Independent retailers often wear many hats, which makes it challenging for them to spend a lot of time marketing their business. We asked retailers from three different industries about the brand marketing support they find the most impactful.
Check out their perspectives before creating your next retail marketing campaign!
Carrie Seifert is the President of Diversified Flooring (Edgewater, FL), which isn’t just a flooring company, but a full interior design firm! Carrie started off answering phones in small sales, and then worked her way up through the company, and has been with them for 22 years.
Jeff Allaire is the Marketing Director of Bellingham Electric (Bellingham, MA), a family run independent retail appliance company. Jeff has successfully designed and implemented a multifaceted digital marketing strategy at Bellingham Electric that has helped the company achieve revenue growth rates of 5x the industry over the past 24 months.
Pam Atkinson is the Social Media and Marketing Coordinator at Essex County Co-op (Topsfield, MA), a farm feed store that has been in business for over 100 years. Over the past six years, Pam has worked on the digital content on their website and social media platforms and maintaining the old-fashioned country store charm The Co-Op is known for.
Carrie Seifert: I want to receive fun content from brands. Retailers have to interact with their customers online – if they’re not engaged in the first little bit of time they see a post, you’ve already lost them. I like campaigns that encourage interaction and provide an incentive, like ‘show us your ugliest rug!’ and then we give a $50 gift card to our store to the winner of the ugliest rug contest.
Jeff Allaire: I would like to receive more in-depth informational product content from brands. Why should my customers switch to their product? What are the benefits of each option?
Jeff Allaire: Driving consumer engagement is our main social media goal. We had a Facebook business page we didn’t really do that much with. We invested our time into growing our page and posting content regularly. Now every comment is responded to in a timely manner by our community manager, and we run contests and giveaways on our Facebook page. Our likes and shares have increased very quickly in a short time after making those changes.
Pamela Atkinson: The content itself is very important to our store, having product content keeps our customers informed about what they’re buying as well as any promotions that are running. The reach of that content increases when brands also provide our store with an advertising budget. This allows us to plan out our content calendar and decide where to use the funds to promote the digital marketing campaigns they share with us.
Jeff Allaire: The appliance brands, in general, are really good at supplying digital marketing campaigns, so there’s a lot available in terms of product assets, images, and even videos. Our industry is very promotional around seven major holiday time periods so brands invest in Black Friday or Memorial Day content that we can utilize. We rely very heavily on these assets.
Carrie Seifert: We took our time to do the research and looked into the best flooring companies to partner with. If I’m making a promise to my client, I can’t fulfill that unless I know that I’ve partnered with the right company. We want to partner with a brand that delivers on time, is great to work with, provides a lot of education to us as a retailer, and also provides us with digital media campaigns that we can utilize through Promoboxx.
You heard it here first – retailers want access to engaging digital marketing campaigns that drive interactions with their local consumers!
Retailers are a brand’s best local advocate, reaching local consumers near their storefront. Supporting retailers with great content, paid advertising support, and product education prepares them to increase foot traffic and sales!
Connect to, manage, and market through your entire retail channel to reach local consumers near every storefront. Learn how Promoboxx can help you activate retailers and increase consumer engagement – request a demo!
