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A common marketing mistakes that specialty retail business owners make is following in the marketing footsteps of everybody else. In other words, they do the same thing that all the other retail stores do for marketing. They basically take a look at sales ads and offers and create all the same kind of offers and discounts to customers that the other stores are making.

It’s not hard to understand why a retail store owner – particularly a new retail store owner – would try to duplicate things other retail store owners are doing. After all, if you see other retail store owners advertising a certain way, using a certain medium or with certain words – you figure they must be successful with it and so you will be too. If you were able to take a look at raw statistics, though, you would see that most retail stores are actually not doing all that well. If you copy all the techniques and methods of stores that are not doing great – how can you expect to have better results from the same methods?

So – forgetting to be unique is the most common marketing mistake, and the most frustrating, marketing mistake that specialty retail businesses make. It’s actually quite easy to do things differently from what everyone else is doing – and it’s those aspects that help you stand out from the crowd and get a leg up on the competition. When you do things differently, you are bound to get far better results.

When you are looking to market your specialty retail business, you can advertise in specific magazines, papers and on websites that are targeting the same target group of customers. Unlike big department stores that have to gear advertising to appeal to everyone, your specialty retail business is targeting a specific group of people as customers, so you can place your advertisements with media that also targets that group of people. This is a much more effective approach to marketing, and you will soon create a loyal following of customers to your specialty retail business who becomes repeat buyers of your products. A common marketing mistake that specialty retail business owners make is forgetting that they are marketing to a smaller target market and don’t take advantage of these relevant niche magazines and websites for advertising.

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.