Marketing for
builders merchants
Marketing for Merchants is a UK marketing agency specialising in independent builders merchants and their suppliers. Founded in December 2022 by Chartered Marketer Charlotte Jewell, it handles social media, websites, email and branch marketing from £600 a month, contract free, for merchants across the country.
What do independent merchants actually need from marketing?
Consistency, mostly.
Most merchants do not have a marketing problem so much as a time problem. The posts go out for three weeks and stop when the yard gets busy. The website still has last year's Christmas hours on it. The trade morning gets organised in the week before it happens, so half the customers who would have come never hear about it.
The national groups are not doing anything cleverer than you would. They are doing the same things every week, with someone whose actual job it is.
So the important question is not "what campaign should we run". It is "who is going to do this every month when we are busy".
What does a specialist do differently?
Nothing a good general agency could not learn. It just takes them six months and a chunk of your budget to learn it.
Working in this sector since 2010 means not having to explain that account customers buy on price, lead time and whether the thing is actually in stock, not on brand affinity. That supplier co-op funding exists and is worth asking about. That the photo of a delivery landing at seven in the morning will out-perform the polished brand video, every time. That the BMF and the buying groups matter to how a merchant sees itself.
Chris Osborn, our Commercial Director, spent four years inside Kingfisher, the group behind B&Q and Screwfix, most recently running a kitchen sinks and taps range across around 500 SKUs. He has seen exactly how much budget and expertise the nationals put behind winning the same customers you are competing for.
You buy hours, not deliverables
So what can you actually ask for?
Anything an in-house marketer would do.
There is no service list, because merchants do not have service-list problems. You have a trade morning in three weeks, a supplier who wants their new range pushed, a website nobody has touched since it was built, and a newsletter you keep meaning to send.
So we work the way an internal marketing department would. You buy hours, not deliverables. What those hours get spent on is decided month by month, against whatever is happening in the branch.
In a normal month that might be social media content, a customer newsletter, updates to the website, artwork for a trade morning, a supplier promotion, a price list, product descriptions, a case study, an email campaign, or the SEO work nobody has looked at since the site went live.
Some of it is not glamorous. Resizing a supplier's artwork so it fits the poster frame by the trade counter is a twenty minute job and nobody's idea of strategy. It still needs doing, and it is exactly the kind of thing that falls off the list when there is no one whose job it is. At the other end, it might be a full website rebuild or pulling several branch brands into one.
What we will not do is take on something we would be bad at. If what you need is a national advertising campaign or a full-time person sat in the office, we will say so.
What does it cost?
Packages start at £600 a month and run to £2,400. Everything is contract free, month to month.
Starter
£600/month
10 hours per month
Typically covers social posts, a blog, and a proper look at what the website needs.
Advanced
£900/month
15 hours per month
Adds website updates and promotional artwork on top.
Elite
£1500/month
25 hours per month
Enough for case studies, product descriptions and proposal work as well.
Ultimate
£2400/month
40 hours per month
Where a website build, SEO and visitor tracking fit.
It is £60 an hour whichever one you pick. You are buying more hours, not a better rate. Nothing is held back for the bigger packages.
Bespoke plans are fine, and changes need about two weeks' notice. There is no minimum term and no notice period dressed up as one.
Does it work?
For Ten-25, the team behind the Merchanter ERP system, website sessions are up 114% and unique visitors up 121% since January 2024. On LinkedIn, followers are up 54.55% and impressions up 150.77%.
+114%
website sessions
+121%
unique visitors
+54.55%
linkedin followers
+150.77%
linkedin impressions
Read the full case studies →
Who you would be working with
Charlotte Jewell, who founded the business in December 2022 and is a Chartered Marketer with a CIM Diploma in Professional Digital Marketing, and Chris Osborn, Commercial Director.
Behind them is a small team of specialist freelancers.
There are no account managers. The person writing your posts is the person you email.
