Trade marketing strategy 101 for ecommerce marketers

Your ecommerce store is thriving. You’ve got loads of orders coming in every month and have a growing base of loyal customers. People are even asking how they can get their hands on your products in-store. 👀

You’re ready to start selling in retail stores, but you’re not sure where to start.

It's a great problem to have, but it can leave you wondering how to move forward. Beyond some of the practical elements of getting your products into retail stores, you've got to attract retail partners and promote your brand to buying managers. You’ll also need to manage those relationships once you've got them. 🤝

To do that, you need to use effective trade marketing. In this guide, you’ll learn about trade marketing, along with some successful strategies to help you get started. By the end, you’ll have actionable tips on how to attract lots of attention from stockists and boost sales.

What is trade marketing?

Trade marketing is a type of business-to-business (B2B) strategy that brands (vendors) use to increase product demand. It’s a way of forming strategic partnerships with wholesalers, retailers and distributors. 

The goal of trade marketing efforts is to increase market share by: 

• Attracting good-fit retailers to sell your products.
• Building product demand.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Persuading your distribution channels to not only stock your product, but also promote it over other competitor brands. 

An effective trade marketing strategy is crucial for building strong relationships with retailers, wholesalers, and distributors - and then ultimately selling your products in stores. 

The difference between trade marketing and DTC marketing

The major difference between trade marketing activities and DTC marketing is the audience. Trade marketing targets B2B audiences—that’s people like retail trade managers and store owners. DTC or ecommerce marketing targets your end-consumer directly.

As a result, the approaches to both types of marketing are very different. DTC customers want to know if your products help them get their jobs done (like decorate their home, hydrate them, keep kids occupied, etc.)

Your trade marketing audience will want to know they can market your products and make a healthy profit from them. 

When should you start building a trade marketing strategy?

For some store owners we spoke to, their brand has to meet the following criteria to start investing in trade marketing:

• There’s been an increasing and consistent demand for their products 
• They have a solid brand awareness strategy and identity in place

For example, Tiago Pita, Brand and Ecommerce Director at Whole Food Earth, talked about demand consistency, as well as the need for a strong brand identity:

"For us, we started to think about trade marketing strategies once we saw consistent demand for our products online and knew we could replicate that success in retail. It’s important to have a solid base and brand identity first, retailers want to know that your product will sell."

While for Sam Speller, CEO and Founder of Kenko Tea, they realized they were hitting a growth ceiling in the online matcha niche:

"The moment we started thinking about trading marketing was when we hit a plateau in our online expansion. We had a good reputation on the online matcha scene, but we also felt like there was a whole new audience we could potentially tap into with stores.

Trade marketing allowed us to present Kenko Tea to stores as a good product on their shelves while promoting the quality and growing consumer demand for our matcha products."

There's a high chance you're already monitoring the long-term performance of your store. Like Tiago and Sam, if you find that your demand is consistent and similar month-to-month, it's a good time to start thinking about trade marketing.

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7 trade marketing strategies to help you boost sales 

Now let's get into detail with some successful trade marketing strategies to help you sell more products to retailers. Each of these have been taken from real DTC brands — we talked to a few directly for their words of wisdom. 🙌

1. Attending trade shows

Go networking at trade shows. Making personal connections can help retailer store owners and managers learn more about you and your product. 

For example, Gaynor Humphrey, Director of Best Years (a children's toy brand) found a ton of value in networking:

Attending these helped Gaynor better understand the retail market in the US, as the brand originates in the UK. She was also able to build new relationships with customers as well as competitors in her industry. 

Don't just attend any trade show, mind. Pick ones that specialize in your product niche or in a target market location. This way, you'll have a better chance of building relationships with the right people at the right time.

2. Creating samples for retailers

Offering potential retail partners product samples helps them better understand your product by being able to touch or taste them in real life. This is also an essential approach if your product is in the food and beverage category.

You can try finding a direct contact for the people dealing with merchandise (buying managers or trade managers, for example) and send them product samples directly.

Bonus: you can tick off two checkboxes if you have product samples to take to a trade show booth, just like Tyler Watson of Dan-O's Seasoning did at Expo West in California:

3. Creating POP or POS assets for your retailers

Both you and retail store owners or managers want to make more money with your products. One way you can do that is by creating point of purchase (POP) or point of sale (POS) display assets for them.

To do that, you’ll need to create a folder (or use a digital asset management tool) with some of the following assets:

• Brand logos.
• Relevant product photography.
• Digital renderings of display options to show retailers what the displays will look like.

With this folder, you can send assets (or share a link to the folder) with retailers and display manufacturers ready for building the physical displays. Take this example of a POS display from Yerbae:

This POS display rendering shows what the display would look like on a shelf, as well as the product photography and overall design. Giving retailers access to these marketing materials can improve the likelihood of them choosing to promote your product.

