Boost your brand on Faire: A beginner’s guide to promoted listings

With so many options out there, getting noticed in the wholesale world can feel daunting. How can you get noticed by the right retailers? How can you stand out?

That’s where promoted listings on Faire come in—they’re a powerful tool designed to amplify your visibility in a fast-paced marketplace. Promoted listings surface your products in search results for retailers looking for items like yours. This simple tool cuts through the noise and helps boost your brand’s exposure online. 

What are promoted listings?

Simply put, promoted listings are paid advertising on Faire. But they’re more than that. They are a pivotal strategy in ensuring your products capture the attention of retailers. Retailers on Faire are already looking for products like yours—promoted listings ensure they find you. Retailers who log into Faire will see ads for your wholesale in their search results. It’s an easy way to get your brand in front of more retailers.

“The traffic is high-intention. The Faire algorithm is showing the ads to the right people, which increases not just the click-through rate, but once someone clicks, these high-intention buyers tend to convert,” says Tigran Karapetian of Minori Beauty in our recent webinar about promoted listings. “In our case, that has resulted in an attractive, predictable customer acquisition cost.”

Why are promoted listings important for brands?

Faire is unique in that it’s a platform designed to connect retailers and wholesalers in a single place. By using promoted listings, you know you’re advertising in a space where retailers spend time. This increases the effectiveness of your ads and makes conversion more likely. Best of all, you’re only charged when retailers show an interest in your listing by clicking. 

Understanding your promoted listing analytics

Data doesn’t have value unless one tracks and acts upon that data. To know if promoted listings are achieving your aims, you have to understand the analytics behind them. You can access all these data points within the Faire dashboard. By analyzing trends such as the types of retailers buying your products or which items command high reorder rates, you can fine-tune your listings to better meet market demands. The two most important factors to pay attention to are customers acquired and your performance overview.

Customers acquired 

The customers-acquired sections give you a clear picture of the people interested in your brand. Understanding this group and recognizing patterns about them is key. Here are a few metrics that are worth watching.

• New customers: The total number of customers you’ve acquired as a result of promoted listings. This is different from organic customers who found your brand on their own.
  
• Most valuable customers: You’ll find these customers highlighted at the top of the dashboard. These are retailers who frequently place large orders, consistently reorder products, and actively engage with items from you.
  
• Lifetime sales: Total revenue (including reorders) received from this customer, after brand promotions have been applied.
  
• Reorders: The total number of reorders from this customer.

Performance overview

While the customers-acquired section focuses on your retailers, the performance overview tab is a bird’s-eye view of how your promoted listings are doing. Here are important metrics: 

• Projected first-year sales: Potential revenue within the first year from customers acquired through ads. This projection is based on the average first-year sales per customer multiplied by the total number of customers acquired from promoted listings during a given time period.
  
• Ad spend: The total amount spent on promoted listings during a given time period. Total ad spend can vary month to month based on available advertising opportunities and any changes you make to your monthly spending limit.
  
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): The amount of revenue a business earns for each dollar it spends on advertising. Your projected first-year ROAS is calculated by dividing your projected 12-month sales by your actual advertising spend.
  
• Clicks: The total number of times retailers click on your promoted listings. To calculate the average cost per click, divide your total ad spend by the total number of clicks.
  
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): How much it costs to acquire a new customer with promoted listings during a given time period. To calculate CPA, divide your total advertising spend by the number of customers acquired.
  
• Impressions: The number of times a promoted listing is viewed by retailers. They represent the potential reach or exposure of a listing. Even if the retailer doesn’t click in that moment, those impressions are still valuable from a brand-recognition standpoint as they could result in future sales.
  
• Ad spend: The total amount spent on promoted listings during a given time period. Total ad spend can vary month to month based on available advertising opportunities and any changes you make to your monthly spending limit.
  
• Monthly spending limit: The maximum amount you want to spend on ads monthly. Your total ad spend may vary from your spending limit, but it will never exceed it.

How to make the data work for you

You’re probably wondering what you can do with this data. Not only should you leverage these numbers to understand how your promoted listings are performing, you should use them to make informed decisions about your marketing efforts. The data you glean from promoted listings can surprise you. 

