Many resellers in the UK started the business as a side hustle. According to Micro Biz Mag’s research on popular side hustle avenues in the UK, “How to Make Money Selling on Amazon” was among the top 10 searches in 2020.  

You may have started a reselling business as an alternative income avenue. But that doesn’t matter much now because you’ve established yourself as a competitor in the market. The next step is leveraging proven marketing tips to scale your reselling business. 

This reseller marketing guide is designed for resellers looking to reach a wider market in the UK.  Here, we’ll discuss the basics of advertising. We’ll also explore marketing advice for resellers and different ways to promote your reselling business. 

Understanding the Basics of Marketing

Marketing is how you promote and get people to notice your reselling business. Essentially, it’s anything you do to draw potential customers’ attention to your products. Of course, marketing doesn’t go far beyond this definition, but you’d do well not to over-simplify it as it still entails several interesting aspects.

Marketing isn’t convincing customers to buy what you’re offering, nor does it primarily involve closing deals. Those activities fall under “sales,” but most resellers misconstrue them with marketing. 

Marketing a reselling business primarily deals with creating awareness and pushing brand popularity. Sales include the part where you convert popularity to profit. Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand, with many small business owners like yourself often lumping the two together.

The problem for a reselling business looking to grow is doing more sales work than marketing. You’re selling to a small group. But your products aren’t popular in the market. Consequently, your profit margin will remain the same for a long time, and business growth will stall. 

Marketing is vital to boost those sales numbers and grow any business. That brings us to the question, “what’s the best way to market your reselling business?” 

The tips we’ll consider shortly should give you all the necessary insights and strategies to create publicity for your venture.

Marketing Tips for Reselling Business

The following proven reselling strategies work in the UK market, helping resellers maximise opportunities and resources to gain a wider reach. They’ll also help you get a high ROI for all your marketing efforts. 

Know Your Audience

Marketing primarily involves publicity, which is letting many people know about your products. However, there’s such a thing as ineffective publicity. 

Ineffective publicity usually starts with the idea that “anyone” is your buyer. This opinion may come from a misguided comparison with the more influential players in the industry. Larger resellers may do marketing on a broader scale, but a small reselling business might not pull it off successfully. 

Think of situations where several people know about your reselling business, but they don’t have any use for it. For example, consider a reselling business delivering antique furniture to senior citizens who are collectors. Say this business runs a social media campaign on Instagram. 

The product is getting publicity, but the bulk of Instagram users are young people who may not need your products. Hence, it’s ineffective publicity.

When marketing your reselling business, the first box to tick is communicating to the right market. But to do that, you must recognise the audience first. 

Knowing your audience starts from recognising specific demographics of the market section you appeal to. For example, if you’re a reseller with years of experience, you already know the category of customers your business serves. You can then use this info to devise a marketing strategy to promote your reselling business to the right people within the UK.

Newbie resellers can identify their audience by asking and answering the following questions: 

• What social demography responds the most to your products and previous marketing attempts?
• What group of people make up the bulk of your existing buyers?
• What aspects of the market would you like to sell more to?

Answering these questions will help you clarify three things. The first is you’ll know the social demography (age, social strata) that have the most interest in your products. The second helps you understand who’s currently buying from you. Finally, the last answer clarifies who you think you can and will like to sell to.

Additionally, you can consider your competitor’s strategies when creating yours. An excellent way to get insights for recognising the right market is by assessing your competitors.

Identify resellers like yourself offering the same products or similar. Then, take a microscope to their marketing efforts, specifically, who they’re talking to and who’s responding to them. You can then use that information to curate an audience on which you’ll focus your marketing efforts.

Curate Relevant, Interesting Content

Once you have identified your target market, the next thing is to get their attention. And one of the best ways to achieve that is to provide answers to their questions. Next, you should suggest solutions to their problems and draw them to yourself.

One of the easiest ways to draw shoppers to your business is by giving them relevant, helpful information. Ideally, the information should align with what you offer and must be attractive to the reader.

For example, you’re reading this blog post about marketing tips for your reselling business. The information on this page holds relevance for you; it’s interesting and also helpful. That gives you an idea that we can help you with strategies for marketing your reselling business. So, if you need such services in the future, there’s a higher probability you’ll come here for them.

But, we’ve not even attempted to sell to you or give you the scope of our services. We’re simply giving you helpful answers to your questions, but now you know about us. In the same way, you’ll attract more relevant attention to your reselling business by curating helpful content for your audience.

