Grow C-Store Sales & Foot Traffic Faster With SMPs (Strategic Marketing Promotions) Artwork

Convenience Marketing Group with Tim Lazor

Tim Lazor's Unique Retail Marketing Firm Specializing In Growing The Convenience Store Sales by focussing on Customers. We help: Convenience Store Retailers…Convenience Distributors…Convenience Manufacturers & Suppliers……Grow their sales and margins with differentiated, disruptive, and value–creating marketing programs.

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Convenience Marketing Group with Tim Lazor

Grow C-Store Sales & Foot Traffic Faster With SMPs (Strategic Marketing Promotions)

February 12, 2025

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What’s the fastest and easiest way to grow your convenience store sales without breaking budgets?

Answer: SMPs---Strategic Marketing Promotions.

SMPs create and communicate your convenience value to customers, then differentiate your stores to beat out competitors for sales, time after time. It’s awesome.

But here’s a secret…successful SMPs must be built strategically…from your retail vision and business ideology to work. That’s what makes them unique and irresistible to customers. (Most retailers miss this secret.)

SMPs are the best marketing tool to get customers to act, buy and return. They make your store a destination.

Since 2002, we’ve been helping retailers create and fully implement monthly SMP’s that grow sales. And I wanted to see if we can help make growing your sales easier.

I built my SMP Marketing Framework and Process during a seven-year period working for the Sheetz Chain, and it tripled sales and doubled store counts. I’m proud to say it helped catapult Sheetz into the juggernaut it is today.

Our SMPs will work for any size retailer because they are rooted in today’s most effective retail marketing fundamentals. And they are almost impossible to copy.

Our framework combines the best of CPG strategy, creative retail marketing, direct marketing tactics, LTO’s urgency, irresistible customer value, digital & media targeting, and food service offers when needed.

No other firm does what we do, the way we do it.

A little curious? Listen up.

The SMP Framework: Convenience Store Marketing Group

1: How To Find Your Starting Point: The Business Review-Where are we? Where should we go? How?

2: How To Create A Value Wheel-Why do you matter?

3. How To Create Your Competition’s Value Wheels-Why do they matter?

4: How To Place Value Wheels On A Map: Set Up Your Store’s Winning Move (Or Position)

5: How To Make Your ONE Winning Move-Check & Checkmate

6: How To Create A Promotional Plan To Communicate Your Move

7: How To Use Your Retail Ideology In Your Promotions

8: How To Create Your Media Plan That Reaches Customers

9. How To Share Your Plan With The Store Operations Team: Retail Jihad

10: How To Measure Results: Your Future Is Born Here - Learning, Rinse, Repeat

BONUS: How To Get Faster Results-One Hack

http://conveniencemarketing.net/

You're listening to the Convenience Store Marketing Podcast.

This is a new podcast for CEOs and leaders of convenience stores, distributors, and manufacturers, all who make things and sell things in the convenience store space. I'm Tim Lazar, your host. Welcome to our podcast.Our topic today is how you can achieve faster and easier sales growth with what are called SMPs.

So I ask clients in the convenience store space all the time, what's the fastest and the easiest way to grow your convenience store sales and your margins and your traffic counts without breaking your marketing budget? And the answer to that question most times, if not all the time, is what are called SMPs. It's what I call them were strategic marketing promotions.

