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What’s the fastest and easiest way to grow your convenience store sales without breaking budgets?

Answer: SMPs---Strategic Marketing Promotions.

SMPs create and communicate your convenience value to customers, then differentiate your stores to beat out competitors for sales, time after time. It’s awesome.

But here’s a secret…successful SMPs must be built strategically…from your retail vision and business ideology to work. That’s what makes them unique and irresistible to customers. (Most retailers miss this secret.)

SMPs are the best marketing tool to get customers to act, buy and return. They make your store a destination.

Since 2002, we’ve been helping retailers create and fully implement monthly SMP’s that grow sales. And I wanted to see if we can help make growing your sales easier.

I built my SMP Marketing Framework and Process during a seven-year period working for the Sheetz Chain, and it tripled sales and doubled store counts. I’m proud to say it helped catapult Sheetz into the juggernaut it is today.

Our SMPs will work for any size retailer because they are rooted in today’s most effective retail marketing fundamentals. And they are almost impossible to copy.

Our framework combines the best of CPG strategy, creative retail marketing, direct marketing tactics, LTO’s urgency, irresistible customer value, digital & media targeting, and food service offers when needed.

No other firm does what we do, the way we do it.

A little curious? Listen up.

The SMP Framework: Convenience Store Marketing Group

1: How To Find Your Starting Point: The Business Review-Where are we? Where should we go? How?

2: How To Create A Value Wheel-Why do you matter?

3. How To Create Your Competition’s Value Wheels-Why do they matter?

4: How To Place Value Wheels On A Map: Set Up Your Store’s Winning Move (Or Position)

5: How To Make Your ONE Winning Move-Check & Checkmate

6: How To Create A Promotional Plan To Communicate Your Move

7: How To Use Your Retail Ideology In Your Promotions

8: How To Create Your Media Plan That Reaches Customers

9. How To Share Your Plan With The Store Operations Team: Retail Jihad

10: How To Measure Results: Your Future Is Born Here - Learning, Rinse, Repeat

BONUS: How To Get Faster Results-One Hack

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When you learn to see...

•The convenience industry and its' customers DIFFERENTLY,

•Your store model and retail marketing DIFFERENTLY...

...ONLY THEN can you create new sales and growth opportunities.

Let's explore:

Why doesn't the convenience store industry grow commensurate with the growing importance of convenience in every other business category?

Are industry profits healthy or not?

Are you creating new customer value or just looking for the next Magical Product at NACS?

Are you a PASSIVE retailer and marketer? Hint: That's the root of your problems...not competitors. (They're passive too)

Are you advocating for your customers FIRST in your company...or yourself? (Amazon's Jeff Bezos advocates for customers first.)

Are you investing time and dollars into creating and marketing new customer value? How?

Why does the convenience industry RANK LAST when it comes to investing a portion of its sales into marketing? And why do industry leaders like Sheetz do the OPPOSITE?

Where do you start to create a better marketing budget?

Ideas for the industry to get itself unstuck.

And much more!

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Is putting a radio station that YOU OPERATE inside your convenience store a good retail marketing idea?

Is operating a radio station and selling RMN ads on it in your "retail wheelhouse?"

Prove it to me.

What do your customers say about this?

You didn't ask them....?

Uh oh.




Notes:
So here's the one question of the day for the convenience store CEOs and owners. The question is this: retail media networks, what are they? Are they a good marketing idea? Let's dive into it.

I was recently reading the convenience store dive newsletter, which I love and which I would highly suggest that everybody who listens to this podcast sign up and subscribe to. It's tremendous. It's very, very good. It's called C store dive and you can find it online.

Okay. So I've been reading about retail media networks, which are also known as radio stations inside the convenience store. They're not just a radio station, but a lot of it I think depends on audio and additional digital ads and things like that that are inside display that's inside a convenience store, and the C store dive newsletter goes into this. And there's three big chains recently that are looking at this:

1. Casey's - their radio network is called Casey's access.
   
   
2. Wawa - their network is called the Wawa media network.
   
   
3. 7-Eleven - they're doing it with gulp radio and gulp media. Love the name, by the way.
   
