One of the reasons why you might choose a wholesaling business is to utilize other expert marketers to take your product and run with it. However, that doesn't exempt you from marketing your business at all. You still need to promote your products to retailers. Here's how:
Wholesale Directories
Many retailers and individual resellers will purchase wholesale directories to find products for their store or business. One way to promote your business is to get listed. That's the minimum requirement, but there are other ways to stand out from the competition in these directories. You can purchase ad space, or add features to your listing. Some ideas are larger fonts or bold text. You don't want to go overboard with a full page ad or side binding ad until you're generating a lot in sales to justify the expense.
There are also online directories that you can submit your wholesaling business to, such www.wholesalecentral.com and www.wholesaledir.com. Submitting to an online directory geared toward promoting wholesalers will help to drive more traffic to your own website.
A Website
Your wholesaling business needs a presence on the web. You're missing a huge opportunity to attract more customers if you're not online and promoting your website. In addition to wholesale directories, you can submit your website to search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo! and Google. You can also submit your website to open directories, such as www.dmoz.org.
Finally, you'll need the optimize your website for the search engines, making it easy for the search engines to index your site and for customers to find you. If you don't have experience or know how to design and optimize your website or submit it to the major search engines, you should find an experienced web designer to help you. You can post an ad on www.Craigslist.com to find a freelancer.
Online Advertising
Once your website is ready, you'll have to promote it online. An effective way to drive traffic to your website is to advertise on other websites. You can purchase banner ads or small ads on popular websites that target the customers you want to reach. Be sure to track the rate of return for each dollar spent. To do this, divide the dollar amount you spend each month by the number of sales from those who clicked through to your website.
Trade Shows
A faster way to promote your wholesaling business to customers is to rent booth space at targeted trade shows. Start with small local and regional trade shows that target the online and offline stores. After you've gained enough experience, and ironed out your systems and processes for working with multiple customers, you can think about participating in larger trade shows.
There are several thousand trade shows that happen all across the country, across multiple industries. Find out which trade shows are sponsored or recommended by your industry's top trade associations, for ideas on which to attend. Keep an eye out for ads announcing local and regional shows in the newspaper. You can also participate in online trade shows geared towards attracting customers for your specific industry.
Promoting your wholesaling business will take time and a lot of effort on your part in the startup phase. However, once you get the ball rolling, your customers will take over promotions for you through word of mouth marketing.
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Daphne Mallory, Esq. is the co-owner of Mallory Writing Services and has written more than 100 articles helping home based business owners and entrepreneurs start and market their business. You can learn more about her here.
