The Heinzeroth Blog

Back in the “olden days” the consumer purchase journey was pretty cut and dried. You went to a local brick and mortar store, shopped the brands and their respective assortments on the shelves and made a purchase. If you didn’t see what you were looking for, you drove to or called other stores until you found it. Competitive brands “differentiated” their products through shelf placement, pricing strategies and point of purchase materials. National TV ads, print ads, newspapers and circulars also educated consumers about product choices and available brands. Word of mouth recommendations from family and friends were the key trusted sources of product reviews. Special order catalogs were also in circulation and presented additional options for product purchases.

If your products involve a warranty, kudos to you for adding that special value to your brand. But is the way in which you register customer purchases making it possible for you to capture key insights and also to stay connected with your customers? For any company considering a content marketing program, a good place to apply its automated communication features is with your warranty registration process.

I recently painted nearly every room in my house. It was an ambitious and laborious DIY project (respect for all professional painters). Although I couldn’t be more satisfied with the completed product, I underestimated the total effort and time involved in the process, from picking out paint colors and taping off trim, to actually doing the painting, not to mention all the touch-up afterwards (more props to the pro’s).

"With online meetings we consistently miss one very important thing" states one of our agency's clients recently. "We totally lose the ability to show our product advantages in person, giving buyers a chance to touch and feel the products."

This particular client was talking about Product Line Review (PLR) meetings with retail buyers at Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards and other major DIY retailers. There's a lot riding on those meetings which in pre-pandemic days were almost always done in person. PLR meetings often make all the difference in determining which brands will be on the retailers' shelves next season.

This absence of an experiential element caused us to think about ways our creative team can help companies come out on top in those meetings, even when the obvious limitation is that all things being discussed are on a computer screen.

Content creation is at the core of a successful inbound marketing strategy. But to attract the volume of website visitors you need via search engines and social media to click through on an email, your content creation strategy needs to be prolific.

Before Covid-19 safety measures became part of the shopping experience, the role of product packaging and P.O.P. was mostly to provide an immersive consumer experience for your brand. Capture attention. Generate interest. Convert browsers into buyers. (etc.).

And while those in-store merchandising tasks are still important, consumers are expecting more from their shopping trips these days. As reflected in national surveys, consumers prefer safe practices by the retailer. But taking this to a level that possibly affects your merchandising, how might those shopper expectations about safety carry through to preferences in packaging? And if you provide signage, custom racks or other physical display systems, is the format helping to make the shopping experience as safe as it can be?

Would you shop at a retail store that didn’t implement some sort of safety measures to protect its customers from Covid-19? Do you notice when someone inside the store is improperly wearing a face mask (or not at all)? Do you look for the hand sanitizer station when you walk in or perhaps note if there are “Social-Distancing” floor stickers at checkout?

Although the economy as a whole is suffering due to the pandemic, major hardware and home center retailers have seen a significant jump in online sales due to the rise in consumer shopping from home. Here are some tips to help you maximize the visibility as well as sales conversion of your products in online channels.

The old adage “Change is the Only Constant” hardly seems to capture the rate of change that has impacted consumers and brands since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rules of retail are in a state of flux as consumers learn to navigate new social behavior requirements, working from home or job loss, financial uncertainty and home-schooling children. How does a brand ensure that they will not just survive but thrive?

Your website’s homepage is your company’s calling card. For most company websites, the homepage is the single most visited page. And since the homepage is referenced by the company’s root domain – yourcompany.com – it is often the easiest website address to promote and for visitors to remember. The homepage also sets the tone for the content on the rest of the site and serves a utilitarian function to introduce the navigation and other technical and design features.