Grocery stores serve a wide variety of food products, household goods and medicinal products to local areas. Although most of them have similar business model, they can still differentiate themselves in their community through a unique marketing plan. Today, let’s talk about how the sales funnel can help with businesses like these.

Goal: Our grocery store has 15 locations all over the Lower Mainland. Their goals are to raise awareness about their weekly flyer and have their target markets receive the flyer in order to pique their interests and visit one of their locations (thus, ultimately buy more products).

Challenge:  Targeting the right person at the right time is a big challenge for them. How do they find the right consumers? How can they differentiate themselves from their competitors? How does their flyer reach the right consumers while people are getting flyers from their competitors as well? How can they boost sales?

What type of digital marketing do they need and how does it fit in the funnel?

Solution: Glacier Grocer tasked Glacier Media with devising a strategy to achieve its brand awareness and sales goals.

As we’ve learned from the previous case studies and our initial blog, we know the goal of services on top of the funnel is to increase awareness about a brand and find the customers to speak to them. In this case, we would recommend Sponsored Content. This type of content is great for businesses who’d like to talk about their brand, introduce themselves to the community and educate people how they can be useful on a daily basis. Since Glacier Grocer has 15 stores and limited budget, they may not be able to cover all the markets/communities. What else can we do?

From all the services from top of the funnel, Programmatic is an option. Why? Because it’ll help our advertiser to talk about themselves while they’re targeting different communities with lower prices. It’ll also help them to target people who are searching or reading content such as recipes, vegetables, fruits, healthy lifestyle. etc. This group of people is ready to get familiar with this brand!

Using Programmatic Ads and Geo-fencing would maximize brand conversion by being placed on high impact formats on viewable premium inventory. To take full advantage of this platform, a proportion of the digital advertising would be synchronized to appear on competitor locations by targeting people who are ready to shop their grocery.

Moving down to Engagement & Conversion, Glacier Grocer needs to move people from simply knowing about their brand to considering their product. Think about how we can have people consider our grocery store over bigger name brands such as Save-On-Foods or Superstore. This can be accomplished through social products such as Social Contesting.

For example, you could run a  social contest to win 1 MONTH OF FREE GROCERIES! Who wouldn’t want it?

Entrants could opt-in to an e-newsletter, like the business Facebook page or download their flyer. Or all of the above.

From here, we can start promoting the flyer that we know will benefit the target market. That’s what Glacier Grocer ultimately wants….to bring more foot traffic to their stores. When we talk about ROI, this level of the funnel is where the magic happens. We create targeted ads with a clear Call to Action, and an easy way to convert.  Our Grocery store has a great website; however, we want the users to get the flyer right away when they land on their website.  In order to have a cohesive yet simple user journey, our social ads and contesting must lead to one hub. Therefore, our digital home for the Grocery Stores is a custom Landing Page.

Throughout this journey, we came up with great digital solutions: sponsored content, programmatic advertising, social contesting and social ads. All of these platforms are working together to raise awareness, increase engagement and bring conversion, all of which help the client to meet their goals.