4. Use cross-promotional campaigns

If you're trying to improve your existing retail partnerships with better trade marketing, you can try cross-promotional collabs with trade partners.

Cross-promotion is a strategy that all the brands we spoke to recommended, for good reason. Collaborative relationships are a win-win for both your brand and the retailer.

For example, Kunal Madan, Founder of Amarra (a fashion brand specializing in event wear), uses special promotions to increase sales volumes across a number of his brands:

"I have often collaborated with retail partners to bundle products or offer an in-store exclusive product—this helps incentivize customers to visit the physical retail stores."

Cross-promotion is a popular trade promotions strategy to help both your brand and retail outlets. Try getting creative with your retail partners to build engaging collabs.

5. Offer store-exclusive SKUs

Taking collaboration a step further, Adam Tishman, Co-Founder of Helix Sleep, offers their retailers exclusive SKUs:

"Offering retail-exclusive SKUs has really helped us build strong relationships with retailers. We created unique product variations and limited editions available only at certain physical stores.

This strategy encourages retailers to promote our products more and gets customers excited about visiting those stores. It's been a great way to create buzz and foster collaboration with our retail partners."

This approach can be even more useful and effective when you have detailed customer segmentation. For example, you can offer a limited-edition product targeting a segment of your customers who live locally to each other (like city-specific editions). 

6. Invest in your relationships with retail partners

Haws, the world's oldest watering can brand, uses this strategy to help 100+ retailers sell their products.🌱

Haws uses Dash portals, a feature of our digital asset management (DAM) system, to create shareable (and searchable!) views of the brand's marketing materials.

Josh Papworth, Haws' Purchasing Manager said:

“We want to make it as easy and fulfilling to sell Haws products as possible. Dash is a way for us to share all our assets with our customers and optimize their sales performance.”

Here's what Haws' Dash portal looks like for one stockist:

Pretty nifty, right? 

Having these assets ready for retailers to use (and for manufacturers to build the displays) helps save time and effort looking for the right marketing materials. Not to mention saving you from back and forth requests—creating smooth and reliable relationships.

7. Offer a product training workshop for retail staff

The better the retail staff know your products, the more they can talk about them with customers.

That’s what Tiago, who we mentioned earlier from Whole Food Earth, recommends. He said:

"We offer training for store staff so they understand the unique benefits of our products, which helps them sell better in-store. The key is building a partnership that benefits both your brand and the retailer’s goals."

Product training workshops can involve educating staff about how your products function or taste. But to take this strategy a step further, you can also train them on your brand story, and help them better explain the "why" behind your product.

Maintaining relationships with your partners and resellers

Using the examples of trade marketing strategies above, you'll become a trade marketing wizard in no time. 🧙

However, trade marketing strategies alone won't help you maintain relationships with retailers — you also need good relationship management.

On this topic, the folks we spoke to also talked about building trust with transparency and communication.

Adam from Helix, for example, leans on proactive communication with retailers:

"Building strong relationships really depends on how we handle issues proactively. When we quickly address product defects, delivery delays, or supply chain disruptions, it helps build trust.

Retailers and supply chain partners appreciate brands that take responsibility and solve problems promptly because it keeps operations running smoothly and boosts their confidence in future orders. By being responsive, we can create lasting partnerships that benefit everyone involved."

Kunal from Amarra also says that transparent communication is key:

"In terms of good relationship management, transparency and regular communication are key. Providing our retail partners with clear product information, marketing materials, and honoring agreements ensures a solid and profitable business relationship."

Give retailers the tools to succeed

Once you land a new partnership with a retailer, you’ll need to give them access to tools they need to succeed. Earlier, we mentioned how Haws shares marketing assets with over 100 retailers to help them sell Haws' products better.

They do this with Dash portals. ✨

Dash portals work by letting you select groups of assets to make publicly available, without users needing a Dash login. Portal visitors can then use the savvy search function in the folders you've given them access to and download the files they need. 

This method also helps retailers or resellers with smaller marketing budgets. They can use your Dash portal to access your high-quality, brand-approved product photography to help them promote your products in-store and on for content marketing on their websites.

If you'd like to find out more about how Dash helps brands manage retail partners, take a look at some of our customer stories:

• 🥦 Food Huggers uses Dash to get product visuals to retail partners as well as journalists.
• 😎 Goodrays uses Dash to keep track of ecommerce marketplace assets.
• 🍦 fwip also uses portals to help stockists sell more products all over Europe.

If you want to try Dash for your brand, sign up for a 14-day free trial — no strings attached. 

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