The time when there was a huge distance between the online, virtual, digital world and the offline material reality is gone. Nowadays, the in-store marketing experience is defining a new way of buying while every kind of shop is more and more digitalized. But before offering an in-store experience, you have to drive your customer to the store, know his behavior and begin “think mobile”.

What actually is the in-store marketing?

Redefining the shopping process, the in-store marketing brings together all the digital devices that can be used at the sale point in order to enrich and improve the customer experience and to improve sales. To do that, the main digital tools used for in-store marketing are smartphones, tablets and interactive screens.
What kind of experience should you offer using this method? If you have a tablet and an app, there is a universe of possibilities. Brands have put in place different strategies in their stores such as offering a special in-store guidance or offering an online demonstration of the product use. Following these evolutions and the new stakes of the brands, new concepts of points of sale were born, notably the flagship store. However, in order to offer a great and innovative experience through this method, firstly you need to drive your customers to the shop.

Take me to the store

If the in-store experience can be very easily provided with an app and a tablet in order to perform a mobile-to-store strategy it’s required anticipation and a good deal of geographic data and buying intentions, without ever being intrusive.

For their part, prospects surf the search engines in a short period of time (micro-moments) and with specific needs – location and timetables of the store, details about the stock and prices. Hence, you need need a good referencing of the brand’s website in order to quickly catch these future customers and to offer them a highly geolocalized mobile advertising. Not to mention the optimization of the site’s landing page on the mobile, as well as the necessity of a “call” button to give the prospect the ability to easily join the store.

Statistics

Based on new researches showing that people use their smartphones when they are about to purchase a product from a point of sale, in-store marketing has become a new powerful trend. It seems like 51% of buyers use their smartphones to make photos and send it to friends before deciding to purchase it. In addition, 42% use their smartphones to search technical information and reviews about the product. People also access the internet in order to compare prices (44%) or to obtain different discounts.

With all these tools which may help you follow the entire purchase process, it seems that the marketing has never had before the possibility of being so close to the customer. Moreover, in a digitalized store the distance between the offline and the online is so little that you almost don’t know if you should buy online or offline.