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How to Reach Your Audience Effectively with a Pop-Up Store
You’re a successful online business with a respected brand name and adept at SEO and email marketing. Your customers keep coming back and giving you great reviews on Amazon, but you’re still trying to reach the 56% of online shoppers who say they prefer a brick and mortar store.
How can you reach those shoppers directly without the massive time and money expenditure of building a physical store in the shaky world of retail?
For many marketers that answer is increasingly a pop-up store. A temporary location has a lot of advantages over the all-in-one approach of a fixed location and brands that succeed in this space can generate outstanding cache with a young audience that loves the thrill of discovery and finding the next new thing.
The need to create brand buzz has gotten stronger than ever as spending on brand activations increased to $560 billion in 2015 and are expected to exceed $700 billion by 2020.
The opportunity is certainly there but with that come challenges. How can you elevate your brand? How can you communicate authentically with your audience? How can you generate a positive ROI?
According to Oni Chukwu, CEO of Aventri, a cloud software company known for its event management solutions, a big part of the answer is to give yourself plenty of time to prepare.
Aventri counts large corporations like Coca-Cola, Mastercard, and Dell as some of its most high profile clients and partners with a variety of vendors who are experts in their business space so you can believe Chukwu when he says that his best-performing clients allocate several months for event planning up to even a year “depending on how complicated their environments are.”
And if you’re trying to create a brand experience in some of the biggest cities in the world like Tokyo, New York, or Paris then your environment may be very complicated indeed. Big cities mean lots of exposure for your brand, but just as many opportunities for one bad impression to be all people talk about or even worse — not to be talked about at all.
Brand Buzz is all about social media marketing. You want the cool kids to come to your booth and tell all their friends about it. And yeah, we know, millennials want an authentic experience that feels real, so how do we achieve that?
Your brand needs to tell a cohesive story.
First of all your brand needs to tell a cohesive story in that space, one that reflects the core values of the product. If you’re passionate about the product, then the consumer will be too, and the experience needs to reflect that.
No more an expert on authentic experiences than Richard Branson himself talks about this very thing. “It is important to be authentic when choosing your values,” he says. “It can be tempting to try and construct a facade of the ideal business, but if the values you espouse don’t match the actual values that dictate your actions you’ll soon find yourself in dutch with your audience.”
The way to find your authenticity is by paring the messaging of your brand down to its core elements and figuring out what those elements are by asking leading questions to sharpen your focus.
“What does my brand represent?”
“Who is my target audience?”
Sharpen Your Message Into a Statement of Purpose
If you can answer those kinds of questions, you can put them together into a statement of purpose. If you already have a statement of purpose but people don’t seem as excited by your product as they used to, perhaps it’s time for a refresh to ensure that your brand remains vital. Think of your statement of purpose as a guiding light pointing you in the right direction when making decisions that affect the public face of your company.
Don’t be afraid to be as direct as possible, your self-exploration will ultimately lead to greater identification with the audience you’re trying to reach.
Another way to think about your statement of purpose is by boiling it down to who you are and what kind of audience you serve. Here’s an example of a good template for that kind of evaluation: “My brand is the best at “x” and serves the needs of “x” kind of people, all the while accomplishing “x”.
Do you have any goals for your brand beyond just making the biggest amount of money possible?
Does your social media presence align with the message you want to send to consumers?
Keep asking these kinds of questions and you’ll be even better prepared for the design phase.
In the design phase, you’ll need to incorporate a similar core mindset as you did while asking questions about your brand. Every element of the store needs to be carefully thought out, examining whether or not it adds value, and if it fits the brand aesthetic that flows out of your statement of purpose.
Be eye-catching without being overwhelming. Be bold without being over the top.
Your pop-up store, if designed properly, represents the best things your brand has to offer and suggests to your intended audience an immediate call to action. If you can’t grab their attention when they first walk in the door, then they won’t see themselves in your product and they won’t be buying what you have to sell.
Buying in doesn’t solely refer to purchasing anything at your store on-site, or giving you their information in exchange for a free product or a chance at a giveaway. It means converting them to your way of doing things and earning their trust by showing them that you’re more than just a blip on the internet or an ad on a podcast. Internet marketers don’t have much trust with the public, and the people that you hire to work at your pop-up as brand ambassadors become the face of the brand, and their enthusiasm and friendliness are an important tool in gaining the trust of consumers that are buffeted with online ads.
In addition to helping you sell things more effectively the enthusiasm that brand ambassadors generate can dramatically increase your social media mentions giving you another avenue to reach your customer base directly. A positive presence in social media won’t always show up in direct sales immediately, but your ROI should be more about long-term effects than a short-term boost.
Were you able to gain insight into how the consumer feels about your product?
Did you collect pertinent data that can help you reach your long and short-term goals?
With all that in mind, it’s important not to forget the most important ingredient of a successful pop-up store — fun! If your store doesn’t seem vibrant and upbeat, then in-store traffic will be low as consumers will flood to the next place that makes them feel alive. Bright lights show off the work you’ve done in designing your space, and bright colors draw attention to the brand messaging and product displays.
Building a successful pop-up store requires a lot of planning and careful attention to every element, but it can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal that you would be wise not to ignore.