So, let’s say you resell sneakers; an example of relevant content you can provide will be a blog post on “The Best Sneakers for Each Occasion” and “How to Get Your Sneaker Game Spot-On.” Or, for a more common discussion, you can explore topics like “Tips for Spotting Fake Sneakers.” Or “How to Avoid Buying Fake Sneakers.”

Establish Your Online presence

It’s hardly believable that any business exists in the UK in this age without a structured online presence. More and more people are diving into the ecommerce business. 

A new report by TAMI indicated that there are now close to 600,000 ecommerce enabled websites operating in the UK. Today’s entrepreneurs are either ditching brick-and-mortar shops or running them simultaneously with online stores. 

However, you need more than an online store for marketing your reselling business. You must create a recognisable online presence that’ll cut across several communication channels on the internet. Primarily, you should have official social media accounts for your business and a website. 

You may think you don’t need a website if you already have an online store on a popular marketplace like Amazon. But owning a website offers many benefits for a reselling business. Your website can double as an online store if you set it up appropriately. But a store on an online marketplace can never function as a website.

For instance, referring to the earlier discussion about content curation, a website will feature a blog section where you’d include relevant content. The difference is you don’t have this luxury with an online store. You can share content on your social media, but having a website with a blog section helps to catalogue all the information accurately.

Admittedly, operating a store in a popular online marketplace will come with several benefits. So, it’s the best place to conduct sales activities. However, a proper website and social media presence are some of the best ways to market your reselling business and improve its publicity.

To cap it up, you can easily curate content for your website blog and also share the same content on your social media. Or better still, you can post excerpts with links to the blog posts on social media. That way, you’ll drive valuable traffic to your website and get people to notice your reselling business more.

Optimise Your Online Presence For Search

SEO involves optimising your website, stores, and social media presence to make them appear high up in the result pages when customers search for specific keywords online. For example, if you resell home appliances, you can do SEO for your website and store to show up high on the first page of the results when someone  Googles “where to buy home appliances.”

Essentially, the primary aim of doing SEO is marketing your reselling business and improving your visibility to the people looking for what you offer. That’s why many online vendors view it as one of the ultimate methods for advertising.  

Up to 34% of customers start their purchase journey with a search on Google or other search engines. Therefore, you want to ensure you’re among the first few resellers the customer will come across when they type relevant keywords into the search engine.

To do SEO, start by making your brand more searchable on the major search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Then, employ SEO strategies on your website by making your website more conformant to the search engine’s algorithm requirements. Additionally, use keyword strategies to make your content and blogs more visible when web users search about specific topics. 

Also, make your physical stores visible on Google maps and list them on GoogleMyBusiness. That’s because several customers use the “Near Me” phrase to search for goods and services online. So, enabling location markers to let your reselling business show up on location-specific searches in the UK market is a good strategy for improving popularity.

SEO marketing is quite broad, and there are several aspects to it, all of which can overwhelm you. Hence, hiring professional SEO services and letting the experts go  

Nevertheless, the fundamentals of SEO involve tweaking your website to make it appear on the first page of search engine results. Getting it right will help bring numerous traffic to your website and unravel several other means for marketing your reselling business to the right audience.

Traditional Marketing Strategies Still Work

Several consumers in the UK still get their commodities from walk-in stores. Many of these customers prefer seeing, feeling and probably testing out their products before making a purchase. Hence, traditional marketing strategies are still very effective in promoting fashion-based reselling business to this section of buyers.

Traditional marketing, just like digital marketing, has several aspects and facets. So, you can go about it in many different ways. 

For example, the most typical traditional marketing method is direct contact advertising. Just as the name implies, it occurs in a scenario where you or your marketing reps have physical meetings with prospective buyers to tell them about your products. This advertising avenue also allows you to let the customers see, feel and test the products.

Another traditional marketing method involves using radios, print media and billboard advertising to promote your reselling business. This method allows you to reach various people across several channels. 

The other popular traditional advertising method is through a referral programme. This avenue involves encouraging existing buyers to tell others about your product. You can do that by offering freebies and referral bonuses to customers for every new individual they tell about your reselling business. 

The referral method is also applicable to digital and other non-traditional marketing avenues. But the primary focus is on applying traditional marketing for your small or medium-scale reselling business. Hence, you shouldn’t sideline or discount its relevance to your overall advertising efforts.

