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Marketing for specialty retailers is different to marketing for other retailers.

A specialty shop is simply a shop, either a conventional store, or an online business, that specializes in a specific range of products or services.  It is not like the big generic stores like WalMart or Kmart- the large stores that cover a great and varied range of products. Specialty shops tend to cover or specialize in just one field.

For example, a coffee shop is very specific or an adult shop, or an antiques shop. Toy shops, hobby shops, sporting goods shops. In fact, if you want to take sporting goods shops, you can break that down into even more specific niches and you could actually have just a golf shop, or just a tennis shop. Any store that caters to a particular niche is a specialty shop.

Marketing for specialty retailers as opposed to marketing for a department store requires different approaches.
The generic shops, like Walmart, tend to concentrate on price and the latest sales. They have to put out a lot of brochures, they have to put out a lot of advertising on television and radio, that have to cover a great deal of product in order to try and gain as many customers as possible.. It’s basically what I call a scattergun marketing approach.

A specialty shop is very easy to market effectively, if you know what you’re doing. Unlike having to appeal to the masses, and try and bring them in by showing a whole range of products, a specialty shop can advertise in specific magazines or papers or Internet sites targeting their potential customers. You appear directly to your target audience, and once you start doing that, believe it or not, price is not the all-important aspect. In fact, I show stores how to charge more than their competitors for the same product, and yet sell more than their competitors do!

It’s also a lot easier to build a loyal following of customers to a specialty shop than it is to a department store. And if you can do that, this then will let you market directly to a group of people who bought off you before, and are most likely to buy off you again. So I look at techniques in marketing for specialty retailers that shows them how to get those customers to spend more with them each time they buy from them, and to actually increase the numbers of times they buy from them in a year.