Now SMPs, what they do is they create and they communicate your convenience value to customers. They also then differentiate your stores to beat out your competitors for sales time after time after time. And in the business world and the achievement that these things bring to your chain of convenience stores, it's absolutely awesome. And I can vouch for it, but here's a secret. The successful strategic marketing promotions are those SMPs. They have to be built strategically from your retail vision and your business ideology to work. Okay? You have to include your vision and your ideology for these things to work. That's what makes them unique and absolutely irresistible to customers. And just a little secret here is that most retailers miss this point. And if you don't include it, it's very likely that your SMP will not work as well as it should.If you take the right approach and the right amount of time to build your SMPs, they are the best marketing tool to get customers to act to buy inside your stores and return and become loyal. They literally will make your store a destination.Since around 2002, I've been helping retailers create and fully implement those monthly SMPs to grow sales. And I wanted to see in today's podcast, if I could maybe outline our process briefly and see if we might be able to make growing your sales a bit easier. But first I wanted to give you just a little bit of background.I built my SMP strategic marketing promotion framework and my process during a seven year period when I was working on the Sheetz convenience store chain. And when I implemented this process and this framework, for the years that I worked on Sheetz, it tripled their sales and it doubled their store counts. And I'm really proud to say that it was part of the reason that Sheetz was catapulted into the juggernaut that they are today and still use some of these marketing techniques that are embedded into their culture.What's extra fun about SMPs is they will work and this process will work for any size retailer because these principles, these, this framework and this process is rooted in today's most effective retail marketing fundamentals. And they're almost impossible to copy when they're applied to your store.My framework combines the best of:
Consumer package good strategy
Creative retail marketing
Direct marketing tactics
LTOs or limited time offer urgency
Irresistible customer value
Digital and media targeting
Food service offers when they're needed and we apply them.
There really is no other framework or process quite the way that my firm does it. So if you're a little curious, I'd love to share this framework with you and let's begin.So before we get into the strategy of developing SMPs or strategic marketing promotions, we need to start with one question. And here's that question. What's the one most important convenience store problem that this podcast or SMPs can solve and that if you solve it, it'll make everything else that follows in your retail business life a heck of a lot easier? The answer to that is SMPs or strategic marketing promotions. That's what we're going to cover in this podcast. More precisely, we're focused with SMPs on increasing and growing maximum customer sales andmargins. So this podcast will focus on growing and maximizing your convenience store sales by generating more customer traffic with valuable, creative, strategic marketing campaigns and promotions. We're not doing that by focusing on finding and placing the next magical or addictive product on your shelf and waiting for someone to wander into your store and find it and buy it. We will not do that with our SMPs. The products and services and messages and offers in our SMPs that we create, they're so valuable and different to convenience customers that they can't be ignored by them and they can't be easily copied by competitors. Customers will act on them and your competitors will fear them. And it doesn't matter if you have one store or a chain of 200, my process and concept of SMPs will grow and