“A win that we’ve experienced [with promoted listings] is we’ve found some new bestsellers within our line that I don’t think we would have realized if we weren’t advertising on Faire,” says Daniel Sehoff of Sophistiplate. “It’s been cool to see some of those unexpected items take off since we started advertising.”

Here’s how data can be important:

• Customer segmentation: Use your data to sort customers into different groups. You can segment them according to various factors such as the type of stores they run, where they’re located, their past purchases, and the categories of products they shop for. This helps you understand the unique needs and preferences of different customer segments.
  
• Targeted marketing: Leverage the marketing tools available on Faire to tailor your product listings to appeal directly to specific groups of customers. By aligning your marketing efforts with the distinct characteristics of each segment, you enhance the chances of catching the eye of the most relevant buyers.
  
• Product selection: Analyze your sales data to pinpoint which products are hitting the mark with certain customer groups. Use these insights to fine-tune your product listings—tweak the descriptions, update the images, and adjust the pricing. This tailored approach helps ensure that your offerings resonate well with your targeted audience.

How do you get the most out of your promoted listings?

Now that you know what all the numbers on the dashboard mean, you can use them to optimize your promoted listings and get the maximum return on your investment. 

• Determine your ideal CAC: To figure out your ideal customer acquisition cost (CAC), start by understanding how much value each customer brings over their lifetime with your business, known as customer lifetime value (CLV). The goal is to make sure the cost of acquiring a customer is well below what they’ll eventually spend. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a CAC that’s about a third of your CLV. In simpler terms, for every dollar you spend on acquiring a new customer, you should expect to see at least three dollars in return over the customer’s relationship with your business.
  
  Sehoff of Sophistiplate has been able to maintain a great balance of CAC against CLV with promoted listings.
  
  “Each month, we’ve been able to successfully scale our ad budgets on the platform,” he says. “So far, year-to-date, around 15% of our revenue on Faire came from promoted listing conversions. The returns on the CAC have been fairly consistent.”
  
• Know the difference between B2C and B2B advertising: ​​B2B advertising focuses on reaching other businesses, while B2C advertising targets individual consumers directly, meaning the messaging used to reach them will be vastly different. Remember that you’re talking to other business owners, not shoppers, and adjust your tone accordingly.
  
• Optimize your product listings: Make sure your product listings on Faire are high-quality to increase the conversion of your ads. This means more of your product listings will be pulled into relevant search results. Promoted listings work by identifying which of your products already appear in search results and then pulling the products that are most relevant to the retailer into earlier slots where they are more likely to be seen and clicked on. The higher the quality of your product listing, the more likely the retailers will convert. All improvements you make to your listings will not only help within promoted listings but also accelerate organic sales on Faire. 

“Once we got on Faire, we started taking the time to optimize our pages. There’s always things to improve whether it’s checking how your photography is looking versus your competitors, reworking the keywords and the descriptions, or including some things you wouldn’t have thought of, like mentions from press,” says Anastasia Bezrukova of Minori Beauty. 

“The difference that we saw in our growth on Faire after constantly working on the pages has been tremendous. Without doing this work, your promoted listings are not going to be lifting as quickly as they could.”

• Develop a complete catalog: Keep your catalog updated and competitively priced to ensure your best inventory is being surfaced to retailers when they see your ads. If your products are more expensive than your competitors, be sure to clearly convey why they have higher quality so retailers understand what they’re paying extra for. All of the effort you invest into your products and your catalog doesn’t just contribute to the success of your ads. It ultimately makes your entire Faire business more efficient.
  
• Follow up with ad customers: Maintain the relationships that you build from ads through email follow-ups so that they re-order from you. Promoted listings are all about long-term value, so continue engaging with these customers. Create a new segment for those retailers and send either one-off personalized messages or add them to a reorder email campaign. 

Promoted listings on Faire are an opportunity to optimize your wholesale strategy and make your products visible to a targeted, engaged audience of retailers. By understanding and acting on the insights provided by your analytics, you can unlock the full potential of your promoted listings. 

Now that you understand the nuts and bolts of how promoted listings can transform your wholesale business, take the next step and see if promoted listings are a fit for your brand.