aware of the fall downs and how you can pick yourself up again will stand you in good stead to develop an effective content strategy. 

The post 7 fall downs and pick-ups in content marketing  appeared first on noupe.

Whether you sell buttons or beef, you need a website to achieve your business goals, especially when you consider the profit it can bring. The average eCommerce site earns just over $63,000 per month and a successful business blog can significantly improve your brand awareness. 

However, running an effective and sustainable website can be tricky. If you’re new to digital content, phrases like “bounce rate” and “click-through rate” (CTR) may make you feel like giving up on creating a site altogether. 

Fortunately, creating and maintaining a website is easier than ever before. Free website builders can help you put together a great site even if you can’t afford a full-time web developer. 

Why Get a Website? 

Creating and maintaining a website may require a lot of work. However, the effort may be worth it if you want to grow your business and reach new customers and many businesses already see this value. 51% of small businesses say that they’ve increased their interactions with customers thanks to their website and a further 36% say they complete all their business online. 

If you do build a website, you have to ensure that it is functional and meets consumers’ expectations. Consumers today spend an average of 2 minutes on each site they visit and need only half a second to form an opinion of a site. 

The cut-throat nature of online consumers means that you have to have an effective, user-friendly website design from day one. 

Website Design for Beginners 

Although website design is intimidating for the uninitiated, you don’t need to learn a coding language or become fluent in HTML to start building an effective website that you and your consumers love. Even a beginner can create a website in under a week. 

Start by defining your branding. Choose a color scheme and draft up a few logos that suit your business. Try to choose complementary colors that will be easy on the user’s eyes. 

Next, put together a sitemap that will act as a navigational guide for your business. What kind of pages do you want to create? How will they be connected? Include links in your site map, and try to structure the hierarchy of your site before you create any digital content. 

At this point, you’ll want to choose a web development site that suits your current business goals. Currently, the most popular website builders include: 

• WordPress;
• Wix;
• Square Space;
• Weebly;
• Shopify.

Research the options available to you and choose a site that aligns with your business goals. Consider what you want to use your site for, as some builders are better for blogging and marketing while others are more suited to eCommerce sales. 

Familiarize yourself with the website builder you’ve chosen and build a few pages before you go live. Once the site has been up for a while, start setting KPIs that correspond with your overall business goals. Setting KPIs can help you spot ineffective areas of your site and improve your web presence. Consider a few common SEO KPIs like

• Bounce Rate;
• Conversion Rate;
• Organic Visibility;
• Keyword Rankings.

You should also aim to create a sustainable site that is both good for the world and your business. This will boost trust in your brand and ensure that you create evergreen content with a great user experience (UX). 

Sustainable Design

Consumers care about sustainability and climate change. They’ll flock to businesses that take their commitment to the environment seriously and will boycott businesses that do more harm than good — even those that don’t integrate sustainability into their website design. Currently, the average site produces 1.76g of carbon per visit. The more complex a site is, the more energy it requires to load. 

If you run an eCommerce site or blog, you can use your website to improve the sustainability of your small business by embracing green UX. 

Green UX is a principle of website design that pushes website engineers to create more sustainable digital content. Start by decluttering your website and reducing the amount of video content that you use per page. 

You can further reduce the carbon footprint of your site by running each page through a carbon calculator and assessing and identifying your most energy-intensive content. It may not be possible to eliminate all energy-intensive content, but you should still strive to minimize the energy required to load each page. 

It’s worth bearing in mind that digital businesses are inherently greener than brick-and-mortar businesses. Digital businesses can track and improve their sustainability by utilizing AI-driven ESG and IMM programs. Digital businesses can also use AI to quickly assess the impact of their business operations and spot areas for improvement. 

Evergreen Content 

Evergreen content can improve the longevity of your website and reduce the amount of maintenance you need to complete. Evergreen content is digital content that shouldn’t become irrelevant or dated within the next 5 years. 

Common examples of evergreen content include some “how-to” blog posts and consumer testimonials. Get more out of these pages by connecting them with landing pages. This will ensure that folks who land on “evergreen” posts can still access your most relevant pages today. 

