Tips for insulating your business reliance on lottery traffic / revenue

Lottery purchases continue to migrate online. It's what's happening and you cannot stop it.

There is value in taking steps to attract shoppers for other reasons to your business, to try an insulate your business should your lottery sales decline.

IN-STORE.

1. Be a local destination for sought after, interesting, products. Be more than a generalist who stocks a bit of everything. You need a magnet category, something people tell others you are known for. Something people will buy more than once. Buy inventory thoughtfully and well.
2. Use your front window (if you have one) to promote hero / magnet products. Promote non lottery products in the window. Displays should be fun, appealing and traffic generating. Change them weekly or fortnightly.
3. Use the front section of your shop that is not lottery controlled to promote hero / magnet products. Change this display weekly. It needs to be in-your-face stunning and easily seen from outside the shop.
4. Leverage non-lottery hotspots to promote differentiating products. You can see your hotspots by looking at the top selling items (by volume) in your reports.
5. Work on the shop floor, ideally interrupting lottery traffic flow. Unpack boxes. Price goods. If it looks like temporary, in the moment, work, you are less likely to be caught for lottery misbehaviour. Also, customers react to shop floor work, notice you and what you are doing, and buy.

OUT OF STORE.

1. Embrace opportunities to display your best, most interesting products at markets and other out of store opportunities.
2. Look for pop-up retail opportunities where you can be pure retail with no lottery obligations.
3. Distribute flyers to homes in your immediate catchment area.
4. Have a website through which you pitch and promote your specialisation.
5. Explore speaking opportunities at community groups where you can pitch unique products that will have good local interest.
6. While this is an in-store tip, it's kind of out of store. Host events after the shop is closed, when you won't have a lottery obligation, to show off a new line, maybe with supplier support, where you can socialise with customers and sell without actually trying to sell.

ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

1. Don't promote lottery products. This will guide social media platform tech to help you reach a broader audience. Further, promoting lottery products is not differentiating. 
2. Use social media to pitch what genuinely differentiates your business.
3. Every post should reinforce why your business matters.
4. Posts need to be single topic / single product.
5. Posts need to entertain or add-value to the reader's social media experience.
6. Boost your best posts to reach beyond those who already know you. Small boosts work best.
7. Most important: consider multiple presences on each social media platform, niche presences to reflect each specialisation.

RITUALS.

1. Set aside time every day for non-lottery promotion of the business.
2. Challenge yourself and your team, what is the most ridiculous thing I could do to promote non-lottery business?
3. Run business reports that do not include lottery sales.
4. Know what your success point is for a business without lotteries.

Lottery business comes from being open and offering good service. Non lottery business success depends more on you being and engaged retailer, pitching terrific products to people who don't shop with you today. This is a tough challenge that requires relentless focus.