How To Drive Customers To Your Physical Store

You can’t get customers to buy your products if you can’t get them to your store.

This is true for online and physical stores.

But how do you get customers to walk into your physical store in today’s world, where customers would rather order products online than walk into a store?

Simple! You make it worth their while.

Continue reading to discover powerful strategies you can implement immediately to drive more customers to your physical store.

Getting Them To The Door: Five (5) Strategies That Work

1. Your Location Matters

Where you choose to site your store is very important. There are many factors that small business owners consider when choosing a location.

But, your number one priority is to choose a location with good foot traffic.
This will guarantee that your store is more visible to passersby and that is great for business.

2. Turn Your Storefront into A Big Signage

Traditionally, the only way to attract customers to walk into your store is to utilize attractive signage.

Today, it is not enough to just have visible or memorable signage in front of your store.
You have to turn your storefront into one huge signage.

First, your signage has to be visible, bold, and memorable.

Second, you have to leverage your windows to display your products.
Many businesses fail to see the huge potential of displaying their products on windows for passers-by to see.

If you own a restaurant and instead of just signage that tells customers that you sell fresh food, you can use your glass windows to display your steaming hot chicken – and let it do all the talking.

I bet you that the chicken, ice cream, etc. that you display on your glass window will do more to convince people to walk into your store than your signage would.

In essence, let everything on your shopfront have the single purpose of attracting customers to come in, instead of just leaving the job to your signage alone.

3. Host In-Store Events

One powerful way to get people to your store is to host a physical event.

You can organize one yourself, usually something related to what you sell.
If you own a bookshop, you can host a monthly book reading club.
The goal of such an event is to attract people who are in the case of a book club, interested in books and turn get them to books from your store.

Another way is to volunteer to host various events that other organizations are organizing.

Many restaurants are catching up with this strategy.

It makes sense because, if your restaurant hosts an event (like a reunion or a small business owner get together), your business will gain from the publicity of the event.

And when people come into your restaurant for the event, it’s easy for them to buy food and drinks from you especially when you display them properly.

4. Market Online

Some small business owners don’t see the benefit of advertising their businesses online since they don’t have an online store.

But advertising online and on social media means that you’re promoting your business where the eyeballs of your potential customers are.

Two ways to drive customers to your store via online marketing include:

a. Listing your business on Google My Business

b. Advertising on social media, using local influencers to drive awareness

Most customers go online to check out stores before they visit, the harder it is to find your business online, the lower the probability that they’d visit you.

5. Referrals

Reward existing customers to bring their friends to your store. A simple discount on their next purchase is an effective way to get them motivated to keep bringing you more customers.

You can also do a referral program with other complementary small businesses. Where you agree to send them referrals when they send you referrals.

There are a lot of other excellent strategies to get customers to your store like organizing contests, inviting other popular brands to do a pop-up listing in your store, etc.

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image: Bloomberg

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