Cyber Security

Cyber security is important for you and your consumers. If your website is compromised, a data breach may land you hefty fines and lost business. 

Most website builders come with cybersecurity built in. This means you don’t have to worry too much about the nuts and bolts of building a great cybersecurity program. However, you still need to do your part to ensure that malicious actors don’t gain access to your site and the confidential information you store. 

Start by ensuring that all your sensitive documents are password secured. Password-protecting PDFs is a great way to deter malicious actors, as the extra layer of protection is usually enough to put hackers and phishers off. 

You should also require two-factor authentication for all pages that require a sign-in. For example, if you offer a subscription service, make sure that users have to log in before they can access their personal data or make purchases. Two-factor authentication stops hackers from gaining easy access to accounts with compromised passwords and can reassure paranoid users. 

You can also use additional security plug-ins to further protect your site. Website builders like WordPress and SquareSpace have security plug-ins as part of their service. Utilizing them effectively can protect your site and ensure that your user’s data remains secure. 

Conclusion

Designing an effective website is easier than ever before. You can use free website builders to create the framework of your site. Ensure that your site is sustainable by minimizing the amount of energy-intensive content you use. Cut down on things like GIFS and videos and opt for more evergreen content with easy-to-read text and optimized images.

The post Designing an Effective and Sustainable Website with Limited Resources appeared first on noupe.

Introduction

As a business, you’re probably already well aware of the power of social media. But if your company hasn’t updated its strategy in recent years, it could be missing out on some of the best new trends in the industry. Whether you’re looking to attract new customers or simply improve your brand’s presence online, here are seven social media trends that will help boost your business:

Video Content

Video content is a great way to tell your brand story. It can help you share information in an engaging and efficient way, as well as show off your products or services.

Videos are also an effective way to market, train, and provide customer service. Video marketing on social media allows you to connect with potential customers in a personal way—and since it’s so easy for people to share videos across multiple platforms, a word about your product moves quickly. According to G2’s research last 2022, 99% of digital marketers will use video marketing again.

Be authentic – Don’t try to be someone else or something else; just be yourself. People will relate better and trust you more if they see that you’re real and genuine.

Use natural sound – If possible, record your videos without any music or narration in the background. The sound of your voice can add a lot of emotion to your message and make it more interesting for your audience.

Keep it short – Most people don’t have much time to watch videos online, so keep them short enough so people will want to watch them all the way through without getting bored or distracted by other things on their phones or computers while watching your video

Keep it simple – Use simple language and avoid technical jargon whenever possible when talking about complex topics like tech products and services because most people won’t understand what you’re saying otherwise

Make it mobile-friendly- use a video compressor to ensure the quality of each video when uploading to social media.

Stories

Stories are a great way to engage with your audience. You can use stories to promote your business by sharing information and details or promoting current events that are happening in the world and which relate to your business.

Stories can also be used as a way of sharing your brand story. They can show people behind the scenes what goes on in the office or communicate what makes you unique and special as a company.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content is great for engaging your audience. It allows them to create and share their own content with others, rather than simply consuming what you have to offer. If a customer sees that another person has shared an experience with your brand, they’re more likely to trust it and engage as well.

User-generated content can take many forms: from asking people to share their favorite product or service experiences on social media, to creating an Instagram account that showcases photos taken by customers at events or during trips abroad. Either way, the goal is for you as a brand owner to encourage engagement between fans and followers—and ultimately drive more sales of your products or services!

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a great way to reach your target audience. Influencers can help you get your message across in a more authentic way, as they have a large following and their followers will be more likely to listen to what they have to say. Influencer marketing can help you generate leads and sales. It’s important for businesses to take advantage of this trend so that they can expand their reach on social media.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are growing at a rapid rate. The two technologies have been around for decades, but they’re still in their infancy. And while you may have heard that VR and AR are just a fad or marketing tool, there are many reasons why these emerging media will be important for your business in the years to come.

