Mark AdamsPromotional tactics for warehouse businesses are exceptionally diverse. But in our experience, there are a handful of tips and strategies that will deliver the best return for your marketing efforts. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll call these tactics the “goals” of your marketing plan for warehousing.
To a great deal of extent, promotional strategies are a matter of synergy: working together to create large goals that develop into a meaningful product or service.
And what objectives should we be trying to achieve with our warehouse promotional strategies?
A few key goals
Marketing Video Workflow
The first goal is to make your promotional video easily accessible by audiences from a multitude of mediums and channels. Although your potential customers may be large or limited in numbers – they’ll most probably will be spread out around the globe.
An excellent resource to help you with this goal is the Video Marketing for Warehouse Strategy Tool Kit. This free tool will map out the most effective promotional strategies for each of your target audiences, and a custom video script to help you tell them your warehouse story.
Product Sales Online
Your promotional video is going to be the shining star of your marketing plan for warehouse, but your product sales are certainly going to be an essential component of your overall strategy. That’s why it’s important to focus on your product selling online, as a primary way of selling to your target audience, as quickly as possible.
The primary objective of this, and some other of the goals mentioned below, is to target your maximum number of online prospects through the creation of an online store.
An excellent tool to help you with this is the Warehouse Retailers – Dropshipping Guide. This free guide will show you how to build an online store that addresses the unique requirements of your warehouse business.
So the logical next step in your warehouse promotional strategy will be to promote your warehouse business website online, so that you can easily create a warehouse line for each product for sale.
A good and comprehensive warehouse auction directory can help you with this. In addition to allowing you to promote every item in your warehouse inventory online at the same time, we’ve found that these directories have a host of other benefits.
You can also search and find out about new warehouses and warehouses that have drop shipping programs in place.
Another great strategy for promoting your warehouse business will be using Google Adwords with your warehouse products. Even if you’re a small, drop shipping business – you’re definitely still likely to benefit from using Google Adwords.
The Google Adwords campaign might have to be set up quite differently than it would for a typical brick and mortar store – but the important thing is to learn how to leverage this tool correctly.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a wonderful and effective promotion tool for any business – but as with all promotions, social media marketing needs to be approached with caution. Avoid spreading yourself too thin, and having too many campaigns happening at the same time.
But when you do go on social media, engaging with your target audience and explaining what you do will be a staple of your promotional strategy for warehouse.
There’s also plenty of value in social media for marketing purposes: a great warehouse promotion for social media is attaching your product line to a relevant customer comment, like ‘OMG, these are exactly what I need!
That’s an extremely effective way to get your products to prime sell. And if you’re like us, creating your own customer comment is a very enjoyable, creative and satisfying way to promote your warehouse store.
Choosing a Warehouse Sortation
Warehouse sorting is a key aspect of your warehouse promotional marketing strategy.
How you select a warehouse sorting method is a very personal decision, with a wide variety of variables at play. In short, your warehouse sorts item for sale is dependent on your product offerings, pricing, target market, and a myriad of other factors.
The real secret to selecting the best warehouse sorting method is to weigh these various variables based on the information you have available to you.
But there are things you’ll need to know in advance:
How many items will be in your warehouse inventory?
Which items in your warehouse turnover the most?
What’s the probability of each item to sell?
What price range is the most likely to sell?
How much time can your warehouse staff afford to spend handling these items?
How much difference will it make to the efficiency or cost-effectiveness if you choose one or the other type of warehouse sorting?
Your Warehouse Inventory
Inventory turnover is a key measure of the efficiency and profitability of any warehouse sortation. The faster items sell, the more money you’ll make overall. How quickly your items sell depends on the inventory turnover.
Let’s say you have a 100-item, one-month regular inventory turnover. If you decide to use a three day sortation method, your inventory turnover will go down to 3 days, and you’ll lose half your profit. If you use a five-day sortation method, your inventory turnover will go up to 1 day, and you’ll lose 95% of your profit.
So basically, your warehouse sorting efficiency is totally dependent on the inventory turnover. In addition to this, larger warehouses have different advantages and disadvantages depending on the kind of warehouse sorting methodology you choose – but this is beyond the scope of this article.
Which Items Are Most Likely To Sell?
What percentage of your clothing will sell? Which percentage your men, children, shoes?, etc.? What range of prices are most likely to sell?
Which Cost Vs. Value To Be Your Best Seller?
The price of items in your store can have a big effect on the number of sales you make.
Reselling items from your warehouse could be one way to increase your profits. It’s definitely an important part of your warehouse promotional strategy, but resale and archive is and will continue to be a very expensive strategy.
