Guide to Trade Marketing. A guide to give you support and ideas for reviewing your trade marketing

Transcription

1 Guide to Trade Marketing A guide to give you support and ideas for reviewing your trade marketing

2 Synergy Creative works with clients to plan, design and implement trade marketing campaigns. Here we share our guide to making your campaigns really effective. What is trade marketing? Trade marketing is all about marketing and selling your products to wholesalers, distributors and retailers, instead of directly to consumers. Effective trade marketing builds a supply chain that ensures your products have sufficient distribution to meet the consumer demand generated by your other marketing activities. It s the process of building relationships and partnerships with dealers and distributors, and includes strategy, customer insight, account management and industry analysis. Done right, it helps you to put your products in the hands of partners who can get them to the point of sale. Rather than just thinking about a single campaign, consider what you want your role to be in your industry. Trusted advisor? Thought leader? Your decision can really change your communications style A simple four point process Four steps will help you review your trade marketing activities: 1. Audit and research 2. A strong creative campaign 3. Ideas to bring the campaign to life 4. Review, adjustments and ongoing activity 1. Audit and research Take a fresh look at your industry. Is your knowledge up-todate? Audit your existing trade communications. - Do they follow a strategy or are they ad hoc? - Do they reflect your business objectives and brand? - Which communication channels work best? Print, online, mix? How do you currently manage relationships with your supply chain partners? How can you work better with the trade? - Are there joint savings than could be made? - Will joint campaigns boost revenue? What are the challenges facing your dealers and distributors? What support do they need? What help will make a difference to their daily working? What are the major issues facing the industry? How do competitors bring their products to market/work with the trade? Often you ll find insight online. How do companies in other industries motivate and inspire their partners? Looking at other industries can be a source of ideas. What could you be doing to improve the process?

3 2. A strong creative campaign Create a campaign to address the issues and opportunities identified by your research. Agree the 2 or 3 key messages that you want the trade to remember after seeing and being involved in the campaign. Think about how you want to be perceived in the industry? Are you looking to be a thought leader? What industry issues might you focus on? Create a campaign with creative strong enough to last for several months that can be applied to a family of communication activities. Test your campaign with representatives from the trade to get their feedback before rolling it out. Draw ideas and inspiration from similar campaigns in other industries. Have a mix of campaign elements, both offline and online as you may find that the mix of print and online is very welcome. Use your insight from stage one to make these decisions. Talk to the market leaders in other industries to find out what they do. Remember: your dealers and distributors are just as busy as you are; so make participation easy and attractive. Agree 2 or 3 key messages that you want the trade to remember after seeing and being involved in the campaign Synergy suggests... Not everybody likes receiving information in the same way. I generally find we get the best results when we combine digital and print together. It s a double whammy.

4 3. Ideas to bring the campaign to life Provide a month-by-month marketing master campaign guide for dealers and distributors to tailor and follow. Make it easy to follow, so that everybody knows what s happening and when. Create a toolkit of marketing templates for your dealers. These are increasingly popular. If they have to market your products on your behalf, make it easy for them. Your templates can include campaign elements that they can personalise with their own dealer/distributor branding. Toolkits can include: Adverts Direct mail Event ideas and guides Point of sale ideas Tactical promotional activities Pre-written and press releases Web landing pages and banner ad PR kit Social media guides how to run a tactical facebook or twitter campaign/competition within the overall campaign Run a competition. This is a good way to create buzz in the industry. Examples include: - Regular facebook competitions to encourage dealers to send in photos of their best store displays. - Dealer of the year competitions. - Competitions based around seasonal promotions. Incentivise the teams - Motivate with sales targets, offers and prizes. - Create healthy competition and show results on a league table. - Share case studies and successful dealer stories so they can learn from others Offer your dealers and distributors advance information. - Share industry knowledge and experience. - Keep them abreast of upcoming product developments. Run dealer events - Offer product briefs and demonstrations. - Encourage networking and knowledge sharing. - Gather and learn from feedback and market experiences. - Share latest trends and industry knowledge. - Offer training on parts, systems and general product knowledge. Create an online knowledge bank for dealers and distributors. - Offer short reference videos to increase product knowledge and awareness. - List full product specifications. - Suggest cross-selling opportunities. - Offer a training academy where your dealers/distributors can learn more about the sector and your products. - Encourage feedback maybe via Facebook or Twitter. - Place all your marketing templates for a campaign online so they can download the items and personalise for their own use. ipad3 9:45 AM Social media guides how to run a tactical facebook or twitter campaign/ competition within the overall campaign

5 4. Review, adjustments and ongoing activity If you re providing a month-by-month guide of activity for your dealers and distributors, ensure there is a feedback mechanism in place for them to let you know how it s going and whether the support is right for them. Make sure you include regular reviews with your top 5-10 dealer/distributors to ensure you stay on top of their challenges and industry concerns. Monitor the statistics of any competitions, incentives to ensure they re working well and as hard as they can for you. In summary Trade marketing is a business-tobusiness marketing strategy that requires fresh insight to the industry, careful planning and the commitment to build and maintain mutually beneficial relationships. Offering support and incentives to dealers and distributors who stock your product helps you and them. It gets your products on their shelves, and gives them the support they need in order to sell them. Think of it as increasing your sales team behind your products. Approached with this attitude, trade marketing can be a true win-win situation for manufacturer and seller alike. Synergy Creative can help. We ve a great track record in creative, effective trade marketing communications. Trade marketing campaigns Creative campaigns, concepts Dealer, distributor insight Advertising, marketing toolkits Trade show marketing, design Creative trade communications View Synergy trade marketing work Contact us on +44(0)

6 Thanks for reading! Gemma McGrattan +44 (0) (0)