Various brands, products and services compete daily for consumers' attention in stores, requiring companies to constantly invest in new strategies to differentiate and highlight their brand in the search for these customers' attention.
However, a crucial aspect of the operation often goes unnoticed – just as it is important to distinguish yourself from your competitors in the consumer's mind, it is also equally important to work on this differentiation in relation to business partners in the distribution chain.
Just like end consumers, these partners in the business chain, such as distributors, wholesalers and large retailers, also have a great power of choice, which is why it is essential that your company develops strategies especially aimed at strengthening this relationship, ensuring good spaces and conditions commercials to display your products and services on the most advantageous shelves and showcases (physical or virtual) on the market.
And this is where trade marketing comes in.
Trade marketing is essential for the growth of your brand and for strengthening your company's commercial operations – gaining partners who will make your products available to end consumers is a key aspect for the success of your sales and should be considered one of the most important strategies of your organization.
A fundamental aspect of trade marketing strategies is the relevance of data and training to ensure good results. Information from points of sale is essential to direct not only investment in more immediate commercial actions, but even to develop new products and markets, for example. And training the workforce committed to building this relationship with the distribution chain represents a significant management gain and a reinforcement of the overall performance of your team.
05 essential steps for a new trade marketing strategy
Know your market
The first step of any successful strategy involves study and dedication – with trade marketing it is no different. To structure your actions, it is essential to deeply understand your brand, the potential of your products and know your target audience. At this stage we begin to mine the information that will serve as the basis for defining your strategies and will feed the database that will help create the future of your company. Carry out market research, understand the current behavior of distribution channels and end consumers, work on your brand and develop a proposal for your products and services.
Invest in your team
Sales and marketing need to go together to work, especially when we refer to trade marketing: the right professionals for this job need to be good marketers and good salespeople, so it is essential not only to attract these talents to your team, but to work to develop new skills and competencies that strengthen your performance – without in-depth knowledge of the distribution market it will be difficult for your team to imagine how this strategy could work . Training these professionals is important so that they understand the importance of trade marketing and become able to identify opportunities more quickly.
Work on structuring good reports
Reports that take into account the particularities of your operation allow your company to: increase levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, carry out more assertive management of production and stock demands, improve the performance of your staff and optimize your promotional strategy. By carefully studying your operation, it will be possible to obtain, through reports developed on demand, a complete view of the main performance indicators, in addition to guaranteeing a predictive and contextualized analysis based on both trends and historical data of your company.
Strengthen your company's systems
Data management is important not only for the commercial area, but a crucial issue for the development of internal structuring actions, essential to prepare your teams for this new strategy. A good LMS provides advanced authoring and administration tools, feeding strategic corporate training planning, while a CRM system is necessary to guarantee real-time access to point-of-sale information, for example. Integration between systems makes it possible to have access to KPI reports that cover all channels of your operation, in addition to delivering tailor-made management tools to analyze sales performance, the evolution of your professionals, inventories, loss prevention, calendar of shares, commissions and much more.
Develop the creativity of your teams
The relationship between the company and its distribution channels is a key point of any trade marketing strategy. More than a means to guarantee your sales, distributors are allies, partners in building your image. Instead of repeating successful actions in the past or reformulating competitor campaigns, start thinking about creative strategies to win the support of your commercial partners. Special campaigns add value to your brand, increase your sales and can also be profitable for distribution channels – so distributors will also see your company as an important ally for the development of their own businesses.
Trade marketing is an assertive strategy, but at the same time it also covers broad aspects of management that need to be considered when planning, discussing and structuring direct actions within the distribution chain.
To build a strategy that makes sense for your operation, you need to look within your brand for the reasons that make your products special and the arguments that will make your field team stand out when negotiating with your market partners!