If you need to sell your warehouse products in bulk for profit, warehouse resale can be very helpful. Your reselling will benefit each of your brand identity colors, and will look real fresh and cool, but resale as a strategy will not economically stabilize your warehouse like an online store catalog can.
A proper online warehouse Catalogue is the key to stability in every way.
How Fast Do You Want Your Warehouse Items To Be Sold?
Being able to sell your warehouse items faster can help your profits overall. If you’re a smaller company, faster turnaround times is less important than if you’re a larger or more established warehouse.
Which Drop Shipping Platform Is Best For Your Warehouse?
Our business had been using one drop shipping company with only an ebay store. The benefits for us were… limited. And one and a half years later, we’re not even using that company anymore because they walked away from us. We couldn’t afford to drop ship with them anymore.
The reason drop shipping generally works so well for warehouse companies is that the warehouse company doesn’t need to do any marketing at all – the drop shipping company does it all, for free.
But warehouse companies are different from an e-commerce company. The warehouse company’s goal should be to sell as many items as possible, because every single item sold is an opportunity to make more profit.
And the goal is to sell as many items as possible. Our store still occasionally drops ships, but we did it with this one drop shipping company with only an e-bay-store – and they walked away from us. We couldn’t afford to do IT with them anymore because they didn’t have the legal resources to defend ourselves from others attempting to steal our profits.
It is very hard to justify drop shipping on our own dime when our drop shipping vendor is not even a full-service drop shipping vendor.
The bottom line is that if you are a bigger warehouse, or you have access to legal resources, then drop shipping can work well. But if you aren’t one of those people – then don’t use drop shipping.
There are a lot of considerations to make when choosing a drop shipping company, and we have some particularly interesting things to share with you.
Warehouse Sorting Time
What is your warehouse sorting time? What are you going to do with all of those still unsorted goods in your warehouse? Would you like to have them in your parking lot, in the dirty, dusty back room, or in your office?
You can sell them instead!
Your warehouse is a great place to sell your excess inventory, if you have a well-designed, flexible drop shipping warehouse.
And as a warehouse store owner, you probably also have an abundance of it, but it’s probably going to be selling at your warehouse for only 3 to 5 days – this is an excellent opportunity to close the sale with drop shipping and do it immediately, at almost zero markup.
How Will You Sell Your Warehouse Resellers?
Many warehouse store owners would like to keep the attention of their Warehouse Resellers on your online store online sales. Warehouse store owners who only do dropships miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional monthly sales just by not using warehousing sortation methods!
The solution: warehouse sortation methods that increase the warehouse sales you get from your online store while keeping the attention of your Warehouse Resellers on your on premise sales efforts.
Warehouse Sorting Method Bets
Whether you decide to use warehouse sortation methods directly from your warehouse to your dropshipping or e-commerce (many of which we have picked up for you) or you use different dropshipping and warehouse sortation software applications to your dropshipping and online store (which you will need to pass an assessment for),
Warehouse Sorting Methods
There are a lot of different ways to do warehouse sorting online.
Before we describe these so that you can understand exactly what they are, we ask you do think about how fulfilling it would be for you to run your own warehouse sortation facility.
We would highly recommend that you check out all of the methods in our warehouse sortation article.
Some of the advantages of the warehouse sortation methods are the following:
GPS Tracking The selectable warehouse sortation method will be stored on your store for analysis by our software. The reports below can be accessed from the specific warehouse sortation sort you select.We use our GPS-tracking system to confirm that you have possession of each drawer and that the item count you record is accurate at each stage of warehouse sorting. Effortless Sortation The Warehouse Sorter has an autodock function that sorts your inventory and divides it into different warehouse groups immediately. The Warehouse Sorter will blend and stack the inventory by product type (for example, Baseballs, Soccer Balls, etc.). This means that the item names you enter will be clear and obvious, and the sorting will be extremely efficient. This sorting system is very effective in maximizing your warehouse inventory.
The color coding system assists you to store the items in your warehouse in the best fashion.Warehouse sortation software can normally sort items into bundles, which is a technique used in warehousing. This will give you the ability to visually see the goods you have and the future goods you have to order.
Some types of Warehouse Sorters feature a ramp loader to handle heavy packaging. The sorting software will know how to reverse the ramp loader and appropriately arrange the sorting program accordingly. The product profiles offered by warehouse sortation software may help you to re-sell and resell the items in the warehouse. If you are a dropshipping store, you will be able to take your resell product to your online store to sell.You will be able to save money by reselling the product online. Downside None of the Warehouse Sortation Methods Directly Require You To Talk To Anyone Each type of warehouse sortation software gives you the ability to perform accurate inventory management. When you integrate the warehouse sortation software with your e-commerce store, your dropshipping store, or your Amazon business, you will be able to run a completely autonomous business.
