In 2013, national brands will need to focus on localizing their marketing efforts in order to achieve their goals and surpass their competition in today’s digital world. With 85% of consumers searching for local businesses online, brands can’t afford to ignore how important it is to engage their retailers and launch co-branding initiatives that cater to those local audiences.
We work with brands to connect them with their retailers on a daily basis and have seen a few key actions that brands must take in order to launch successful co-branding initiatives.
1. Establish a relationship. First things first: All brands need to establish a relationship with their retailers. It may sound obvious, but we have found that some of the biggest brands don’t really know their retailers that well. In fact, the bigger the brand is – the harder it is to establish and grow a strong relationship. No excuses, get to know your independent retailers! That means communicating with them regularly about brand news, asking them questions to find out why they love your brand so much and garnering an understanding of what you can do to help them sell more of your product.
2. Provide them new and relevant content. Your retailers are starving for content; they just don’t want to lose their identity with generic national content. That is why it is important to give them access to new content regularly, and make it relevant to them and their customers. By using Promoboxx, retailers are able to opt-in to national campaigns and co-brand the content to highlight their retail location. Then the retailers are given quick and easy share tools to promote their customized campaign on their online marketing channels.
3. Ask them questions. What are the channels they use to reach their consumers? Are they on Twitter? Facebook? Are they online at all? Not only will finding out the answers to these questions help you better understand how you can reach your consumers via your retailers, it will also allow you to provide your retailers with what they need. Once you understand your retailers, the possibilities are endless.
4. Teach your retailers new tricks. Are they on social media? If not, help them start. Many of our clients have helped their retailers get started through Promoboxx, and they love it! Do they need help launching a Facebook page? We will walk them through the Facebook set up process. Do they know how to use Twitter hashtags? Set up a social media training webinar. Help your retailers evolve with technology. This will help you build up influence in the online marketing world, and bring more visibility to your retailers.
5. Make it easy. The last thing you want to do is complicate your retailer’s life. They are busy and so are you. When trying to get your retailers engaged in your online marketing efforts, it must be turnkey. The technology should work to make both your life, and your retailers life, easier. At Promoboxx, it is our job to do just that. We built our platform to automatically generate a customized co-branded campaign for the brand and each independent retailer. After a few clicks the campaign is distributed on that retailer’s local online channels. We make it easy for the retailer to customize their campaign, while our analytics dashboard allows both the brand and retailer to gain meaningful insight to their relationship with one another and of course, the consumer
