In wholesale marketing, you’ll do something that sounds more challenging than it actually is: sell your products to other business owners instead of everyday consumers. In this article, you’ll learn valuable wholesale marketing tips and discover how wholesale marketing strategies differ from other tactics.
Why Wholesale Marketing Is Essential
Picture yourself running marketing for the world’s greatest olive oil brand. Would you use the same talking points when pitching your product to home chefs and grocery store buyers? Or would you come up with different strategies for each audience?
That’s where wholesale marketing strategies come into play. This type of marketing involves promoting your products to wholesale customers, or other businesses who will sell them. Your goal is to market your products to small businesses and retailers who feature similar products.
Your goal is not to reach the everyday consumers buying your products from third-party retailers. Instead, you want to pitch the unique items you curate or hand make yourself directly to those retailers. This difference is why wholesale marketing isn’t quite like traditional retail marketing — though many standard retail approaches work for wholesale too.
The benefits of wholesale marketing
Wholesale product promotion offers numerous benefits, including that it:
- Introduces your products to new markets and locations. A successful wholesale marketing strategy connects you with retail customers well beyond your neighborhood. Selling your crocheting materials solely to craft stores in your city? You’ll find new customers that cater to crafting enthusiasts in other regions and states.
- Increases your sales. These specialized marketing strategies get your products in front of businesses not previously familiar with them. When these businesses buy your products, your sales volume increases. Plus, wholesale customers become repeat buyers if their shoppers like your offerings, so your sales volume remains high.
- Creates — and maintains — strong relationships with business customers. A great wholesale marketing strategy is how you make your first impression with potential customers. Additionally, as you keep carrying out your marketing campaigns, you’ll gradually convert some of your target audience into loyal customers. The more these businesses keep seeing your efforts, the more you’ll maintain your relationships with them.
- Educates retailers about your products. Great wholesale marketing campaigns give retailers the knowledge they need to successfully sell your products to their customers. Plus, wholesalers selling your unique, mission-driven products enjoy the added benefit of diversifying their offerings.

4 Steps Before You Start A Wholesale Marketing Campaign
1. Identify your target market
Increasing sales depends on identifying your ideal wholesale customers. Three key steps for identifying the right small businesses and retailers are:
- Conducting market research. Run surveys and focus groups with retailers, and review publicly available data on your industry’s economic trends and consumer behavior. Use your findings to determine the businesses most likely to buy your products.
- Creating buyer personas. Once you’ve researched the market, develop a fictional ideal customer whose pain points you address and whose budget your products meet. Orient your marketing around this buyer persona’s needs and abilities, and you’ll be more likely to increase sales.
- Vetting individual customers. Look into whether your potential wholesale customers sell products like yours. If so, they might be interested in selling yours too. If not, you might be better off expending your efforts elsewhere.
- Attend industry events. Networking at industry gatherings such as trade shows is a prime way to connect with retailers and small business owners. You can get a broad view of who carries products similar to your own while making valuable face-to-face connections.
- Identify mission driven stores. Is using ethically-sourced materials core to your business philosophy? Do you craft one of a kind, handmade masterpieces? Researching certified retailers that put their principles front and center could lead you to the perfect wholesaler match.
Suppose you run an ice cream shop, and you now want to sell pints on grocery store shelves. Through market research, you find that shoppers indeed want to buy small-brand ice cream at grocery stores. To market appropriately to these retailers, develop a buyer persona of buyers who are on the hunt for new products to bring into the store’s frozen line. From there, visit grocery stores in your area to see which ones are missing small-brand ice creams like yours. Focus most strongly on these stores.