   

So how it works is this. You can either do it yourself, a radio station inside your store, or you can hire a third party to do this for you. And C store dive covers this, uh, talk about some of the vendors out there that do it. And so once you have your radio station as a retailer, you then charge the consumer package goods company for airtime on your radio station or display your digital ads at the point of sale. Cool. Got all that?

So basically you're getting into, if you're a retailer, you're getting into the radio station business and you're going to run radio stations. The idea there is to sell your ad time and have your ads running at point of sale to drive impulse purchases. Okay. So that's the, in a nutshell, that's what we're talking about here is the retailer getting into the radio station business.

Now part of this deal is that the retailer will turn over the first party data to the consumer package goods company. Uh, this is information that's collected at store level, I assume by loyalty cards, just as an example. So the central question I have on retail media networks or being in the radio business for retailers is, is this a good idea? Is it a good idea? And for who?

So let's discuss that.

Um, and again, the question is, who's it a good deal for? Well,

number one, it's certainly good for the consumer package goods company, especially when it comes to collecting first party data. Um, it's a very, I guess it's an efficient way to get that data and have access to it. So then you can turn around and use that first party data, uh, as even as you walk away from, uh, the retail media network. So the, the consumer package goods company, the CPG company has it, they use it as they see fit. So it's, it's good deal for them. That's number one.

Number two, it's certainly good for the retailers because this is new revenue for the retailer, even if they don't sell a single product out of this radio station that's inside their store. So it's just basically, uh, found money and it's extra revenue, uh, to them if they actually sell products as well. So at the point of impulse purchasing, that's, that's, it's kind of a win-

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YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNAm9Xn7U3A

In 1517 Martin Luther was so disgruntled with the Church that he wrote and nailed 95 proclamations of reform to the church door in Germany. He was eventually excommunicated by the Pope for heresy.

While I don't think the Pope will view my 25 Convenience Store Marketing Proclamations with such disdain, they might make some retailers a little squeamish.

Why?

Because "convenience" in the eyes and demands of customers is growing, but the retail convenience category is not keeping pace with this demand.

The 25 Proclamations are my way of addressing both the mistakes being made, and the new opportunities for growth that flow out of them.

If you're only looking for the next shiny magical product to save your bacon, these ideas are not for you.

If you want to create more value for your customers and differentiate your store, products and services, we might be able to help challenge your thinking and make you more competitive and profitable than ever.

Here we go...

1. We will acknowledge the ONLY purpose of our marketing is to engage customers in new ways with our retail locations; to grow our sales, margins and profits.

2. We will recognize that convenience stores, convenience, and saving time, are more relevant than ever.

3. We will acknowledge that value creation and differentiated marketing is a key reason for the growth of industry leaders like Sheetz, and that we can do this too.

4. We will work 24/7 to methodically listen and understand our changing CUSTOMERS and their changing convenience needs.

5. We will make the time to MEANINGFUL DIFFERENTIATE our brand, stores, products, services and people, and the value we deliver over OUR COMPETITORS.

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Learn the secrets and tactics to creating, positioning and marketing convenience store food programs that are different, unique, drive foot traffic and deliver high profits. These are the retail marketing tactics I developed for retailers like Sheetz, Uni Marts, and others.

You Tube link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxvD0kYphI

http://conveniencemarketing.net/

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Content from my upcoming book:

The Perfect Storm
How I Reinvented Convenience Store Marketing At Sheetz
by Tim Lazor

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hphbBVHw0C8&t=14s

Principle 1. Decide On—Then Protect --Your ‘Proactive’ Marketing Mindset

Only you can do this. You must decide to always have a proactive marketing-first mindset, then protect your decision from the forces of entropy. Constantly making decisions that move marketing initiative forward creates work, disruption, problems, risk—and success and rewards.

YOUR People will fight you, not follow up, slow walk. And wear your down. Resist these forces and insist your company is embracing a marketing mindset forever.

Principle 2. Uncover How You Create Value & Why You Are Different

Retail marketing succeeds when you’ve taken time to create real and new value for customers, and differentiated it in the marketplace to customers. The ultimate secret is this: You are the difference. You are the storm.

