Your seafood business ideas have finally being launched, congratulations, but, what next? With wholesale seafood vendors running in their thousands, the seafood industry is highly competitive. Running a successful seafood distribution business requires a solid seafood wholesale marketing and sales strategy.
Key Takeaway: Selling fish and wholesale seafood online requires a mix of the right eCommerce software integration and the best eCommerce marketing automation tools. From using multichannel order management platforms to manage your b2b sales processes to creating the ultimate omnichannel customer experience, a lot of thought and planning goes into selling fish online.
Learning how to sell fish online will help you know the best ways to reach your customers and improve customer satisfaction. Let’s look at some of the best strategies for selling freshwater fish online.
7 Tips For Selling Fish Online
- Decide on your Target Market
Before you can sell fish online, it is important to know who your customers are. The type of customer you market to will be determined by the kind of seafood business model you run.
For instance, seafood wholesale distribution business owners will sell fish mostly to other businesses and adopt B2B eCommerce marketing strategies. These other businesses include restaurants, supermarkets, other seafood vendors, and seafood processing companies.
If you run a seafood restaurant, then your target customers will be the end-users of seafood. You will be selling directly to seafood consumers and your marketing strategies will adopt the D2C model.
Knowing your target market will help you decide on the type of marketing strategy to utilize when promoting your business. It will also help you create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.
- Know your Selling Point
So, why should your target market buy from your seafood business and not the remaining one thousand seafood vendors in your area? Your unique selling proposition is your value point, the added benefit that customers will get from you and nowhere else.
Understanding your selling point is important. It will serve as the basis of your marketing campaigns and strategies. Your USP does not need to be complex. However, you must be really particular about delivering the best value to your customers based on it.
For instance, say you run a seafood processing business, your USP can be the way you manage seafood shipping. Seafood packaging and delivery is frustrating, a lot of factors go into making it successful.
With a route optimization and delivery management system in place, your seafood processing company will be able to manage shipping and handling of seafood. This will ultimately become the reason customers do business with your seafood company.
- Keep Existing Customers
Customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention. According to Forbes, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to keep existing customers.
Your marketing strategies should not only focus on getting new customers, but you should also run eCommerce personalization campaigns that will make existing customers feel valued. For instance, you can create automated eCommerce email marketing campaigns that will send personalized messages on special occasions to your customers.
Existing customers are an excellent source of referral businesses. You can offer incentives or create customer loyalty programs to keep your existing customers happy.
However, no marketing campaign can replace excellent eCommerce customer service and customer experience management. Implementing customer experience strategies is the key to keeping existing customers and getting new ones.
You can use customer relationship management software and customer experience management software to streamline the way you manage your customers. Wholesale CRMs are also critical for wholesale customers.
- Create Unforgettable Branding
The way you handle your eCommerce branding is important. Your brand elements is what customers will see first before making first contact with you.
From your brand color and logo to your eCommerce website design and tagline, all your branding elements must be in sync across all your sales channels. This promotes an aura of credibility.
It is also crucial to have a fairly consistent brand tone across your social media channels and website. This is where implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy will help you. You can create a brand guideline document to ensure uniformity across board.
- Build your eCommerce Website
Building an eCommerce website makes it easy to sell fish online. A website gives you direct access to millions of web-users every day. You also have control over the way customers reach your seafood business.
The benefits of having an eCommerce website is endless. You can create a user friendly interface that streamlines your lead generation processes and optimizes your business process flow.
Having a website makes it easier to integrate eCommerce marketing automation tools and other software solutions. For instance, you can streamline B2B payments with payment processing software like BlueCart Pay.
In addition, a website simplifies the online ordering process for customers. You can create a page for your digital catalog and list your high-demand products.
Having menu engineering knowledge is crucial to creating a menu design that works. Read more about menu management and seafood restaurant menu engineering tips and strategies on our blog.
An eCommerce website can be optimized to improve your online presence when you implement eCommerce SEO strategies. It is also easier to promote your seafood and fish business online with a website.
- Implement Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the sum total of online marketing solutions. From website marketing and optimization to social media marketing and eCommerce email marketing, there are a lot of things that go into launching a successful digital marketing campaign.
eCommerce content marketing harnesses the power of content creation and keyword optimization to grow your seafood brand organically and extend your reach online. You can create how-to posts, recipe videos, or DIY fish farming videos to increase engagement.
With social media marketing, adopt the use of high definition images. Share behind the scenes videos of your seafood business. Engage your followers and grow your page. You can use a social media management software to stay on top of social media posts and content.
eCommerce email marketing allows you to send email newsletters to existing customers in your mail list. You can follow-up with customers, create a weekly newsletter schedule, send company updates, or even send coupons and discount codes to customers.
PPC campaigns are another great way to advertise your seafood business and sell fish online. However, while other digital marketing campaigns can be run organically, eCommerce PPC requires some money. So, its a good idea to set aside a marketing budget for this.
- Optimize, Track, Monitor, Adjust
At the start of each marketing campaign, it is important to set eCommerce KPIs and goals. This will help you track your marketing performance and adjust as needed.
Your KPIs will be set according to the marketing campaign and audience. For instance, a typical metric to track for email marketing campaign will be open rates and bounce rate. If the figures you get from these metrics are not pleasing, then it is important to adjust the campaign and try again.
There are several eCommerce marketing tools that can help you track and measure your marketing performance. Google analytics is an excellent tool for tracking website performance. Paying attention to your metrics will help you better understand your target audience and create relevant marketing campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions About Selling Fish Online
One thing to be careful about is changing strategies that are already working. While it’s great to implement several marketing strategies, it is important to focus on the one that works best for your seafood business.
Let’s answer a few questions about how to sell fish online.
Can I sell Live Fish in eBay?
No, you can’t. Selling fish and other pets are against eBay’s policies. The same goes for Facebook marketplace.
How do I Price Seafood?
The price of seafood is affected by a number of factors, including environmental change, quality of fish, market price, water pollution, and source location. You also can conduct market research to analyze competitor prices.
How do you Package Fish for Sale?
Make sure to use plastic bags made exclusively for carrying fish; they should have flat bottoms when packed and be at least 3 mils thick (and ideally 4 or more mils). Additionally, use fish shipping containers with outer boxes made of sturdy cardboard and inner boxes made of perfectly sized Styrofoam.
Giving Your All
Selling fish online is easy if you have all the right tools and knowledge. It is crucial to obtain your wholesale license if you plan to sell wholesale. Additionally, make sure to adhere with food safety management system regulations and laws.
Implementing software solutions will make your life easier as a business owner. BlueCart offers a full suite of eCommerce software solutions for food wholesale distributors and restaurant businesses.
BlueCart solutions will improve customer satisfaction and help build more efficient business systems. Take advantage of these solutions and optimize the way you sell fish online.