help your sales. And as a result of doing all this wonderful extra work, you get to keep a piece of that growing value and profit that you create for solving customers' convenience shopping problems. Now that's not a bad way to see things, is it? Come on, let's change your life with this podcast.Before I started the convenience marketing group, I spent a lot of time at major advertising agencies in Pittsburgh. The two most notable ones were Ketchum Advertising and also HBM Creamer Advertising. And when I worked on both packaged goods, consumer packaged goods, and also on some major regional retail accounts, one of the things that you learn before you put together SMPs or strategic marketing promotions for clients is you have to find a starting point.So in order to build strategic marketing promotions, I want to take you through 10 steps, questions to consider as you build these. And each one of these steps builds on the one before it. That's one of the notes that you need to know.
Business Review: Before you start your strategic marketing process, you have to start with a business review. And by a business review, what I mean is we're trying to find a starting point. That's what a business review does. It just basically answers the question from a number standpoint, where are we right now and where should we go? And then once we determine where we should go, we have to determine then how we get there. And that's really the strategy that we're going to put together.
I first was exposed to business reviews with a little bit of a twist, both on the Heinz account and also on Chef Pierre Pie's account, which was a packaged goods pie that was sold into grocery stores. And what you're trying to do with the business review is you're going to analyze data, you're going to look for sales, and you're going to be looking for trends. But probably more importantly from that is you're trying to glean from your business review customer information. What does your sales information start to tell you about your customers and your customers' behavior? And ultimately one of the things we used to say at both Creamer Advertising and Ketchum Advertising was we're trying to get the data to confess. We're trying to get it to confess some kind of strength about the product or the service. We're also trying to surface opportunities and we're trying to look at the data, look at the trends, and bubble up marketing opportunities for our business.That's one of the major things that people miss in a business review. They just take a look at the data, they lay it all out there, and it's just data for data's sake. But what we're trying to do is see the convenience store industry differently. We're trying to see our customers differently. We're trying to analyze and surface their behavior so that we can offer them new value that makes them behave and respond in different ways. That's the key insight of the business review. And as you do your business review you'll be able to put the key ideas and initiatives and insights either at the top or the bottom of the page that the data surfaces for you. So that's step number one. You start a business review and you're just starting to look for overall trends. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's just a starting point and what you'll see is it'll start to suggest a direction and some directions as to where your company and your business should start to go.
Value Wheel: Step number two is we're going to create what's called a value wheel. And a value wheel is based on the book by Cynthia Montgomery called The Strategist. And basically a value wheel answers one question. Why does your business matter? Why does it matter to customers? And if your business went away tomorrow, would that leave a holein the universe or would people just move on to something else that was an equivalent replacement for what you offer? It's a hard question to answer, but it's critical. But the value wheel is the tool that we're going to use next. A value wheel is a simple, simple tool.

