For those of you who attend NGA each year, there’s a chance you heard me speak in workshops in 2003, 2004 and 2006 about the same topic: namely, what is the future of the printed ads in supermarkets? If you are going to depend on print advertising to deliver your marketing messages, you best have an outstanding printed piece that attracts new customers.

Throughout your store you carry many nationally branded products sold at every one of your competitor’s stores. Do your customers prefer Hunt’s Ketchup or Heinz Ketchup? It really doesn’t matter to you which brand they buy, as long as they buy it at your store. You can’t help Hunt’s or Heinz differentiate their brands—the only way you can differentiate them is with your shelf price.

It’s a different story in your deli department.

How can you track visitors to your website? What are they looking at? What are they ignoring? Do they “click-through” on your email promotions? How much time should you invest in studying your website traffic? What do you do with the information once you have it?

A website tracking system shows you exactly how your website is performing.

A consultant group we respect recently recommended that companies wait to get involved in social media because there are “no clear and obvious benefits.” While they may not be “clear and obvious,” we believe that the benefits of social media are significant. Here are three of them…