It’s no question you’ll need innovative marketing strategies to acquire wholesale customers in today’s market. If you’re starting, expanding, or improving your wholesale retail store, this is the guide for you. Let’s dive deep into 8 trending ideas wholesale retail leaders use to enhance their marketing efforts.
Cutting Edge Retail Marketing Strategies
So, without further ado, let’s get into the top 8 most cutting edge retail marketing strategies you can implement to boost your shop’s sales.
1. Influencer Partnerships and Collaborations
Obviously, influencer promotions and collaborations have blown up over the years. Now, it’s nearly impossible to get on any social media platform without seeing an influencer promote a product. You’ll see this often from CBD or supplement wholesale brands, skincare products, and beyond.
In the wholesale retail space, you can use influencer marketing and collaborations to reach a wider audience since they already have a captivated audience that is willing to buy from them.
To identify like-minded influencers, see if there are any currently following your accounts. If not, begin searching for hashtags related to your product and search that way, or partner with an influencer agency to find those that align with your company.
If you’re conducting a search on your own – you can send a simple message to connect, to further explain your offer and receive their costs per post.
You can have influencers promote your wholesale offers and link directly to your store – powered by Wholesale Gorilla. Our platform lets any new buyers that come from influencer campaigns immediately sign up with ease and shop your wholesale products.
You can customize campaigns with special pricing, tailored checkout experiences, and beyond.
2. Virtual Showrooms and Digital Trade Shows
Most expos and tradeshows are prohibitively expensive for growing wholesale retail businesses.
Fortunately, virtual digital trade shows are now offering an online alternative to showcase your wholesale business to a wide and highly interested audience.
Another way to get your product in “front” of potential wholesale clients? A virtual showroom! A virtual showroom allows others to better connect with your brand, “interact” with products, and even place their orders.
For clothing retailers, virtual fitting rooms like Zeekit are growing in popularity to give buyers an online look at how they can expect clothes to fit. When selling wholesale, you can add these virtual show room or fitting room apps to your tech stack to seamlessly connect with your SKU management platform – like Wholesale Gorilla.
Overall, by enhancing your website’s capabilities for showing off your product, you have the ability to capture more buyers by giving them a hands-on experience, virtually. Even more, when you have a tech stack that maximizes efficiency, you can manage larger, more lucrative sales.
3. Personalized Marketing Campaigns
In today’s modern world, it’s not just about marketing to target audiences, it’s about marketing to specific audiences segmented based on accurate data. This means collecting and utilizing customer data to create targeted marketing campaigns.
For instance – if you have buyers who have previously purchased a watermelon scented variety of one of your products, a personalized campaign may involve marketing other watermelon items to this audience. With data, you can segment audiences based upon region, gender, age, purchasing patterns, etc.
Do you get regular promotions from your Starbucks app on your favorite drinks? The company’s app and reward system serve as a masterclass in the art of gaining information such as purchase history, location, times, etc. to get more personal with customers.
When you take your wholesale business “online” and equip it with a powerful app like Wholesale Gorilla, you too can collect this personal data and better tailor your marketing campaigns to be more personal and effective.
4. AR and VR Product Demonstrations
Another way to boost your tech capabilities to acquire more customers is through the integration of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for product demonstrations. State of the art technologies now allow customers to have an immersive experience with products – even across the screen.
By utilizing this technology, you can save on costs by demoing the product in other ways, and gain more customers you might not otherwise be able to demo. These techniques are often used in retail to allow customers to try things on, see items in their room, or preview items to potential wholesale buyers.
5 Social Commerce and Shoppable Content
Of course, social media will always come into play when it comes to wholesale retail marketing strategies. In today’s modern era,social media is a major player in how consumers find retailers to buy from. The key for retailers is successfully driving traffic to your retail site from the social platform, via Link in Bio call-to-actions or paid campaigns.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok can be an additional channel to attract and achieve direct sales in addition to your main Shopify or website. This retail strategy could be and is often combined with influencer partnerships to maximize exposure on the platforms, and efficacy and effectiveness overall. That’s because many influencers have built relationships with buyers who trust their word and their promotion of products.
Keep in mind, the more you add more platforms for e-commerce or direct sales, the more organization and backend support are required to fulfill such orders. Hence the reason why so many Wholesale Gorilla users are able to scale so effectively with robust order fulfillment and processing tools.
6. Interactive Content and Gamification
Like AR and VR demonstrations, interactive content and the gamification of marketing are also trending among retail wholesalers. These strategies engage potential wholesale buyers through interactive content such as –
- Maps
- Webinars
- Games
- Infographics
- Quizzes
- Calculators or tools
And beyond. According to industry experts, interactive content gains twice as much engagement versus static content. Depending on your industry, there are a plethora of plugins that can help you build custom interactive elements into your sites and marketing strategies that align best with your services or products.
One common tactic that integrates interaction into wholesale marketing strategies is the hosting of webinars. Webinars can be cost-effectively hosted virtually and then seamlessly followed up with an automated email campaign. They allow wholesalers to connect with potential customers, show off their expertise, and nurture relationships.
7. Subscription and Membership Programs
The next trend when it comes to wholesale retail marketing strategies, is the implementation of subscription and membership programs to drive repeat business. Which comes as no surprise considering new studies show that the subscription ecommerce market is forecasted to reach over $450 billion by 2025. By offering a subscription or membership option on your retail site, you streamline regular cash flow and create ongoing, recurring sales.
Even more? You’ll spend less on acquiring customers, and it makes upselling and cross selling that much easier, too. When managing automated programs like subscriptions or memberships,it helps to have a wholesale plug-in like Wholesale Gorilla that lets you customize messaging to personalize the experience for all buyers, regardless of the program they buy into.
A recent survey reported that 73% of customers say they’d rather do business with brands that personalize their emails. Once you’ve captured a customer, with your email platform, website, and Wholesale Gorilla, you can create an entire automated upsell flow that’s customized and generates higher, guaranteed cash flow through the subscription or membership model .
8. Data-Driven Insights and Predictive Analytics
One of the best ways to bolster your Shopify’s retail wholesale marketing strategies? To power them with data driven insights and predictive analytics. This strategy component is crucial to making informed decisions on where to direct your marketing efforts, too. When you have insights and analytics into your customer’s behavior and combine that with market trends, you can better fine-tune strategies to land the right message with the right
audience. For instance, in Wholesale Gorilla, wholesalers are able to view transactions natively on Shopify and by segment.
Giving those equipped with Wholesale Gorilla a competitive edge with actual analytics from real-time purchasing.
Going beyond, when marketing digitally, using a wholesale platform like Wholesale Gorilla gives you the power to customize checkouts, allowing you to further tailor the buying experience based on the data and analytics you review,
Wholesale Retail Marketing: The Final Word
Now that you have these 8 cutting edge wholesale retail marketing strategies fresh in your mind… What are you waiting for? It’s time to implement them! Remember, it’s wise to experiment and adapt marketing strategies based upon any KPIs you collect and what’s working best for your business.
With that said – that means it’s always best to stay ahead of the game (and competition) with innovative approaches to the wholesale industry and your business. Start with the integration of a wholesale app that can support these marketing strategies and keep you up to speed with the latest industry advancements, all while streamlining your operations for optimal profit margins.
Get familiar with Wholesale Gorilla and make your wholesale retail business, quite frankly, a beast in 2024. Wholesale Gorilla strengthens the way you support online wholesale retail sales, allowing you to be more efficient and scale more seamlessly.
Explore what Wholesale Gorilla has to offer and begin your 21-day trial now.