So here's what you do:
Draw a circle on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper.
Make it into a pie chart.
Ask yourself one question: How does your store or stores create value for customers?
We're going to break your store down and your store model into its components. So you can start to imagine it in your mind's eye that, you know, one of those things might be gasoline in the forecourt or coffee, salty snacks, whatever. You can put those the whole way around your pie chart. You can also add in things here. Maybe things that create value for customers could be your employees, your location if it's really special. Just take a rough crack at drawing a value wheel, answering the question, how do we create value?
Now I want you to take a crack at redrawing it. But what you're going to do with each of these categories is you're going to try to plus. What I mean by plussing it, you're going to incorporate all the senses: sight, sound, hearing, smell, taste, touch in each of these categories where you create value. Is there a way that you can plus it using the five, it's called five sensing this technique? And what you're going to try to do is say, based on the five senses, is there anything more that we can do to create value for our customers?
So for example, in the forecourt with gasoline, is there anything that you could do visually? Is there anything you could do tactically as far as touching? Is there anything that you could do as far as smell or audio that might add value to that experience if that's the only experience that somebody came onto your lot and had the chance to experience with your store?
Then take a walk in your mind inside the store, go to the coffee bar, go to the fountain bar and ask yourself the same question. From a five sensing standpoint, are there any other senses we can pull into the experience to create more value?
At this point, you should have basically a rough draft of your first value wheel, which is how you create value right now with no changes. And then the second wheel that you're taking a crack at, just set that aside, but that's your value wheel. We'll call it value wheel plus. That's future looking as to as far as how you might create future value for your customers.
Take another sheet of paper. This is step number three. You're now going to create a value wheel for your competitors. And basically what you're going to do here is ask, how do your competitors create value? You're going to draw it based on what you know about each of your competitors and you'll do one value wheel for each of them and ask the question and be honest with yourself.
How are they doing things better than you?
How are they beating you?
Where are they weaker?
And again, keep this thing not emotionally focused, but data focused and try to create value wheels for each of your competitors and how they create value for the customers that you all are competing for.
Step number four, get another piece of paper, draw a big plus mark on the piece of paper. This is an X, Y access. What you'll start to notice based on doing your value wheel and your competitors value wheels is you're going to start to see some patterns and trends inside your market and how each of you are competing for customers.
And you'll be able then, for example, on the X, Y axis on that blank piece of paper you just drew. And we're basically making a map and we're going to plot stores, both us and our competitors on the map.
So if somebody doesn't have any food in their stores on the left of the horizontal line, you might put no food on the far left-hand side, but on the far right-hand side you might say great at food service. Then on the vertical line, if some of the people you compete against are just low price operators, you might put at the bottom of that vertical line, low price. And at the top of that line you would put premium price.
And just as a note here, you can create as many of these maps with an X, Y axis as might see fit. You haveto play with these a little bit to start to see the world that you compete in with your competitors and how you're competing a lot more clearly. So, for example, if you have a food service program but based on your market it's more lower priced food, you would place your circle, your value wheel in the lower right hand quadrant of that map. And as you plot your competitors on this map, maybe a lot of them don't have food service at all in your marketplace. You're competing in the low price space but based on your competitors maybe they're just salty snacks, coke, smoke, cigs, all that stuff and they're more lower prices.
What you'll start to notice is there may be an opening based on the plotting of all your competitors; there might be an opening for more premium priced food in your marketplace. What you're basically looking for on this map are openings and trends and clusters. So, if your competitors are clustered in one of the quadrants but there's an opening or two in some of the other quadrants you can basically look at that as an opportunity.
Now, it's not going to be the answer right away but you're seeing how you create value, how you compete against your competitors and how they create value and when you plot them out on the XY axis of a map, basically what you're doing is you're starting to see the world of choices according to customers. I'll say it again, you are starting to understand the universe of you and your competitors and what you offer and how you create value from the customer's point of view and when you do that you now start to see marketing opportunities emerge.
So, step five is you're basically going to make one winning if it makes sense for your stores. So, you're looking again for openings and unfilled spaces on this map of your competitors and you ask yourself, can you exploit it? And if you can and you can make margin and you can make money at it and you think that you... For example, you might be able to go from just lower priced food not the whole way up in the upper right hand quadrant to premium food and go hog wild but you might be able to introduce more a couple of premium priced food products in that quadrant to test them and make a marketing move there.
And when you think about it, it makes a whole lot of sense trend-wise you know with food service being more and more important in the convenience store space and you make that move and you consider that move and you make it and you succeed at it you then have the opportunity to make more margin which answers the single question that we asked at the beginning of this, what does a strategic marketing promotion, what's the one problem it solves and that is generating new sales, new revenue new margins, new customers, new traffic inside your store and once you knock down that domino a whole lot of other good things start to happen for your complete value wheel all around the store.
