The trick to selling the treats: How to stand out at Halloween
Halloween is fast becoming one of the biggest retail events of the year, especially for confectionery companies. It is estimated that 90% of Americans spent money on sweets over the Halloween period, amounting to $2.6 billion dollars. Halloween has been an established and widely celebrated holiday in America since the early days of the 20th century, and this enthusiasm has spread worldwide. With so much income being spent on Halloween themed sweets, how can one company possibly stand out?
Availability
Your customers can’t buy your products if they’re not on the shelves! This may seem like a completely obvious statement, but during the busiest times of the retail calendar, simply making sure your shelves are fully stocked is one of the best ways to ensure you’re beating your competition. It’s easy to implement too!
All you have to do is make sure you have a field marketing team to ensure your products are constantly replenished and on shelf with regular store audits.
Consistency
Every single part of your production process means you have a product which is consistently of the highest standard. No matter if someone has purchased your product at a service station outside Aberdeen or a Sainsbury’s local in Hammersmith, you know that your produce is quality. It’s also true that sometimes, the way store managers and retail staff display your products can be subject to human error. In our 30 years of retail field marketing experience, our team have seen many examples of busy staff placing boxes upside down, or opening and displaying packaging the wrong way round. Sometimes, having your products displayed as intended can be the difference between selling out or losing out.
Having a team completing retail store audits to maximise your visibility and availability, ensuring maximum capacity merchandising and getting the basics right will ensure you don’t lose out.
Become a tradition
Halloween calls to mind certain pieces of candy that are completely synonymous with the holiday. Just like candy canes at Christmas and chocolate eggs at Easter, there are certain brands that have made their products must-haves for sweet-toothed trick or treaters. Haribo, as an example, excels each year at creating the perfect trick-or-treating favourites. As well as releasing spooky, Halloween themed mixes for their larger bags, they do a number of smaller bags that are great for sharing with trick or treaters. It’s these fun size bags that are becoming childhood favourites and a whole part of the Halloween tradition.
The success of this lies in the marketing you do for your products, not just instore but in a wide variety of media. Ensuring you have an outsourced field sales team on the ground to collect the data of how your products are performing and where, and ensuring that your have access to the real-time sales data you will need to ensure the following year is ever more successful. That’s where data led field marketing comes in, helping you to maximise your product performance and compliance.
Experimentation & innovation
The success of this lies in the marketing you do for your products, not just ATL but instore. Ensuring you have an outsourced field sales team on the ground to collect data and insight into product performance. Also using data-led technology to maximise product performance and compliance and deliver ROI. Ensuring promotional compliance by equipping your outsourced field marketing team with intelligent instore surveys will help you track the uplift in sales that you should be seeing at these busy periods.
Working with an award-winning field marketing company who can advise you on strategies to increase your ROI makes sense in today’s climate. Get in touch with our Commercial Director, Amanda on working with us in the New Year to support with your instore activity, NPD launches or merchandising, and generate more sales.
For more expert advice on how to drive more revenue through field marketing, take a look at our blog, or for seasonal wisdom, take a look at our blog: Elf on the shelf? Get more of yourSELF on the shelf at Christmas.
