Understanding The Benefits Of Trade Marketing For Your Business
Trade marketing is important!
Marketing comes with different principles, and trade marketing is one of the most understood.
Unless people don’t know your products, how will they make up their minds about them?
You get a plethora of information around the space, and people often need clarification about whom to bank upon. Trade marketing generally revolves around credibility.
When marketing products to wholesalers, distributors, and retailers, businesses often stumble upon them. Trade marketing involves promoting your business through other companies and letting them sell your products to your customers.
Getting a clear idea about trade marketing gives you a boost in your revenue.
Given the prominent advantages it possesses, many people still need to be convinced about the importance of trade marketing.
Hey! Trade marketing works well, and there is no doubt about that.
However, you will find many businesses required to develop the proper strategies for marketing their products to the distributors, wholesalers, and retailers to bring them to the consumers. This phenomenon is known as trade marketing.
The article will go deeper into trade marketing providing explanations with examples. And we will also discuss the proven benefits of trade marketing.
So let’s start.
Table Of Content
What Is Trade Marketing?
There was a time when companies used cards to display and sell their products to retailers. The products listed on the card were best-selling, and the company wanted to prioritize them.
With time, marketing has evolved, and things have taken a different path. Trade marketing came into the picture.
Trade marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing, which is relevant even today. Here the product comes from the manufacturer through the retailer and finally to the end consumer.
Imagine buying a face wash for yourself. There are several brands for it. Now think from the standpoint of a manufacturer. Multiple brands are competing for a single product. This is why companies sell their products through wholesalers, retailers, and distributors. Trade marketing allows you to market your product to a certain group before reaching your consumer.
As a trade marketer, you must design your pitch and strategies smartly to convince a retailer, as many players are doing the same.
Trade Marketing Strategies
Now, we will see trade marketing activities through the eyes of a manufacturer and retailer.
Let’s Now Focus On The Manufacturer First:
- A manufacturer starts trade marketing activities with an initial business listing.
- During the initial stages, the focus is on convincing the retailer that their customer would love the product and how it will grow the category.
- A manufacturer must be well aware of the scope of the retailer and boldly put forward new ideas.
- I am offering a discount at the product launch and different festivities of the year.
- Many manufacturers share gifts for purchase.
- If there is room, offer an in-store sampling.
What A Retailer Can Offer To The Manufacturer In Return:
- Promote the product on digital platforms.
- Specific shelf placement.
- Multiple facings on the shelf.
- Wide distribution.
- Inclusion in seasonal promotion (if applicable).
Understanding Trade Advertising With Examples
Companies with different sizes and scales can reap the benefits of trade advertising. With the right strategy, they can do it easily.
Example 1
Let’s imagine a company that deals with packaged foods wan to penetrate the chips market. Here they can use trade advertising to meet its goal. Let’s say they started one trade marketing campaign targeted at food grocery stores, supermarkets, etc. Now the aim is to explain to the retailer about the product and why people would love it. With the same goal in mind, they now create 5000 flyers. Additionally, they reach out to food magazines to feature their print ads.
Example 2
Let’s take another example!
Let’s imagine a story of a toy seller Mr. Daniel. He sells his products through online marketplaces and is thinking of expanding his business and creating an offline store. He aims to give the prospective buyers to experience the look and feel of the product before actually purchasing it. That, in turn, adds a boost to their overall revenue.
The next step?
Mr. Daniel printed his business card and started reaching out to local retailers, including toy stores, gift shops, and stores in malls. He even shares samples of his product so that the shop owners can evaluate their product.
The retailer responded with interest in his product and placed an order.
The card with a business proposition with outreach acts as an effort of trade marketing.
Who Should Leverage Trade Marketing?
Businesses that operate through supply chance are the ideal fit for trade marketing.
Suppose a company sells baby creams and they want to reach the end customer. How are they going to do the same through trade marketing?
Here’s how:
- The manufacturer will search for a wholesaler that fits the product range. If the company is new, it will consider offering the product at a competitive rate to beat its competitors.
