This post is written for frustrated brand managers, marketing managers and distributors selling to local retailers or SME's / SMB's. 😉
In this post you'll read about:
I hear you say: “My marketing team creates beautiful pictures, videos, and even includes captions for my local resellers, but they are not using my pre-made marketing kit or campaign at all. Why?!”
We understand your frustrations! 😖😩😫
You are not alone. Far from that. We have listed the top 6 problems every marketer or PR-agency encounters that is responsible for distributing (social media) marketing assets to local retailers around the country or globe. Don’t give up. We will give you some concrete tips to make your life a lot easier, more productive, and literally more engaging.
This is absolutely the #1 problem every marketer talks about. Many brand managers prepare beautiful campaign images, engaging Instagram stories, POS-materials (Point-of-Sale), and awesome marketing videos, but the retailers for whom they are creating these marketing kits are not using them.
Local retailers tend to use your professional crafted posters, Insta pics, and Facebook posts in a very ugly and unprofessional way. They rip your pictures from Instagram or Google. They print them (all pixally of course) and hang them in their shop windows. They stick their logos on top of your pics and posters. They combine the pictures and create their own collage. In short: they use your meticulously crafted brand visuals for their business scrapbooking endeavors.
Your products are sold by independent store owners around the world. Per region or country, you work with different distributors. Your distributors have a local network, expand the number of shops selling your brand in their country, they provide training, support, and aftersales in your resellers’ language and timezone. They are often great saleswomen and -men, but not necessarily great marketers. They forget to forward your marketing assets to your resellers, they don’t translate your posts swiftly into the local language and resellers never have access to the right content in time.
You sell an exclusive brand. You put a lot of effort into your social media following. You understand that consumers orientate online and often buy offline. So after seeing your Insta posts, stories and reels a couple of times, they crave your product and they look for a store closeby to fit & feel. Especially youngsters use Insta and Facebook, next to Google, to find a store nearby that carries your brand. That’s why it is extremely scary to see unauthorized resellers re-post your campaign images and product pictures on their own Instagram account. Gruesome! Trademark infringements are terrible. This one is hard to stop, since it is literally so widespread.
You prepare marketing assets. You even get them pushed through your distributor-pipeline. Your retailers actually use the post. At least, that’s what you think. Who is really using your assets? You might get a glimpse of a user of your assets. Because they accidentally used the right hashtags, you see one of your local reseller’s posts on Insta. But did you catch them all? Calculating your marketing-ROI is really undoable this way.
You use WeTransfer to share your marketing assets with your local retailers. Every couple of days, the link expires and … the retailer bugs you again to re-send the content. You have to collect everything again and re-share. Only to find, they never downloaded or used it. It’s as painstaking and useless as carrying water to the sea.
How many boxes do you check? I bet you encounter 3 different problems on a weekly basis, at least. We understand your frustrations. And since a problem shared is a problem halved … be aware that basically every brand manager or marketing team runs into these problems.
But why are your local resellers and distributors so insensitive when it comes to your brand presence and efforts. We have been interviewing many local entrepreneurs over several years and guess what:
Local entrepreneurs say:
And to be honest, some of the entrepreneurs we spoke to, also lacked (or lost) the willingness to learn and be out there. But that was certainly a small portion.
All in all, it’s good to realize that - most of them - don't hinder you on purpose. They genuinely lack time, knowledge, and organizational skills. You ‘do marketing’ all day long. ‘They’ do marketing on the side.
Local entrepreneurs are often over the age of 35 (in some industries, the average age is even above 50!) Imagine your 50+ dad or mom running social campaigns on Insta and Facebook as a local entrepreneur. You immediately understand where it goes sideways.
When they started their entrepreneurial career .. marketing was mostly offline, especially locally oriented and tangible. Nowadays, marketing requires knowledge of algorithms, data, and a specific skill set per platform. (If you have the time to listen to a podcast, do listen to this episode of Wireframe. The title: Why can’t dad unmute himself on Zoom. It’s so clarifying!)
Anyways, how to solve the low adoption rates of your marketing campaigns and really engage and activate your local retailers at a granular level? Let’s talk about solutions!