Principle 3. Create & Execute Your Marketing Plan From Value & Differentiation

Your marketing or promotional plan doesn’t have to be long…it has to be strategic, powerful and simple to execute under pressure and chaos. And it has to be written (even six pages) so it can be shared, communicated and committed to by your team. No exceptions.

Principle 4. Build A Marketing Team With Your Ideology, Not Paper

4. Implementing Your Convenience Store Retail Marketing Plan is a team sport. Be precise in picking your team, and what each teammate will specifically do for the company. (Not themselves. Not their portfolio. Not their Linkedin page)

Principle 5. Love Your Money Machine (Oil The Gears)

Your store is a value-creating & money-making machine. Maintain it. Love it. Improve it. Most important, use your marketing machine to communicate and sell to customers moving through it. And clean your fucking bathrooms.

Principle 6. Measure Your Marketing Budget & Its Sales Results

Be precise and exact in what you decide to measure from your marketing program and budget: It eliminates opinions, delays and chaos, and delivers helpful data for future decisions.

Principle 7. Keep Innovating & Creating More Problem-Solving Value For Customers.

The closer you are (and stay close) to hearing your customers’ needs and opinions, the more innovative your company and its marketing will be in the future. You’ll be un-copyable, un-stoppable and extremely profitable.

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In this episode, Convenience Marketing Group President Tim Lazor interviews Luke Maurer.

Luke is CEO of Digital Marketing firm Ad Giraffe AND owner of BJ Maurer Ford Dealership. He brings a 1-2 marketing punch and perspective to the C-Store Industry when he discusses:

• The essential, but sometimes taken-for-granted role cars play in the convenience industry (How else do most customers get on the lot?)
• EV vs Gas cars. Implications for C-stores.
• The dramatic beginnings of the family business during the Great Depression.
• How to use digital and social media to reach c-store customers in real time and engage with them.
• The robust c-store capabilities Facebook brings to the marketplace.
• Thinking about C-store Customer Lifetime Value.

Questions C-STORES Must Answer

• How to get out of the “2 items for a low price” rut.
• Where should you start digital marketing to reach more customers and get more foot traffic on lot and inside your store?
• New thinking about How to promote the FOOD category within a convenience store. Where would we start?
• DIGITAL DILEMA: How do we find potential convenient store customers through digital platforms?
• From beginning to end, what does customer engagement look like step-by-step?
• What are some common mistakes people make when trying to promote their business digitally and socially?
• Is there a difference between digital marketing and social marketing?
• What is “content creation” and “brand story?”
• How do you budget for and measure your digital and social marketing initiatives? Are they measurable?
• You are a single location? How can digital and social marketing apply here?
• What are some resources our listeners should check out?
• Pricing and cost considerations?

Tim Lazor, The Convenience Marketing Group

412-423-0044
412-400-3144
http://www.conveniencemarketing.net

http://conveniencemarketing.net/

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SHOW NOTES:
How Your Retail Marketing Should Be Driving Sales…

Step #1

Uncover The New Value Your Company Creates.

You might be surprised

Not features and benefits, old school.

Situations.

Value feels like something specific

Around a problem define it.

Specific and innovative program of solutions that make problem go away

Step #2

Then, Creatively Differentiate That Value. HOW?

Look at you and competitors, sharks and cage match

Competitors are not passive or static

Take into account 4 Forces affecting you and competitors

Threat of new competitors esp non-traditional

Power of your customers

Power of your suppliers

Threat of substitues Electric for gas?

GO VERY DEEP?

Who do you want to challenge?

What do you BELIEVE. Your ideology?

Some other questions to consider:

What is my unique point of view toward customers and why we serve them?

Why do we do this?

Why does our company matter?

If we went out of business today, would people miss us?

How do we do what we do better?

What specifically do we do better?

Boil down to a statement: We are the only _________ that creates value to make ________ go away for ________________.

Marketing Magic happens focus and sacrifice

What you say vs. where and how.

Step #3

Tell Your Target.

Complete marketing and creative and media and digital plan

Implement

Engage

Step #4

Drive Sales.

Learn as you go, re apply

Marketing strategy is never static

Fun

Tim Lazor
www.conveniencemarketing.net
timlazor@comcast.net
412-423-0044

http://conveniencemarketing.net/