Curate and Nurture Leads With Email Marketing

Email marketing is an advertising method that involves getting people to sign up for your email newsletter and then guiding them through the consumer journey. 

Email marketing has become a vital part of modern marketing. In fact, statistics show that 73% of millennials prefer receiving offers from businesses via email. 

Email marketing occurs in stages, which marketers refer to as funnels. The first step involves getting the prospective customers to sign up for your newsletter by providing their emails and allowing you to send them publications. The most efficient way to get through this stage is to create a form for leads to input the necessary information and get a fundamental idea of what to expect.

The second stage involves curating the list and nurturing the leads using an email copy strategy. Primarily, what you’ll be doing here is creating content and forwarding them to the prospective customers via the emails they provided. Most buyers aren’t ready to buy the moment they see your products. So you have to nurture and develop their interest in your commodity carefully. 

The two stages above address the marketing aspect of Email marketing. The subsequent stages include the sales part, which involves convincing the prospects and converting them into buyers.

Email marketing is free, and you can easily set it up using several tools like Clickfunnels, Mailchimp, Klavico and Getresponse. While most of these tools aren’t free, they come with limited-time free trials and their subscription fees are often affordable.

Email marketing also enables you to foster customer loyalty while marketing your reselling business. You can use it to notify customers of new products and ensure top-of-mind awareness. With top-of-mind awareness, your audience will remember your reselling business whenever they need something you offer.

Invest in Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is a similar concept to SEO. Essentially, the two avenues help to increase your website’s visibility. They do that by helping your website show up higher on SERPs for specific keywords. 

However, there’s a fundamental difference between SEO and SEM. SEO is free; you only have to improve some of your processes, features and contents to make your website more relevant for the appropriate searches. In the case of SEM, you’ll have to pay to secure the ranking. A primary example of search engine marketing is Google Ads.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can buy your way into a higher rank on SERPs. The search engines, for instance, Google, have multifaceted SEM options. They allow several competitors to bid for a spot on the search engine ranking. However, the spot doesn’t necessarily go to the highest bidder. 

Instead, they consider your bid and website content’s relevance to the search. For example, you may bid for the top ranking position on SERPs for a specific keyword with an offer of 10$ per click. 

Google will consider your bid and also rate your website content’s relevance to that keyword. Then, they will compare how you perform in these two categories to other bidders and select the best proposal.

Consider Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing avenues entrepreneurs can use to publicise their reselling businesses. It primarily involves getting people with a significant level of clout on social media and other platforms to endorse and advertise your products to their followers. 

The rise of platforms like TikTok and Instagram has ushered in a significant boon in the influencer industry. Several business owners recognise and exploit the advantages of onboarding influencers in their advertisement strategies. Hence, the best marketing advice you’ll get for scaling your reseller business will include influencer collaboration.

Influencers primarily do what their title implies. They influence their followers’ opinions. So, getting the right influencer to help market your goods to their follower base can skyrocket your reselling business’s popularity. 

However, to get the best out of influencer marketing, you must ensure your influencer’s follower base aligns with your target market. Their values must go in line with your brand and what you offer.

Influencer marketing primarily targets an already curated large audience base with a common interest. Consequently, targeting an audience base that’s not interested in your product will be a waste of time. 

Common influencer marketing tactics that can work for a reseller business include:

• Getting an influencer to write a positive lengthy review article of your products
• Having an influencer post and endorse your products on social media

Of course, you should be open to ideas and inputs from the influencers. Their opinions can be beneficial. However, it would be best if you didn’t leave it all to them. You’re the reseller, and it’s your business, so you should guide how the marketing effort goes. 

Improve Your Reselling Business Marketing Strategies

We may have made it seem deceptively simple, but you shouldn’t underestimate the effectiveness of the above marketing tips for reselling businesses. Each of the points discussed can increase your venture’s popularity on several levels. 

But of course, it all comes down to how you market your reselling business. Great marketing will help you to exponentially grow your business’s popularity and expand your follower base. 

Marketing is one small part of growing your reselling business. Another aspect is knowing which products to sell, when to sell them. Here at Crep Chief Notify, we’re inviting you to take advantage of our all-in-one platform for resellers. We can help with acuqiring products for resale, where to liste these products and mark-up pricing based on real-time market info. 

Sign up today!