I hope that basically makes sense for point number five so let's move on to point number six and the next thing we're going to do based on that map and based on that one move that we might think we can make in our marketplaces we're going to create a strategic marketing promotion or promotional plan to communicate that move to our target audience and basically this is, and I'm not going to go into the weeds on all this, but basically you need to put together and determine precisely who your target audience is and the product or the service that you're about to create value with or new value with and you're then going to build once you decide on those two things the target the product service then you're going to build your value stack around that thing.
So you're gonna ask yourself based again on the five sensing what can we do to create and generate more irresistible value around this offer that we're about to promote with a strategic marketing promotion and this is where you brainstorm with your group and you are basically trying to create an offer and a value package that only you and your stores can deliver against your competitors in that new space based the way customers see the market and then once you have determined that you start to get precise on the offer in the value stack and and how you're going to create value for customers then you're ready to create the strategic marketing promotion or the campaign and this is where you start to kick around the creative ideas you know whether you're going to use social and digital media to translate your message out to customers whether youuse traditional media whether it's TV, radio, cable online, over-the-top television could be direct mail. I suppose there's a whole lot of different media and we'll talk about that in the next step about the most efficient way to get your message to the target audience.
I just want to pause here and make this one critical point: it's not where you place your message. All media work, and we'll talk about that in a minute. All media work, whether it's on the social, digital, or traditional side. The thing that's missing in most convenience store promotions with strategic marketing campaigns is the message. A message of value, a message that's based on what customers want and based on what your data tells you from your business review and your value wheels. That'll tell you what your customers will respond to, and usually it's something that's so good, so irresistible, so different, so unique that they can't help but take some kind of action on that.
The mistake that most retailers make is they just do one-off ideas. They throw an idea out there, and any competitor could copy it. But we are now basing our strategic marketing promotion (our SMPs) on your business, your company, your customers, your trends, your sales data. When you start to do that, you start to find your way toward really creating value, really being different, making your store a destination. This process will get you there.
Then that leads us to point number seven as you're building your SMP. That question is: you're going to enter the world of just a couple of competitors. If you've come this far, but when you have those couple of competitors at this point in time, there's a good chance they've kind of gone or could have gone through a similar process. Maybe, maybe not. I doubt it more so in the convenience store space. But let's just assume you have a competitor out there or two that's pretty good. Now we have to really do the final layer of differentiation to make our store a destination.
The way that we do that, and a lot of people, a lot of retailers will miss it, is we want to overlay on our promotion that we're creating, our strategic marketing promotion. What we now want to overlay there is our business ideology. It's Simon Sinek that had a quote that says, it's gonna maybe paraphrase this: in retail, you don't want to just offer people the same thing so that they, you know, we're all offering and they buy what they need. What Simon Sinek advocates for, and I wholeheartedly agree and tell clients this all the time, is when it comes down to that final battle, the battle has to be about ideology. Really, it has to be that you want customers who believe what you believe.
This is the area, and this is rarefied air where you're really starting to create a tribe. You're saying to yourself and you're saying to the world as well: our convenience store is not for everybody. However, if you recognize us and you believe what we believe and we have similar ideologies, we are definitely the place for you. When you reach that rarefied air, you will get the most loyal customers in the world, and you won't need a loyalty card to keep them.
Okay, step number eight: we have to create a media plan that reaches customers. We have our message, and our message is then built with value. It has our ideology and our belief system laid into it, and now we want to get that message out to the world.
What's important here? Well, the first thing is that you have to be very precise about who your target audience and your target market is. It's difficult to do this, and a lot of people make the mistake of relying on internal people to do this. What happens is it becomes inefficient, and people pull in media that they like rather than what the target audience uses.
One of the better ways to do this, one of the best ways to do it, is to have a professional media or digital planner help you and sit down and do this. I would really recommend that you know, again, I'm gonna get into the weeds just for a second here. But what they'll ask you are things like:
Who's your target audience?
What is your objective?
What is it that you want them to do as a result of being exposed to the message in your campaign?
What's the geography of where you want your stores?
What's the timing?
What's the budget?
What are the reach and frequency goals that you want to achieve? And basically reaching a frequency goal. And you can calculate this pretty accurately is how, how much of the audience of your target audience do you want to reach: 50%, 80%, a hundred percent? Nobody can reach a hundred percent, but these are kind of stretch goals.