First of all, acknowledge that marketing is not the #1 thing local entrepreneurs (want to) do. Just as it is counterintuitive to drink before you are thirsty. It is just as counter-intuitive for local entrepreneurs to market before their pipeline runs dry. Accept this is how their clock ticks.
Secondly, empathize with the day-to-day hassle of a local entrepreneur. As we said before, local entrepreneurs do marketing on the side (next to selling, talking and serving customers, purchasing, cleaning the store, accounting and bookkeeping, and not to forget, living). When you are ‘disturbed’ constantly, by customers walking into your story, it’s hard to focus on creating a marketing campaign or social media planning for the next couple of weeks.
That brings us to the solution: Serve your solution in bite size portions they can actually chew on. Realize this: they do marketing in-between two conversations with customers. Sharing your post should therefore take less than 2 minutes. And they must be able to do it sitting on the toilet (for real), while sipping a coffee or just ‘hanging’ in the back of their store (glancing at the front door). As soon as a customer pops in, your window of opportunity has closed. Simple as that.
Using a tool that is really built for (not-tech-savvy) local entrepreneurs really helps. Our Embrosa App eliminates the time they need to search and find, copy captions, download pictures and sharing. There are less hurdles and therefore local retailers are less likely to stumble and stop.
Let’s, as an example, compare Dropbox to Embrosa:
Dropbox is easy when-working-at-your-desktop-and-doing-bulk-work. Embrosa is 2-minute-in-between-coffee-and-customers-easy. Embrosa is all about KISS: Keep It Simple and Short.
Looking for alternatives for Embrosa? Think semi-traditional, short and simpel:
Before you read on, picture - again - your 50+ mom or dad. Often, the level of tech-knowledge of your parents matches that of your local resellers.
So, using your marketing assets must be monkey-proof easy. It must be so easy, your mom&pop could get the job done too.
Let’s take #hashtags as an example. What #hashtags should your resellers use? For you, this is simple and easy. Your local resellers, however, don’t know the difference between the # and @.
So, serve your solution in a way that doesn’t require any knowledge. Just a few examples:
I’m going to break two bad news items for you. I am going to be brutally honest. Brace yourself.
Bad news #1: In brand-retailer marketing, when you really want to activate the resellers that sell your products … It’s not about YOU. It’s about them. Your local resellers. And it’s your job to make their business-life as easy as possible.
Just like servant leadership. This is about servant marketingship.
It’s harsh. I know. You serve the local resellers.
Bad news #2: Your #1 brand is just one of their 25+ brands
I also know your brand is the best. Really. I get you. It’s the absolute #1.
But let’s be real, your resellers sell multiple brands. Don’t be mad with them. They have to. Yes, all the other brands are inferior. I hear ya. But still, some consumers want to buy something that is merely ‘good enough’. So your resellers also want to market the other ‘barely good enough’ brands.
So combine fact #1 and fact #2: you serve the local reseller (it’s about them, not you) + they sell multiple brands. The conclusion is quite simple: the way you deliver the marketing assets (pictures and videos and captions) to your local resellers should not be in the most simple way FOR YOU, but in the most simple way FOR THEM.
They need one place where they can access all their marketing assets, so they don’t need an excel course first to keep track of all WeTransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive, Brand Portal, Bynder, and OneDrive -links, passwords, and urls. This requires a lot of organizing and management. And they don’t have the time, knowledge, or willingness to do so.
Our Embrosa App does just that. It combines the marketing assets of all brands into 1 App. All brands are lined up, side by side. And the local retailers can create social media posts and even complete social media planning using the social media pictures of all brands. Why not add your brand(s) too?
Let’s face it. Some local entrepreneurs are really not willing to use your assets. Sometimes because they create better pictures and videos themselves. But more often, it’s because they really don’t want to.
You will always encounter a group of people that are not willing to participate. They might already have retired mentally. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Accept it. Let it go. And focus on the people with a positive attitude and an optimistic approach.
How can you persuade the stuck-in-the-middle group? Share success stories of entrepreneurs that have used your marketing assets and benefited from it. Make sharing your assets fun and easy, so more entrepreneurs give it a go. And applaud entrepreneurs that actively share and are a true ambassador for your brand. Give them extra perks, like free entrance tickets to a trade show or access to that special designer meet-and-greet. Appreciate the active ones and ignore the passive group.
Good luck
