How to Display Advertisements in Your Convenience Store

As a convenience store owner/manager, you’ve got a lot to manage — from the large inventory of miscellaneous products to the complex reporting and analytics. This means it can be a challenge finding the time to promote, or even create, enticing sales and events for your retail shop.

If you’ve been looking for ways to display advertisements and promotions within your small business, we have a few ideas to help you get started!

What to Advertise in Your Convenience Store

In-store advertisements are just as important as external advertisements — they’re just a bit different! 

Generic coupons, for example, aren’t the most beneficial to have on display for shoppers who are already in your store. Offering a whopping ‘20% off your purchase’ is a great awareness tactic that’s better sent via email or text to get someone to stop in.

But promoting an upcoming storewide sale leading up to the date is a solid way to build excitement and get someone who is already making a purchase to return.

Additionally, in-store advertising can be used to give people a heads up about your VIP customer loyalty program, or invite people to an in-store event or flea market you’ll be participating in.

At the end of the day, thinking of your goal and the stage of the buying process your customers are in will help you determine what kinds of advertisements to focus on.

Now that we’ve covered what to display, let’s dive into how to display it.

Flyers and Print Materials

Let’s start small. When promoting storewide sales or upcoming events, there’s one old school tactic that never fails: flyers!

Create some fun and on-brand flyers to display throughout your store or at the checkout counter. If this sounds scary to you, don’t stress — Canva is a great (and free) tool you can use to create a simple yet effective flyer design. After that, all you need to do is pay for them to be printed, which is pretty budget-friendly nowadays.

Flyers aren’t the only fun option out there, though, so do your research and play around with other types of print materials that’ll really help your c-store advertisements stand out!

Shelf Tags and Labels

Let’s talk about labels. This advertising method is a lot easier if you have a label printer that’s integrated with your point of sale solution, of course.

Say you’re in the middle of the storewide sale you’ve been promoting, and with that sale, there’s a major discount on select items. Consider printing out special eye-catching labels that you can stick on the shelves or the products themselves, ensuring that your customers don’t miss an opportunity to save some cash.

This can take a bit of extra work on your end, but as mentioned, many POS systems offer label printer integrations plus a software feature that allows you to customize the labels. If you have something like this, it’s as easy as creating the tag you want and clicking print!

Customer Display 

If you have a customer display integrated with your point of sale solution, how are you utilizing it for advertisements?

A customer display is a piece of hardware (a customer-facing screen to be specific) that is used to display transaction details and advertisements. Before and after your cashier is ringing up transactions, the customer display screen can be utilized to display anything you want.

Use this valuable real estate to advertise your next big sale, product launch, or exclusive event. You can even have a promo on screen, such as ‘Save 10% on Your Purchase When You Join Our Customer Loyalty Program Today’. And if you have the budget, displaying a promotional video for an in-store event is a great option, too.

If your customer was satisfied enough to be making a purchase, they likely won’t have a problem with additional promotions — especially if they save them money!

If you don’t have a customer display, we recommend looking into your options. Our convenience store customers think they’re well worth the investment, especially for customer peace of mind during checkout.

Getting Started with C-Store Advertisements

We hope this short list of in-store advertisement ideas inspires you to create your own! There’s no way to know whether something will work for your small business unless you give it a shot, so don’t be afraid to take the leap.

If you have any questions about retail POS integrations, small business marketing, or you want to take a tour of our in-house software CAP Retail by POS Nation, reach out to our team at 877-727-3548.