And then the key part here is frequency of message. So reach and frequency, and you can do this through all media. And then you can do a total, total reach and frequency delivery of your media and your digital plan. I'm a big proponent of frequency.
And I use the analogy of a boxing match. Professional boxers rarely come out and with one big punch, think of the Superbowl ads that you never remember, come out with one big punch and knock out their opponent. A lot of media is similar to a good boxing match where it's jab, jab, jab, big left hook, jab, jab, jab. And then a knockout punch.
There's an old saying in our businesses that when you're getting sick and tired of hearing your message, your customers are just starting to hear it and understand it. It still holds true today, the secret and one of the keys to an effective media plan is efficiency. I'll say it again. All media work. Every one of them works. They work best when you know your target audience, and you're trying to reach your audience in the most efficient way.
And one of the ways that you calculate that is cost per thousand. Um, and that's an easy measurement for any media plan and anybody can do it. And I won't get into the weeds here, but look at and ask your media buyer or your planner, your digital person to calculate your cost per thousand numbers. That'll help determine efficiency of the media plan. That's what you're after.
And I'll leave you with one more media thought. And that is if you could put together a media plan and reach your target audience, let's say 80% of them three or more times with your strategic marketing promotion message. And you could do it for free. You would absolutely do it. So somewhere between zero cost and a cost of delivery and reaching those people, 80% of the audience and three plus times. If you use that as a reach and frequency goal, you are asking your media and digital person for the most efficient way to reach those people.
Okay. Step number nine, and this is what I call retail Jihad. And most convenience store retailers don't do it. I know that we used to do it on the sheets business and other convenience store businesses. And I'm going to recommend retail Jihad to you.
What is it? If you really want a strategic marketing promotion to work, once it's implemented, the best thing you can do is get your store managers together and show them the campaign. This is easier to do today than it is. It has ever been really. And you share the campaign, the start date, who your target audience is, what you expect to happen inside the store, what the point of sale materials might look like. If you incorporate a retail media network, you know, some of that message communication is in there as well.
I can say from experience, there is nothing worse than spending all this time, all this effort, creating value and putting a campaign to communicate it to your customers and have a customer, maybe a new customer, see it, make the effort to drive onto your lot, open up the doors to your store and walk in and talk to one of your employees, right? Not just the store manager, but also your employees and say, man, I saw that new message, that new ad or that new campaign that you guys put out there. And it's really awesome. And your employee says, uh, I don't know what you're talking about. This happens, still happens today. It's lethal for customers because it bums them out. And it basically says to them, you guys don't communicate to one to one another internally. And it totally depresses your employees who think that they're not being included in the process, um, of your team.
But think about the different response. If your team has seen it, they've had a chance to give you feedback on the campaign. Good or bad, listen to it, have these group meetings. When you do this and you put a campaign like this together, it is retail Jihad. It is lethal both to competitors and it's absolutely lethal and will drive your sales and your loyalty up at stores in ways you can't imagine right now.
Andthen step number 10 is you want to measure your results and your future is born here. And basically this is learning rinse and repeat, but I want you to think back and we're going to go back to the beginning with your business review: how you set your business review up, how you analyze data, how you looked for trends, and how it communicated what your customer behavior was like through the data that you presented to yourself.
Then also look at the insights that you've gleaned at the beginning: measure the data and collect it the same way that's in your business review. The last thing on earth we want to do is go through all of this work and have all of this success happen at the store level with our strategic marketing promotions and then not learn from it or have the data collected or analyzed in a different way than was in our business review. Again, this is just lethal and demoralizing.
So keep your measurements simple and just ask yourself:
How do we do?
What did we learn?
What can we do better next time when it comes to creating and implementing an SMP?
Okay, I want to wrap up and I want to give you, I guess this would be point number ten point five, and it's a bonus: how to get faster results with one really, with one hack or one move. What I would say, and I've said it lots of times, is I believe that the convenience store industry is very passive when it comes to marketing. A lot of convenience store owners, whether it's one store, ten, or fifty stores, can be passive and just wait on customers to come inside their store. I think it's a mistake. I know it's a mistake. I've seen it done lots of times, but I do see the winners and the people that have been successful today. Right now, success leaves clues.
When I worked on the sheets business and developed this framework that I just shared with you, I can tell you that it's going to work and it will resonate with customers and it will put you and your stores on the map. How do you start? Here's what I recommend: this process will work, but if anything, just start ugly, start fast, and start now. Always ask yourself the correct question for your customers:
How can we create new value for our customers by asking them sometimes and then communicate it to them through a strategic marketing promotion?
If you just start ugly and start now and start today and just try this, it doesn't have to be perfect, but become a more proactive marketer and get your ideas up and on their feet and implemented into the marketplace. You'll be happy with the success that you start to create for your chain of convenience stores.
Okay, let's wrap it up. My name is Tim, last name is Lazar, from the Convenience Marketing Group. You can find us at convenience marketing net. You can reach me anytime at 412-423-0044 here in Pittsburgh, and I wish you success.