2. Build a brand
Business experts have noted that consumers form human-like relationships with companies, and this dynamic exists in wholesale marketing as well. Namely, your brand allows customers to form these relationships with your company. To build your brand:
- Write a mission and vision statement. This statement tells potential customers who you are, what you do, and what motivates you to do it. It humanizes your business, making potential wholesale customers more likely to buy what you sell.
- Develop a brand deck. Use your mission and vision statement to develop core values and a brand voice that comes through in all your marketing materials. Infuse your voice and values into your advertisements, your wholesale e-commerce website, and everything in between to appeal to customers while showing your business’s true self.
- Build a website and social media presence. Since your website and social media pages are accessible 24/7, these digital marketing assets are important to activate from the get-go. At the same time, these online touchpoints are just the beginning of building your brand. Email, content, search engine optimization (SEO), and other digital marketing strategies keep your brand in front of current and potential wholesale customers alike.
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3. Establish your marketing goals
Like any goal, a marketing objective should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. To set SMART wholesale marketing goals:
- Determine your budget. Quarterly sales projections give your team clear goalposts to reach. They also indicate how much money you’ll need to spend to hit your revenue targets. Assuming your spending doesn’t outweigh your revenue, you’ve got yourself a wholesale marketing budget.
- Assess how you’ll tap into new markets. Showrooms designed to give retailers hands-on, highly positive experiences with your product are tried-and-true wholesale marketing staples. There’s also the option to hire in-house salespeople or outsource to third parties. Consider your potential routes forward and decide which ones you’ll incorporate into your marketing campaigns.
For example, suppose you want bakeries to stock your cold brew. A SMART goal could be to get 30 franchise locations to stock your cold brew made from single-origin Kenyan beans by the end of the current quarter. Whether it’s achievable is subjective, but it’s definitely specific (it names an exact product), measurable (it names a quantity), relevant (you sell coffee), and time-bound (it establishes a timeframe).
4. Iron out the logistics
Even the best marketing strategy will fail if you can’t fulfill your wholesale orders. So, first things first: Set up your infrastructure for receiving orders and payments, putting together shipments, and getting them out the door. An inventory management system is crucial for these logistics.
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8 Ideas To Market Your Wholesale Products
1. Referrals
Often, wholesale customers are happy to connect you with others if you offer them an incentive. For example, suppose you want more mom-and-pop home goods shops to sell your beeswax candles. Inform your existing wholesale buyers that, if they connect you with a mom-and-pop shop that becomes a customer, the existing buyer gets $250 off their next order. Consider making it easy to claim this offer through a special referral website link to your catalog or printing out a one-pager. If the incentive you offer is sustainable for your business model and pricing strategy, you’ll see greater profits through word-of-mouth wholesale marketing.
2. Social media
Test out just about any wholesale marketing strategy through social media. For example, go live on Instagram to field potential customers’ questions about your beeswax candles. This way, other future customers curious about why their shoppers might prefer beeswax candles to other types get answers too. This also gives you great data to apply to your ongoing digital marketing efforts, messaging, or developing new products.
From there, spend a few weeks checking out these other potential customers’ social media pages. These brands’ social media managers might notice you interacting with their content. That’s a good thing — if you reach out to the brand to introduce your offerings, the brand might already know you. That familiarity is much more effective for making sales.
3. Optimized website
Suppose your company manufactures vegan skate shoes made with no leather or other animal products. Potential wholesale customers might find you upon searching the internet for vegan skate shoe brands, wholesalers, or manufacturers. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your website reach these high-quality wholesale leads.
Optimize your homepage and product pages, then begin regularly publishing targeted blog posts that show your skate shoes’ greatness and why skaters might want vegan shoes. You might land on wholesalers’ radar more frequently, and more exposure on search engines often means more sales.
4. Visit ideal customers in person
They say it’s all about who you know, so find the bravery to conduct in-person visits to retailers that stock items similar to yours. For example, suppose you set up a Google Alert for “vegan skate shoes Chicago.” You’ll get occasional emails linking to articles that name Chicago skate shops. Swing by these shops with samples to help persuade decision-makers to stock your vegan shoes.
Another strategy is to go through other vegan skate shoe brands’ lists of wholesale customers. Visit any customers located near you, and pitch your shoes.
5. Direct mail
Direct mail marketing is a classic way to put product samples right into the hands of a possible new customer. To avoid the shipping costs of sending whole product samples, consider sending a card with a QR code that links directly to your website catalog. Handwrite a note to the business you’re reaching out to for an extra personalized touch they’ll remember.

6. Samples
If your new line of heavy-duty dog toys is perfect for independent pet stores across your state, try shipping samples to these retailers. Proceed with caution, though — shipping costs are expensive, and giving away products instead of selling them is a financial loss. That said, if you target high-quality leads, you could well recoup your costs via sales. Alternatively, conduct in-person local visits to circumvent shipping costs.
Couple your samples with key information about your products and company, especially the exact heavy-duty dog toy line from your sample. Invite your prospects to sign up as wholesale customers. An incentive such as a 30% discount on their first order might help. If sending your sample via shipping, require a signature upon receipt so you know the sample has arrived. Call the potential customer within a week to ask them how they like the product and move them along the sales pipeline.
7. Trade shows and events
What if you could reach as many industry decision-makers as possible in the least amount of time? Trade shows offer exactly this solution. Register for a table at a show that targets your industry, and bring all your highest-quality samples. The dog toy brand should attend pet shows like Global Pet Expo, while the beeswax candle company may benefit from a giftables trade show like Americasmart.
While at the trade show, present your brand and products to everyone who stops by. Don’t be shy — everyone is there to do business. Some opportunities might start popping up months after the trade show, so keep your head up if you don’t immediately make sales. As long as you get your samples and contact information into the right hands, you’ll grow your network, find solid near-future leads, and hopefully get sign-ups from potential customers later on.

8. Introductory offers
Wholesale buyers must be risk-averse by default — every dollar spent lowers their company’s profit. Promote introduction offers to minimize the buyers’ risk. Your pet toy company could offer 10 free toys for every 40 purchased — that’s 50 toys for the cost of 40. This discount might be all it takes for a retailer that’s almost ready to sell your toys to move ahead. And if their customers wind up buying your toys in droves, more sales will result, so you’ll recoup that initial discount in no time.
From Your Stockroom To Their Shelves
Through wholesaling, you sell your products to the retailers best equipped to get your offerings to the public. After all, the best route from your warehouse to customers’ hands sometimes involves a stop at another business. The wholesale marketing strategies explained in this article have worked for businesses across industries, so try them out for yourself — success might be just around the corner.