If you work for a manufacturing brand and you’re reading this, you might be thinking, “We do this already. We support our retailers with online marketing.” The reality is, your retailers need more help.
Most large manufacturing brands have a current set of tools and tactics they use to engage their retailers with digital marketing. However, these methods are oftentimes un-engaging and complicated, especially for a local retailer who may not have enough time on their hands or the sophistication. A brand recently told us “Well, we have lots of strategies here internally to hypothetically engage our retailers with digital marketing, but actually engaging them is a different story.” Below is a quick summary of what you might be doing currently, compared with how digital marketing tools like Promoboxx can make you and your retailers more effective marketers.
Stop overwhelming your retailers.
Content management platforms can be overwhelming to retailers. If the retailer has the patience to identify the content they’d like to promote within hundreds or thousands of pieces of content available to them, then the burden oftentimes falls on the retailer to customize that content to their retail location. If they can get to that point, the retailer has to format the content properly for each channel (website, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and log into their various platforms to promote your content.
This tactic is cumbersome and due to its passive nature, it’s like assigning homework to your retailers without a due date. Retailers may not feel compelled to engage regularly and there is no tracking beyond the point at which your retailers download your content. Retailers are therefore not held accountable for promoting your brand online.
Promoboxx focuses completely on retailer engagement. By creating a campaign-oriented retailer enrollment flow with clear start and end dates for each campaign, and by providing content that is automatically customized to each retailer, brand clients typically receive 3-10x the number of retailers promoting their content on a regular basis. Plus, Promoboxx provides tracking and visibility on every action your retailers take, from the campaigns they activate, to the channels they promote on, to the consumer traction they receive. One of my favorite features is the retail scoreboard that ranks the retailers that promote you most, down to the ones who need to step it up.
Most brands have internal teams that are responsible for creating content for the brand that can be repurposed and customized for the brand’s key accounts. But your largest retail partners aren’t the only retailers asking for digital support. Independent and regional retailers want content created that highlights their local store, but your internal creative team may not be able to keep up with the number of custom digital requests that fall outside of their prioritized key accounts. The result is a scenario where your small and mid-size partners, many of whom may be important strategic accounts for you, end up feeling neglected. Perhaps the most unfortunate part of this situation is that your creative team is spending valuable time creating custom digital content that may or may not even be used, because files are sent via Dropbox or email, and you’re left to hope your retail accounts put them up online.
Promoboxx alleviates this issue by automatically generating custom versions of your brand-approved creative, co-branded to each local retailer (your team creates one campaign on Promoboxx and it is versioned for an unlimited number of retailers). Retailers will feel appreciative that they are provided this level of customization, and they’ll feel supported by your brand.
Envision your campaign creative, automatically customized for all of your retailers.
Brands often rely on sales reps to make sure their retailers are engaging in digital marketing. The biggest problem here is that sales reps care about selling product, and marketing takes a back seat. Sales reps also don’t typically have a direct connection to the person at the retailer who is responsible for marketing. The result is an infrequent or insufficient feedback loop between your sales reps and your retailer accounts, and the ball is dropped on ensuring your retailers are promoting your brand online.
Think of Promoboxx as a digital sales rep, and a force multiplier. For each campaign built on Promoboxx, we handle the engagement of retailers and provide easy and digestible tools for retailers to promote branded content. We track your retailers’ appetite for various content types, their willingness to promote you online, and we can do this for a far greater number of retailers than your reps could do on a one-on-one basis with their accounts. Below is an example of our Retailer Activity Feed.
Rather than requiring more time and effort of your retailers, or taking the time of your valuable and band-width strapped creative and sales teams to activate these retailers, let Promoboxx create scale for you.
