Trade marketing planning is essential when it comes to maximizing the ROI of any initiative your company runs to boost sales at the POS. Combined with creativity, a clear purpose and a consistent message, it is the first step toward a successful project.
In this article, we’ll show you how planning, paired with smart use of technology, can bring consumers closer to your brand and strengthen your relationship with customers.
Ready to learn? Then keep reading!
Conduct a detailed assessment of the landscape
A landscape assessment is in-depth market research. In general, it involves putting your company’s strategy in context against your competitors’, evaluating the competition and the behavior of your target audience, and looking at other factors that can influence purchases, such as culture and the economy.
This analysis will allow you to build a list of opportunities with your team members. That list should include the channels your brand can break into most easily, the types of initiatives that have worked in the past, and who your trade marketing should reach.
The overall goal of the campaign should be to increase conversions and bring consumers to your brand. That’s why it’s worth looking at which tools your company should use to make that happen, where the points of sale are located, and which pricing strategy is best suited to delivering results.
This is also the time to consider outsourcing your trade marketing, that is, putting the campaign in the hands of an experienced team. Setting goals your team can’t meet can lead to losses, which is why it’s important to weigh the opportunity cost and the capacity of your marketing team.
Use tools such as Trello for this planning. It makes it easier to turn ideas into actions and assign them to team members.
Bring your team together and gather ideas
Even if you outsource, the core ideas will have to come from inside the company. After all, your company knows best what it needs to achieve with trade marketing. A meeting with your teams to align expectations and collect ideas is what will let you estimate the campaign’s feasibility and what should be prioritized throughout it.
Marketing, sales and purchasing should all be part of the process to ensure strategic alignment. How much your company can invest, what results each department expects, how much time there is to achieve them, and how easy it is to implement the specialists’ suggestions are all things that need to be communicated from the inside out.
Information-sharing resources, such as apps for remote document access (Google Drive and Office 365, for example), along with project management software, will be your best friends.
Create ways to measure the results of your initiatives
As with any initiative, we need to establish ways to measure how much trade marketing has impacted the point of sale. To define them, keep the following in mind:
The right technologies
Any detail you can capture over the course of a campaign can make a difference in how it is evaluated. Data is great for informing decision-making and should be a constant priority. Business Intelligence systems can be used to better understand the data collected and compare it to generate valuable insights for the business.
Shared goals
Trade marketing doesn’t have to benefit only your company. Useful metrics for evaluating it should be shareable, meaning they’re good for gauging the strategy’s effect for both the store and the supplier. Increases in conversions, sales, average ticket and supply chain efficiency are useful data points here.
The ideal partnerships
Not every supplier is equipped to take part in a trade marketing initiative with your company. Choose the ones that can get the job done and will offer your company as much value (in data collection and KPI selection) as it gives them in return.
Develop a plan B
We should always anticipate that changes may come our way. Even if you do plenty of research before starting your trade marketing, the market is very fluid and anything can happen. From a spike in the dollar to political swings, plenty of things can blow up a strategy if they aren’t considered in advance.
A plan B will help you handle these challenges. Be prepared for the worst and for the best. Having an extra supplier, for example, to handle a surge in demand or implementation hurdles is a good idea.
Every action triggers a reaction, and we need to be ready so that those reactions don’t hurt the company. So when you’re planning your trade marketing, create a plan B too.
Bring technology into your trade marketing planning
Using digital strategies to make trade marketing work better will make a big difference. Talking about it on social media, integrating new technologies to encourage consumers to walk into the store, and rewarding them so they become loyal are all ways to boost the ROI of this kind of initiative.
This is where creativity gets to shine. Many promotions offer value to the customer but fail to bring them into the store because they don’t stand out from the rest. Copying what competitors have done is never the best way to grab the attention of an audience that is increasingly saturated with offers.
To achieve strong returns, the ideal approach is to work on two fronts: increasing the average ticket of people who already buy from you and creating opportunities for those who have never set foot in your store. Promoting your own brand at the same time, and not just the supplier’s, is another key point for winning customers over and getting them to come back.
Guerrilla Marketing strategies or those involving social media are very effective, especially for tracking the progress of a promotion quickly. Bringing virtual reality into the store, creating interactive displays and booths, or Instagrammable experiences are all ways to give your trade marketing initiative a little extra push.
Also use technology to collect data at the point of sale and anticipate changes in the initiative that may justify putting that plan B into action. That way, you can easily spot which products are succeeding in your trade marketing and which aren’t, replacing them in time and adapting your plan as needed.
Trade marketing can increase your company’s profits and enable you to create compelling promotions. It will be key to engaging new consumers and bringing them into your store.
Negotiating well with suppliers and designing brand initiatives that turn those negotiations into results should be a priority to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Want to get your trade marketing planning right? Count on AliceWonders to help you. Get in touch today!
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