Guide To Creating Your Wholesale Marketing Strategy
For any wholesale retailer, digital marketing is crucial for building industry authority, attracting customers, and gaining a competitive advantage. However, just because you’re sending emails, building a website or sharing your business cards doesn’t mean you’re addressing your prospective customers properly. In order to create a successful wholesale marketing strategy, there are many things you must do!
As you know, behind any successful digital marketing campaign, there is lots of research and planning. In addition, digital marketing requires a properly detailed execution strategy.
Here are a few tips that may serve as your solid starting point.
Rely on Traditional Marketing Tactics
Did you know that 60% of consumers value offline word-of-mouth marketing tactics more than online ones? For B2B businesses, offline marketing means building trust with customers and taking relationships to a more personal level. Here are a few simple offline marketing tactics that still work.
Send Direct Mail
Statistics show that 54% of customers want to get printed catalogs in their mail, compared to 49% of users that prefer email. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the number of businesses investing in direct mail is growing. An article on Entrepreneur takes the example of PostcardMania, a company that earns about $50 million yearly by offering personalized direct mail campaigns directly to small businesses.
However, just printing out a bunch of generic catalogs and sending them to thousands of potential clients won’t work. Personalization is crucial for any segment of your marketing strategy, especially for traditional techniques that are often considered dull and broad. For starters, include your prospect’s first name to show that you’ve done extensive research.
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Leverage Cold Calling
This is one of the oldest and yet, most effective forms of offline marketing. However, to convince your leads to convert, you need to do it strategically.
For example, make a list of talking points instead of writing a script. You don’t want to sound like a robot. You want to build relationships with your leads, listen to what they have to say, and still, steer the conversation in the right direction. Make your speech engaging and always be friendly, polite, and clear.
Distribute Samples
First, you will need to familiarize yourself with your target, learn what kind of products they sell, and who their customers are. The idea is to send them something valuable that will inspire them to do business with you.
Now that you’ve grabbed their attention, you need to introduce yourself. Include information about your company, your story, and even customers’ testimonials. Write something about the sample itself, as well as other relevant items they can purchase from you.
Write a powerful call-to-action and offer an incentive for businesses that decide to register as wholesale customers.
Network Regularly
For you as a wholesale retailer, networking is key to success. It lets you spread the word about your wholesale business, increase brand awareness, build relationships, and meet both potential customers and partners. Start by researching relevant industry trade shows, where you can promote your wholesale business and products. Have an attractive value proposition, offer free samples, and gamify customer experiences to attract people to your booth. Also, any relevant meetups and conferences can also do wonders for your wholesale business.
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Increase Reach with Online Marketing
If you want to increase your reach and personalize your marketing tactics, you should start investing in digital marketing.
Register on Relevant Industry Directories
Business listings will make your brand more visible in Google’s SERPs and, at the same time, build trust with your target audience. Apart from some popular business listings like BBB, Angie’s List, or Glassdoor, you should also register on narrower, niche-specific business directories that target relevant audiences. You just need to search for something like “business listings [your niche]”.
Build a Responsive Website
When creating a website, make sure that its design, content, and navigation are highly responsive and user-friendly. Hire web designers such as NJ Web Design Bizmap LLC to help with your online marketing project. In addition, choosing business SEO services will help you design and optimize your site for both users and search engines.
Now, any wholesale business website should include optimized product pages, containing product photos, pricing info, and customer reviews.
It should also have a contact page, where your customers can easily find your email address, business NAP (name, address, phone number) data, and your social handles. If possible, integrate a simple contact form, too.
You should also have an “about us” page, where you will share your story, brand values, and missions. Explain who you are to humanize your business and build relationships.
Consider running a blog on your website. Instead of promoting your products and business, you should discuss relevant industry topics and provide actionable tips. Blogging will increase your industry authority.
You should also include a powerful email CTA and customer testimonials to encourage leads to register for a wholesale account.
Be Active on Social
Being active on social networks lets you show the human side of your business and build firmer relationships. This way, you can collect customer feedback, answer users’ questions in real-time, and increase your authority. You can use social media monitoring tools to track your brand/product mentions, as well as social media management tools to automate social scheduling and sharing.
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Send Emails
Email marketing lets you build brand awareness and increase conversion rates. With it, you can segment your prospects, according to their location, niche, customers, preferences, etc. and, in this way, send them targeted emails. With tools like Ninja Outreach, you can automate this process and even send follow-up emails to increase response rates.
Increase User Experience to Boost Sales
There are many barriers that discourage people from making purchases. Logically, to succeed, you need to eliminate them. Here are a few tips on how to do so:
- Remove order minimums – that’s kind of pressure many customers would like to avoid.
- Offer free shipping. If not for all products, you can use this tactic to reward some major purchases.
- Provide discounts for larger orders.
- Ask for customer feedback consistently.
- Provide exceptional ordering experiences. Simplify your website navigation and reduce the number of clicks it takes to make a purchase.
- Evoke FOMO with limited deals and offers.
- Use seasonal marketing. From Valentine’s Day to Christmas, holidays give you the opportunity to create authentic marketing campaigns, evoke customer emotions, and maximize your sales.
Conclusion:
A wholesale marketing strategy cannot be done overnight. It takes time to put all its pieces together. For starters, you will need to do extensive market research, understand your customers’ demands, build buyer personas, and audit your competition. Only then will you be able to draft the marketing strategy that will work for you.
And, once you apply these tips, set the right KPIs to follow and measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy regularly.
Hope this helps by teaching you how to create a wholesale marketing strategy that is properly planned!