Takeaway:

You now have a better understanding of the many ways social media can help your business:

• By connecting with customers and building your brand, you’ll get real-time feedback and insight into what people think about your company.
• By getting more business through social channels, you’ll increase sales—and by learning about existing customers’ preferences, you can get even more from each sale.
• Social media provides an opportunity for businesses to learn how their products or services are being used in different industries around the world. This knowledge can be used to improve products or services based on customer needs and trends in the market at large.
• Social networks make it easier than ever before for businesses to reach new markets without having to invest heavily in advertising campaigns that may not resonate well locally—but which do require significant capital investments upfront before seeing any return on investment (ROI).

The post Best Social Media Trends That will Boost your Business appeared first on noupe.

Recruitment processes have changed drastically over the past few years. Again, the pandemic situation has forced candidate assessments and interviews to occur tenuously. If a proper approach is carried out, virtual hiring can prove to be a superior way of hiring candidates compared to in-person interviews. No doubt, virtual hiring lacks the benefits of in-person interviews, but it still allows observing certain essential things, for example, how the candidates react during team settings if they would adopt the company culture and many more. Again, considering the current scenario, organizations are now changing their recruiting strategies by hiring candidates without even meeting them once face to face. 

Are you also looking forward to hiring a top-notch candidate through virtual hiring? Through this post, let’s work on how you can attract the best talent to your organization through a fine-tuned virtual hiring process. 

Virtual Hiring Process

The virtual hiring process is a recruitment process that takes place distantly rather than face-to-face interviews. Thanks to the internet and advanced technology, which has made the entire process completely smooth as well as has improved the scalability and productivity of the company too. The virtual hiring process comes with a bunch of benefits. It also saves the interview cost, traveling expenses, and time for both the employee and employer. Also, an improved plan, using the right technology such as Recruiting CRM software and Applicant Tracking System, and increased consistency at the time of the interview process can help in reducing hiring prejudices and improving miscellany. 

To get the best candidate through virtual hiring, employers need to work on their virtual hiring process. Virtual hiring comes with its own set of challenges, including reduced in-person connection with the employee, technical issues, dependency, and much more. And to overcome these challenges, here are some quick tips that would help in hiring the best candidate for your organization. 

Upgrade your technology

Is your organization’s technology up-to-date for supporting all the requirements of the virtual hiring process? As there would be no in-person meetups, good-quality video conferencing software is required for interviewing the candidates. With the help of the latest technology, organizations can also go for the option of receiving recorded videos of the candidates in the initial recruitment stage for pre-screening the candidates. Again, if the organization is receiving a high number of applications, using advanced technology like Facetime, Zoom, Chatbots, etc., for reducing the workload through scheduled interviews, answering FAQs, etc. As per LinkedIn Report, 58% of Candidates prefer self-directed programs for the recruitment process. So, make sure you have the latest technology ready to help you make the recruitment process easy. 

Allow the candidates to know your company’s culture

Merely questions and answers are sure to end up the virtual hiring process as a complete failure. As the candidates wouldn’t meet the employers in person, they fail to learn about the company and its culture in person. Again, the employees love to work in a company whose values are similar to their own. This makes them work efficiently and maintain a work-life balance. Hence, once the candidates are shortlisted, make sure you give them an idea of the culture of the organization. Invest some time in explaining to them the benefits of working with the organization. For this, allow them to meet the existing employees, allow a virtual tour of the organization, help them with the essential initiatives the organization is currently involved in, etc. This would also help them in getting engaged with the workplace in a meaningful way. 

Look for hosting virtual hiring career events

Many organizations are benefiting from hosting virtual hiring events, seminars, webinars, FAQ sections, networking events, and much more by using the technology. This is a good way of expanding your organizational reach and attracting diverse talent to your company. Hosting virtual hiring events is a very easy and cheap way of getting complacent. Through such events, the organizations would easily get prospective applicants. The events should be well-structured, fun to attend, concise, and involve the employees of the company. Make sure to add a certain variety to the events by including different sessions to the event. Lastly, look for different ways to get feedback from the candidates, as this would help in improving future events. Also make sure the attendees get all the information, insights, and experience they might be looking for. 

