What Are Trade Marketing And The Seven Tips For Implementing It?

Trade Marketing : You’ve probably already seen super attractive supermarket merchandising without realizing it was a Trade Marketing strategy.

That smell of fresh bread that exudes from the supermarket pipes when it just comes out of the oven is also thought of by professionals working in this area, especially when the bakery is at the back of the market and you have to walk through several corridors to get to it.

These two strategies we mentioned are practices used to influence the consumer since, according to a published survey, 70% of the customer’s purchase decision takes place at the POS (point of sale).

It’s easy to understand this when we put ourselves in the consumer’s shoes. When we go to the market, for example, we may even have a shopping list in our pocket, but which product brands we choose to put in the cart will depend on several factors.

What Is Trade Marketing?

Trade Marketing is an integrated marketing and sales strategy in the B2B market. It is used to give visibility and differentiate products or services at a POS, thus attracting consumers and helping them find your brand more easily.

Trade Marketing can have several objectives: increase your profitability, gain authority, recognition, and preference in the market, but always with the main focus on gaining sales volume, passing on knowledge about the product, and optimizing the customer’s buying journey.

Therefore, professionals working in Trade Marketing need to know marketing metrics and sales needs so that they can be applied in specific sales actions, adding real value to the POS.

To better understand that Trade Marketing is not a typical marketing strategy, we need to talk about who is involved in these practices:

• Shopper: who buys the product or service, who is not always the one who consumes them;
• POS: place where the products or services will be sold;
• Sales channels: these are the POS chosen to sell, such as e-commerce, marketplaces, markets, pharmacies, telesales, and specialized stores, among others;
• Distribution channels: are responsible for delivering the products to the consumer. The distribution channel can be direct when the manufacturer or service provider delivers the product directly to the customer or indirect when intermediaries are involved in the delivery, as is the case with wholesale networks, distributors, and retail stores.

Given this, Trade Marketing professionals need to strengthen ties with all of them and study them to find the best opportunities for dissemination and strategic positioning of products, according to the characteristics of each one.

Furthermore, it is up to Trade Marketing to identify where it makes sense for the brand to be present, as exhausting efforts in POS that do not add value to its target audience waste time and money.

• See also the complete category of software for branding management (brand) on the B2B Stack portal!

How Does Trade Marketing Work?

As previously mentioned, many shoppers decide to buy a brand when they are in front of a shelf at the POS, and how to become attractive in the eyes of the consumer is the responsibility of Trade Marketing.

Today, with online sales growth, Trade Marketing can also be applied in digital media. However, there are similarities and differences between physical and virtual POS strategies.

The most important thing, and the main similarity between the two strategies, is knowing your target audience very well to avoid creating generalist action plans.

This is because the B2B market comprises numerous customers with particularities.

We can exemplify this point with a software development company.

Think that the same ERP can serve different business segments. While it offers proper functionality for fashion retailers, it can also cater to the pet segment.

The two sectors have particular needs, so the marketing team for this software needs to create different campaigns for each audience.

The same happens in Trade Marketing: the same industry can supply products to a wholesale network and a small neighborhood market.

In this case, we can mention two types of shoppers: a hamburger shop, which will buy products in large volumes, that is, wholesale, and a lady, who will buy only the ingredients needed to make her Sunday pasta for the family.

Therefore, both need to be impacted by the Trade Marketing campaign, but in different ways.

Therefore, we will explain how Trade Marketing works and its pillars in each POS separately. Follow!

Trade Marketing At The Physical POS

Trade Marketing at a physical POS is based on some main pillars to structure your action plans:

• The availability of products;
• Disclosure layout;
• Prices and promotions.

Product Availability

After knowing their audience and their sales and distribution channels, the Trade Marketing professional needs to ensure that there will be no shortage of products in the stock of their business partners, paying attention to all regions served.

This step is fundamental to avoid making mistakes in campaigns since there is no point in running a super promotion if there is no availability of products or if the supplier, distributor, or POS cannot meet the high demands.

Disclosure Layout

The layout and design used at the POS also make all the difference.

It is the responsibility of Trade Marketing to understand the needs and what can instigate shoppers on their buying journey, strategically position products or offer personalized materials for sales, and even study the possibility of creating extra points at the POS.

It is not by chance that, for example, a particular brand of cleaning product is positioned on a supermarket shelf in such a way as to be at the height of an adult’s eyes or as a particular toy is positioned at the height of an adult’s hands child.