If you’re looking to get your product out there into the world, or you’d like to learn more about what the world likes so that you can craft your product accordingly, then you’ll want to take advantage of a suite of different marketing techniques put out there by specialist companies like Tactical Solutions. Let’s examine four of these strategies, and see how each of them might benefit your business.
Mystery Shopping
If you’re running a store, whether it’s a real-world one or an online one, then you’ll want to provide your customers with the best possible experience. This ‘best possible’ experience often isn’t something that can be easily quantified. There’s no way of being sure, for example, of the exact state of all of your stores at any given time. What’s more, if you personally venture into any of your stores, even unannounced, then you’ll likely get a very different shopping experience to a completely unknown customer.
What’s needed instead is the occasional customer’s-eye-view of the shopping experience. This is what a mystery-shopper report seeks to provide. An anonymous person will visit your store, collect feedback on the areas you’ve specified for special examination, and then report back. This will provide you with valuable information about areas for improvement, as well as providing your staff with an incentive to treat every customer as though they might be a mystery shopper!
Product Recall
The prospect of a product recall is one that fills many business-owners with dread. When a recall is necessary, it generally means that something unpleasant has happened. A product might be defective, or even dangerous, and thus pulling it from the marketplace is called for. If you’re in this position, then you’ll have already suffered a little bit of reputational damage. But this damage can be exacerbated if the recall doesn’t proceed as smoothly as required.
To avoid this, it’s crucial that recalls be handled by an organisation with experience and expertise to draw upon. Recalls are, after all, events that only happen once in a blue moon – and preferably less often than that. As such, they’re something that your business probably won’t be familiar with. That’s why outsourcing to a company like Tactical Solutions is wise; if you’ve already made arrangements for when a product recall does occur, you’ll be able to limit the damage it causes to an absolute minimum.
Product Sampling
There are some products whose benefits can only be really communicated through demonstration and, better yet, sampling. The most obvious of these are specialist products that few customers will be familiar with, and food products where the only way to convey the product’s merits are to try them. That’s why you’ll occasionally find displays filled with tiny samples of flapjack in the aisles of your local supermarket.
You might also get good results by delivering product samples directly to the doors of would-be customers. When doing this, a targeted approach will often prove the most fruitful. Use demographic analysis to determine the sorts of people who are most likely to be won over by a sample of your product, and then deliver accordingly. The better the company you’re working with, the more precise a product sampling programme they’ll be able to deliver.
Retail Auditing
Auditing, as you might already know, is a process through which the efficacy of an organisation is taken stock of, and suggestions for possible improvements are mooted. The term is most often associated with finance. You might envisage a hapless person trapped in an office, poring over the year’s accounts in order to establish where the money is going and why.
A retail audit takes broadly the same principles and applies them to a shop. You might have this job conducted internally by trusted members of staff who are familiar with the business and the way it works. Though this might seem an obviously sensible approach, it’s one with considerable drawbacks.
The most obvious of these is impartiality. A person who’s inside your business will be biased in its favour, and lack the perspective an outsider can offer. While an insider might be predisposed to exaggerating the successes of the status quo, and smoothing over its failures, an outsider will have no such problems. When you come to negotiate with potential clients and buyers, the results of an independent auditor will carry far more weight than those you’ve obtained yourself – for the same reason that you might trust the opinion of an independent restaurant critic over that of the proprietor of the restaurant in question!