- The manufacturer will also try to incentivize the wholesaler to ensure the distributor promotes their products extensively.
- The distributor sells the products to selected wholesalers.
- The wholesalers will sell the product to retailers.
- Retailers advertise products to the final consumers through the means of shelf space, branded merchandise, or prominent display.
This process ensures availability and a consistent supply from the manufacturer to the end consumer.
Why Is Trade Marketing Important?
Trade Marketing is an important part of any business strategy. This helps companies to tailor their promotional strategies to maximize their sales and profits. Let’s understand the benefits one by one.
1. Relationship Building
As trade marketing heavily depends on the supply-chain model, the need to get connected is extremely important.
Product distribution will be much easier if the manufacturer and distributor have a healthy relationship. And maintaining it for a longer period positively impacts the business’s revenue.
In most cases of trade marketing, we see a good relationship between the manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer. And people from this trade marketing landscape are good at building relationships and maintaining them sustainably.
No matter how good your product is in terms of quality, if your supply chain is filled with messy relationships among the participants – you’re in trouble.
2. Better Understanding Of Your Audience
As you operate the entire process of trade marketing from the ground level, the scope of understanding the need is much higher. The retailer is directly in touch with the end consumer, her you don’t even need to conduct a survey; you’ll automatically get to know the feedback.
It’s no secret that understanding your customers in a better way always sets your business apart from the rest.
3. Lucrative Opportunity
The supply chain products mostly cover a wide audience, which is why trade marketing can fetch your earnings. Simply put, trade marketing is a win-win situation for manufacturers and wholesalers, distributors, and retailers.
4. Competitive Edge
If you can give attractive margins or tempting incentives to your manufacturers and retailers, they will promote your product extensively. This will help you stay above the curve.
Many people often ignore or don’t know why trade marketing is important. A lack of knowledge opens up the room for opportunity. All you have to do is do trade marketing the right way to outperform your competitors.
5. Increases Your Market Presence
The more people know about your products, the higher the chances of staying at the top of their minds. This is especially true for those who prefer buying offline to online channels.
As a result, you’ll build a strong prominence in the market. This is how branding takes place. With the right incentives, your retailers will market your products where you do not have to do anything.
6. Increases Profitability
Trade marketing empowers manufacturers with the opportunity to connect with more and more people down the line of their supply chain.
With each additional wholesaler or retailer on their list, sales figures increase to new heights.
Distributors, retailers, and wholesalers will give you more details on how your customers engage with your product. That, in turn, allows you to develop one stellar customer acquisition plan to drive sales.
Let’s suppose you’re a manufacturer and getting a good sales number. Does that matter to your business? Yes, absolutely. More sales come with more customers.
Improving your audience count helps you increase the presence as well as the market share of your website.
8. Can Perform Digitally!
We know that you are well-versed in the strategies of traditional trade marketing. That was face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and mailings.
You might not know that it is now possible to perform trade marketing digitally.
So, you can use email to send promotional materials, such as coupons, discounts, and special offers.
You can use social media to post updates about your products and services and engage with customers.
You can also use online platforms, such as websites and blogs, to promote your products and services.
9. It Won’t Require Upgradation
Let’s understand with an example. Let’s consider you someone who sells soft drinks. Now, Is it necessary to get in touch with your consumers directly?
So, this business doesn’t require direct interaction between the manufacturer and the end consumer; trade marketing is immensely helpful. All you need is to capitalize on your retailers and wholesalers.
What’s Your Trade Marketing Plan?
Now you have an idea about the benefits of trade marketing. The next step is to create your trade marketing plan.
But before you start creating the plan, it is critically important that you think about how to present your brand.
Your Overall Plan Must Include:
- Positioning your brand.
- Pitching your retailers.
- Packaging your product.
- Strategic messaging.
- Fail-proof execution.
- Hassle-free logistics.
Steller trade marketing plans still work wonders, and there is no doubt about that.
So what’s your plan?
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