This post is for brand managers, marketing managers, and distributors. It explains when you should use Dropbox and when you are better off using Embrosa.
In this post you'll read about:
You are a brand manager or marketing manager and you consider using Dropbox to share marketing assets with your local retailers, local shops, or local salons.
If so, read on!
If not, and you are just evaluating if Dropbox is something for you as an individual or for your business, this general explanation of Dropbox or this Dropbox review might be better suited for you if you are not in the brand-retailer marketing field.
So, this explanation is really for companies that sell their products through a (global) network of local resellers and are looking for a brand portal.
With selling through a global network, we mean that your products or services are sold or offered by local businesses. These businesses could be salons, stores, practices, garages, shops, restaurants, bars; you name it. Your local resellers could be your franchisees or independent entrepreneurs.
So this post really answers the question: Is Dropbox suited as a brand portal or are you better of using Embrosa?
For a start, we must admit: we love Dropbox. We use Dropbox to save and share pics with family and friends. We used Dropbox during our college years to share study-book-summaries with our college friends. And some of us use dropbox to safe keep files that used to be on our external harddisks.
Our team only used Dropbox for our personal lives, but Dropbox is also great in the business environment.
Dropbox stores your assets in the cloud. Dropbox lets you upload pictures, videos (and all other types of files too). You can access the content from basically every device anywhere in the world. And you can share these files individually with others or combine these pictures, and videos in a folder and invite others to view (and edit) this folder.
Dropbox offers both a Free plan, as well as various paid plans. Dropbox Free gives you 2GB free storage space. But if you upgrade to Dropbox Plus, you get 2TB of storage space, and you can protect the assets with a password and even an expiration date.
With Dropbox Professional, you get even more storage space. You gain additional controls, including the ability to disable downloads, which will stop any recipients from saving what you’ve shared with them.
In short: Dropbox Plus or Dropbox Professional are awesome when you collaborate with your marketing team members. Especially if you are working from home often or if your team is scattered across the globe or country. Everybody can access the right files and collaborate seamlessly.
So let’s say, your local resellers are scattered across the globe. As a brand manager or marketing manager, you’ve created campaign pictures, product shots, and videos for Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels. And you want to make it very easy for your resellers to share your marketing assets on their own social media channels.
It sounds so easy, right?!
Well, it is.
Dropbox is fantastic FOR YOU! From YOUR perspective, as a brand manager, it works fine.
For your local resellers, the reality, however, is more unruly. Take, for example, an optician or optometrist. She sells contact lenses, frames, glasses as well as eye-exams. She has multiple brands per category in stock. An optician or optometrist has 15 to 25 different brands in store!
A clothing-store, focussing on both men and women, offer 25 to 50 different brands! Say what?! Yes, just think about it, they sell jeans, socks, dresses, belts, and even handbags.
Now put yourself in the local reseller’s shoes and imagine that all 25 different brands send you an email containing the dropbox link, with the marketing assets of that season?
How do you keep track of all the links? And, if protected with passwords, how do you also keep track of the passwords?
As a local reseller, you could create a spreadsheet and meticulously keep track of links, passwords, and expiry dates. But don’t forget, you have a shop or store to run. You are hands-on, active talking to customers. You have to run the whole store. From cleaning to aftersales. From purchasing to selling. And yes, marketing is another thing you have to focus on.
And sharing to Facebook or Instagram is practically impossible using Dropbox. So your resellers really have to download the pictures and videos. And when the time comes that they want to share the visuals on Insta or Facebook, they have to re-find them again on their own phones or computers. And upload them to social media.
You see that this solution is sub-optimal for your local resellers, right?!
You prepare visuals. You upload them to Dropbox. All good. But chances are your resellers are not going to make the most of them. Sharing is too much of a hassle.
Now, you thought it couldn’t get worse? Wrong.
We’ve only been talking about pictures and videos. As you know, as a marketer, captions, and #hashtags are just as important to see engagement on the different social channels.
So you not only prepare campaign and product visuals for your local resellers but you also prep captions and hashtags for them. You write these captions down in a 1) pdf document 2) word document or 3) an excel spreadsheet.
Yikes!
The effect? 👇
Really, you get an A for effort. It’s incredible that you walked the extra mile and prepared captions with appropriate hashtags that match your visuals. But they (your local retailers) are really NOT going to use them.
So, don’t get discouraged and stop prepare the visuals and texts. You just need a different system to deliver the content to your retailers.
And that’s where Embrosa comes into play.
Embrosa is the #1 Brand-Retailer Social Media Platform. You upload your content in the Embrosa supplier portal (on your desktop computer). You add expiry dates, a caption including hashtags and you determine who has access to your assets.
Your local resellers use the Embrosa App on their phone. After you uploaded the content, the assets automatically appear in their Embrosa App. The Embrosa App, of course, combines the pictures and your captions + hashtags. Your retailers receive a push notification, telling them there is new content available from your brand.
And your retailers can immediately share to their own Instagram and Facebook from the App.
They can even create an automagic planning (for a complete month ahead) containing your visuals and accompanying captions. It just takes them 1 minute to create the planning and 10 minutes to personalize your ready-made posts and approve them for posting. One whole month of social media posts, created and personalized in 11 minutes! It hasn’t been that easy for your retailers to share your story onto their own social channels.
And the cool part, especially for your resellers, they can add multiple brands (from different suppliers) in the Embrosa App. This way, they have all assets of all their brands together in one app.
I hear you think, so my competitors are in the app too? Next to my brand? Yes! And that is really a big plus for your local retailers. They don’t need 25 different apps on their phone to access all different marketing assets.
We strongly believe that independent brands and retailers only survive (and even thrive) when they collaborate. Embrosa is built for this new retail environment. An environment of collaboration and winning together.
How do you tell your resellers to use Embrosa and help them find and download your assets? It’s easy! Stop sending Dropbox links. Start sending Embrosa-invitation-links. After uploading content in Embrosa, you receive a (branded) link. You can link to all (currently available) assets of your brand or all assets within one campaign.
Because the retailers can save your brand in the app, they don't need to 'refind' your link at a later moment in time. They just need the link one time.
And since all items have an expiration date set by you, the items ‘disappear’ automatically from your retailers’ apps once the expiration date is passed. And Embrosa can even auto-translate your captions in local languages. This way, every reseller in the world receives your marketing assets in their own language. Embrosa is the world’s leader in ‘last mile marketing distribution’.
So, in short: Dropbox is great for storage and collaboration within your marketing team. Embrosa is great for the last mile marketing distribution, bridging the gap between you, your resellers, and ultimately the end consumer on social media.
Use Dropbox with your marketing team
Use Embrosa to share assets with your local resellers
So what should you do? If you ask us? Connect a cloud storage tool, like Dropbox, to Embrosa. Create and collaborate using Dropbox. Once your assets are final, distribute them to your local resellers using Embrosa. That’s the true win-win solution!
Do you want to see how Embrosa can benefit your brand(s) and your local retailers, request a free trial, and schedule a demonstration tour through the Embrosa portal.