Stay connected with the candidates

Once the process of virtual hiring begins, make sure you are in continuous touch with all the shortlisted candidates. If this is not done, the candidates would feel secluded. For this, keep all the communication channels open, give regular updates to the candidates at every stage of recruitment, and try to accomplish their expectations. The candidates should receive all the details about the different stages of the entire recruitment process along with the tools they would require as well as the estimated period of receiving any response from the company. This would help the candidates with the required time to prepare for the virtual interview. Again, this is the best way of solving any query they might have in mind regarding the company or the recruitment process at any time during their preparations. 

The organization, while conducting a virtual hiring process, shouldn’t miss out on checking for certain qualities in the candidates, like good communication skills, robust collaboration skills, good organizational skills, management skills, accountability, and self-discipline. 

Apart from all these, the organizations can also work on other aspects like telephonic interviews, video interviews, remote onboarding, arranging personality tests, accurate job ads, etc., to have a determined and structured virtual hiring process. The work of a manager during the recruitment process never truly ends. The organization, at regular intervals, needs to incorporate advanced assessments, work on how to include additional human touch to the process, or review the interview questions. Obtaining feedback from the candidates and analyzing the success or failure of the recruitment process also helps in planning a well-organized virtual hiring process. 

Hiring someone virtually isn’t easy, for sure. But a tactically developed virtual hiring process would surely help you get the right talent for your organization.

The post How to Hire a Top-Notch Candidate from Virtual Hiring? appeared first on noupe.

Pop-up stores can be a fantastic way to test out new products, reach new customers, and generate buzz for your business. In this article, we will be sharing four practical strategies that you can use to increase the value of your pop-up store and drive success for your eCommerce business.

Whether you’re just starting out, or looking for new ways to optimize your existing strategy, we’re confident that these helpful pointers will maximize your store’s success. So without further ado, let’s get started — here are five ways to squeeze more value from the pop-up store model:

Provide a Full Hybrid Shopping Experience

Though making some money from in-person buys is obviously important, the core purpose of a pop-up store should be to raise awareness of your brand and drive traffic to your store. After all, that’s where most of your buys will always be. Accordingly, to maximize the effectiveness of your pop-up, you need to entwine the experience with online activity. 

The average visitor to your pop-up store should leave enthused to start buying through your online store — but if you want to make that happen, you’ll need to incentivize it. There are several ways in which you can manage this. Let’s go through them:

Firstly, you should provide an offline buying experience that’s reflective of your online experience. This is what hybrid selling is all about. Instead of simply grabbing some products and asking for cash in an amateur fashion, you should use your online system to process all your offline sales, essentially meaning that an offline customer is also an online buyer.

Secondly, you can distribute relevant marketing material at the event to entice people to visit your store. Giving visitors cards with discount codes and special offers on them is a great way to proceed: if they want to take advantage of those codes and offers, they’ll have to head to your store. This can actually be enough to set you apart from a competitor. The point of conversion presents a particularly-strong opportunity for presenting offers, but that’s not all: you can also use it to prompt email newsletter signups by having email-exclusive deals. 

Thirdly, you want to encourage customers to share their experiences at the store on social media — ideally, live from the store. One way you can do this is by having a stand in front of which customers can take photos, offering each person who does so entry into a prize draw. This can give your online engagement an instant boost and further expose your brand to everyone affiliated with those you’ve already been able to attract. 

Collaborate with Other Brands and Influencers

No matter how you feel about influencer culture or using outside figures to promote your brand, collaborations continue to be one of the pillars of effective marketing. This is particularly true for pop-up stores, success with which can often hinge on the notable names attached to their launches.

Where possible you should look to feature influencers, brand advocates, and other social media stars as part of your pop-up store experience. This reliably pushes their audiences to attend in an effort to meet them (and possibly talk to them), helping to attract people who might not previously have been familiar with your brand.

You can use these figures to promote future pop-up store events online. Influencers can talk about upcoming events in their Instagram stories, and you can even encourage them to write blog posts covering their links with your brand. Content marketing always matters, and it’s even better when you work with a partner.

Likewise, you should look to collaborate with other brands, even to the extent of opening a shared pop-up store selling products from both of your lineups. Many huge brands have found success through limited-time pop-up store collaborations, helping to draw their audiences together. This is particularly useful for growing brands because being associated with established brands leads people to view them as legitimate.

