The Heinzeroth Blog

Marketing is a competitive field, and as such, it's important that your content stand out from the rest. There’s no doubt that content marketing is an essential aspect of business growth. However, it can be difficult to harness the power of this tool.

In this blog post, we offer some best practices for writing better content marketing that will help your business grow. These simple guidelines will help you create high-quality content that engages your audience, generates leads, and converts prospects into customers.

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.

For any of us that have worked extensively over the years on packaging design, planograms, POP messaging and other in-store tactics, the dramatic shift toward online sales is a crystal-clear call for omni-channel thinking. It’s evident that we must present products in the best light for sales conversions “everywhere” while certainly not forgetting a continued strong focus on brick and mortar stores. To make the most of this new shopping landscape, there are some emerging best practices worth noting.  

When it comes to retail trends, no single organization has done more to change the way that people shop in recent years than Amazon. This remarkable company is innovating at a faster pace than everyone by improving the shopping experience with rich, easily searchable content and by adding the immensely popular Prime. Sellers who ignore the impact of this marketing juggernaut run the risk of missing a huge opportunity to reach a constantly growing number of customers who shop online first.

If your company manufactures do-it-yourself products, chances are good that new product development is a key part of your strategic plan. New products often serve as the life-blood of DIY categories that have come to expect a continual flow of new choices. As you look at current revenue and profits, you might ask how much of that financial performance was due to products you've introduced in the past 5 years alone. In many categories that number can easily exceed 50%. To make sure your new product development process is doing all it can for company growth and your brand position at retail, here are some practices we have noted to be successful in the DIY channel.

Professional tradespeople are a proud, independent group with a strong personal identity. They are entrepreneurial in character, but always remain builders-of-things at heart. They appreciate it when anyone expresses a sincere respect for their craft. When buying their tools and supplies, they expect a certain amount of attention, whether that occurs at a specialty dealer or in the big box retail environment. They feel their needs are special, and they expect products and services that cater to them.

Improving your success rate for marketing to professional tradespeople requires a good understanding of this unique identity, what messages resonate with them, what media they consume and, ultimately, how they make purchase decisions.

View These Winning Designs Announced At The 2016 NRHA Awards Program

If you are considering an update to your packaging and in-store POP merchandising, there are some great idea starters represented in this year’s awards program sponsored by the North American Retail Hardware Association (NRHA). Full disclosure: because the top packaging honor went to Heinzeroth Marketing Group for a Rain Bird package, we have a special interest in this awards program. But despite that small qualifier, we do think all of the winning designs are worth sharing.

In Part 1 of this blog post, we discussed why it’s time to start marketing home improvement products to millennials. This post is dedicated to exploring how we can effectively reach this important audience with media, messaging and merchandising strategies that build relationships and, ultimately, drive sales.

Millennials (adults 20 to 34) represent a massive consumer audience with growing economic might. They are 74 million strong, accounting for 25% of the U.S. population and representing $170 billion in spending power. They grew up in a time when there has always been an internet, so their on-demand access to information and social networking has formed who they are as human beings and consumers. They represent the future of our industry… a world where marketing is a two-way ongoing dialog and the consumer has equal weight in the equation.