While following your instincts is ideal in dealing with various situations, doing business is not on the radar of using intuitions. The planning of retailing process requires vigorous efforts, data, research, and in-depth analysis to ensure its fruition in optimizing your retail stores. 

To guide your way to developing a retail planning process, here’s a five-step approach to get you started. 

1. Market Analysis 

Analyzing your market space helps create a solid retail planning process. An efficient way to do it is by applying the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. With this, you can determine how your competitors affect your retail stores and gain insights to be applied to your business. 

2. Customer Analysis 

A business is nothing without its customers; hence, attracting them to your retail stores is vital. Analyze your demographic market, focusing on their background, habits, and issues interacting with your brand. With this, you can craft a shopping experience that fits and benefits you and the target audience. 

3. Objectives Setting

A goal in mind gives your retail stores a vision and motivation to aim for success. However, setting objectives may not be as easy as you think. It has to follow a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal formula to ensure that your objectives are attainable for your business. 

4. Strategy Implementation

Strategy implementation is one of the most crucial aspects in doing retail planning. You must consider all the necessary factors from analyzing your market and customers and crafting your objectives. From this, you can start stocking your shelves, considering product assortment, seasonal demands, product ranges, and product placement. On top of that, retail pricing must be realistic, catering to people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Also, marketing and advertising have to be solid to ensure the promotion of your products. 

5. Performance Analysis 

A robust retail plan is not what it all takes. It is essential to take into account that while the plan is being put out, you have to analyze its performance. Track its progress to see if it is aligned with your objectives or if some adjustments and changes are necessary to make. Also, as the season ends, take an in-depth look at how the retail strategy impacted your business. The insights gathered will be beneficial in leveling up the planning strategies for the next season. 

Take a handful of these pointers and make them work in your business, or you can hire a retail consultant who is qualified and knowledgeable enough to work this out for you. 

Finding a consultant is easy, but finding the right one is complex. The gap between researching and hiring the perfect fit is tedious, but at Retail Smart Guys, we can bridge that gap for you. 

RSG offers marketing, social media, inventory, and retail consultants, to name a few, with fresh perspectives and expertise to evaluate and unleash hidden opportunities in your business. Also, they have the ability to identify the processes needed to undertake to increase productivity levels for your business. 

Reach greater business potential by hiring our retail store planning consultants. 

With RSG, we got it all for you!