Collaborations are a fantastic way of supporting causes that share a similar ethos with your own, too. For instance, if you sell reusable water bottles, partnering with an organization that cleans the oceans of plastic would be a great idea. There must be things you care about beyond money, so show that. The result will be that you’ll profit in both ways.

Focus on limited-time offers and products

Part of what makes a pop-up store so successful and compelling is its ephemeral nature. If you’re a customer, any chance you get to visit it could be your only opportunity to enjoy the unique experience. When running a pop-up store, you need to capture that sense of exclusivity and run with it. 

Offer a subscription service through your online store? Why not provide an exclusive subscriber benefit by granting early access to your pop-up store? The subscription-based business model has seen a huge rise in popularity in recent years, and implementing a recurring revenue strategy can prove incredibly lucrative. 

Provided it’s feasible to distill part of your store’s offerings into a subscription service, doing so is relatively simple; if you run your store through Shopify, for example, all you have to do is choose a compatible subscription app and a subscription management platform. Once that’s taken care of, be sure to add all your subscribing customers to a separate, members-only mailing list, and distribute unique ‘access codes’ for your physical store. 

There are a huge number of businesses, particularly in the fashion market, that have made their names by producing limited runs of products to drive up prices, create a sense of urgency and make their brands feel more exclusive. Even if you generally operate with a consistent product range (and don’t want to introduce artificial scarcity), it can help to produce at least one exclusive item or collection for your pop-up store. 

Most importantly, this kind of exclusivity will give your pop-up shop one more unique element that can be promoted on social media. Take the opportunity to match a one-off event with a one-off product. Social ads targeted at the locations of your future stores can help you drum up further interest ahead of schedule. 

Promote the idea of posting these special-edition items in ways that will add to their sense of exclusivity. You could, for instance, give each one a unique number: this is something that often tacks on a huge amount of value, particularly for collectors. Get it right and many people who don’t attend a given release will feel regretful, leading them to commit to attending future events.

Use Some Attention-Grabbing Themes

The modern incarnation of the pop-up store hasn’t been around for that long, but even so: it’s been done. All the elements have been featured before. No one will be rendered agog upon discovering that an eCommerce brand is selling things in person. If you want to stand out, you need to make your store different, and having a theme is one way to do that.

Research what themes have worked for other brands of similar stature in the past. It also helps to research your fanbase, seeing if there is an obvious crossover between your audience and that of other brands, themes, and social causes. Working with a charity, for example, can help raise awareness for a cause your audience cares about and bring in more possible customers. 

If you’re running the store for multiple days (unlikely, yes, but possible), then you can even have a different theme for each day. You could focus on budget-friendly buys one day, for instance, and concentrate on luxury products the next. This is a great way to keep everything feeling different and encourage multiple visits. It can also bring diversity to the overall attendance by catering to various people interested in different things.

Set a Specific Goal Before you Deploy

It’s a persistent truism that you need to have a clear goal before you commit to a business project. Most things are iterative, and pop-up stores are no different. How your first attempt goes is almost insignificant. What matters is how your subsequent efforts work out — and if you don’t know how to rate the success of each attempt, then you won’t be able to make the next one better by addressing any deficiencies.

Are you mostly looking to make direct sales through your store? Use it as part of an audience-building exercise. Expose your brand to new markets? Promote exclusive products? Whatever you land on, you need to have a concrete aim to make your pop-up store feel coherent and not confuse customers who may have simply stumbled upon it.

Your decision will help guide your marketing approach and dictate the kind of content you produce in anticipation of your pop-up store. An essential part of yielding success is to ensure that the entire operation is as professional as it is unique and creative. Doing something different and interesting is great, but it won’t matter if prospective customers feel that they can’t rely on you to offer a good buying experience and service.

Despite everything that’s happening in the world today, the humble pop-up shop remains a viable option — and it’s one that many brands still choose to ignore, leaving a lot of room to take advantage. If you decide to go ahead with running a pop-up store, these tips will help you make the most of it.

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