Let’s say you spend $1000 per month on Google ads, and $1000 per month on Facebook ads. The total ads spend is $24 000 per year.
You are a local hardware store. Your annual turnover is $700 000, per month it is around $58 000.
If your ROAS (return on advertising spend) goal is 10, then you need to $240 000 in sales.
Sales is a function of:
- People being aware of your business
- People knowing what you offer
- People trusting you, fair pricing, easy returns, friendly staff, convenient hours, ample parking, etc
- People visiting and buying products from you
- Getting referrals from customers
- Communicating often with your clients
- Making it a fun and pleasurable buying experience
The products people buy will have a major impact on the sales you make. Some products have low sales value, others have high sales value, some have high and some have low margins. Hardware stores typically sell a wide variety of products for home improvement, including:
- Paint and painting supplies: Paints, brushes, rollers, drop cloths, and painter’s tape
- Electrical supplies: Wiring, outlets, switches, circuit breakers, and lighting fixtures
- Garden and outdoor equipment: Lawnmowers, gardening tools, hoses, seeds, and fertilizers
- Hand and power tools: Tools used for construction, maintenance, and repair
- Plumbing supplies: Toilets, faucets, PVC pipe, galvanized piping, sprinkler heads, and replacement parts
- Fasteners: Binding posts, dowel-and-cam lock combos, and other unusual fasteners
- Housewares: Utensils and other housewares
- Cleaning products: Products for cleaning
- Building materials: Timber and other materials used for construction and maintenance
Another big factor for hardware stores is seasonality. Demand is different for every season. Here is an example for roof paint over the past 5 years in Texas. This is Google Trends, a free tool to use. You can clearly see how demand changes, some months are high, others demand drops.
When you do your marketing strategy and planning, do this customer journey:
- Identify the products with the most demand for a season
- Link your ad campaigns to the products and the season
- Build a database of clients for newsletters, SMS, calls, etc
- Create a first time offer linked to the products per season that will be in demand
- Define your customer journey, for example:
- When they join your newsletter, call them and thank then for joining
- Offer or remind them of the voucher on their first purchase
- Have an automation sequence for them to claim the voucher as it is season based
- When they come in, great and welcome them to the store
- Take them through the store (have a welcome script here for your sales people)
- On their purchase, offer the next incentive, ie FREE paint mix
- Also have an upsell at the counter, ie offer of the week
- Put them on an automation sequence for the paint mix
- When they come for that, and buy, have another offer ready for the next season
- Invite them to a customer appreciation event (ie could be a talk about the up-coming season and what to do in and around the house to be ready for the winter season)
- Ask for feedback from clients about their experience
- Ask for Google reviews, the more local reviews you have, the more customers you will get
- Have a process and reward referrals
- Train your staff on customer services and sales
- Motivate and help your staff, that is the role of leadership
- Measure your key performance indicators on a weekly basis. This will help you to know you are on the right track and not make adjustments
- Test, test, test. Not only ads, but follow up, offers, sales approaches, etc. The more you test, the luckier you get.
Having a strategy like this, a process approach to your sales and marketing, measurements to track results, you can be sure to smash your 10 ROAS target!
We have seen this many times, if you did not have a clear and measurable marketing and sales strategy, you might try and fix the wrong thing.
If sales are down, and you don’t have a clear strategy then there is no clear way to improve it.
Increasing the budget to get more leads, is also not the only way. Might be seen as a quick fix, but does not always work.
It is understanding the customer journey, from start to finish. Map out your customers journey and from there you work on each key area to make it better. Now you are fixing the right thing!
Your sales people might not be greeting people when they visit. Or the parking is full. Or you were out of stock for a high demand product. Or customer service might be lacking. Fix the right thing. Usually, it is a combination of these that unblocks sales in your business.