You put a lot of faith in the retailers who carry your products. They have the ears and eyes of a desirable customer base, and they represent you in their local markets. You need them to speak about your brand intelligently and accurately, communicate its value, and ultimately, sell it.
Often, while brands create and disseminate content related to their products in one way, their retailers are operating in another. Brands continually report a sense of disconnect between themselves and their retailers. Great content, paired with a solid strategy for syndicating it through social media, can bridge that gap between brands and retailers.
Your social media investment
Your brand probably invests in high-quality content and a strategy to reach the right consumers on social media. There are strong arguments in favor of marketing through social media.
- As of October 2020, four billion people worldwide use social media — a 12% YoY increase.
- 57% of consumers follow brands to learn about new products or services.
- 40% of consumers use social media to learn about promotions or discounts.
- 91% of consumers visit a brand’s website when they follow them on social media.
- More than one-third of U.S. consumers said they have purchased products through social media.
- 55% of Gen Z shoppers say their most recent purchase was influenced by social media.
Social media influences product discovery and purchasing more than ever, even when factoring in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Effects of the pandemic
As consumers have turned increasingly toward online shopping, brands have lost a good deal of opportunity when it comes to point of sale or physical advertising. A 2021 article from emarketer reports that “social networks have benefited from an overall rise in ecommerce, as well as from marketers’ shift to performance advertising during the pandemic.” While some marketers cut advertising costs early in the pandemic, their investment has rebounded faster than expected.
If you haven’t significantly invested — or reinvested — in a social media marketing strategy, now is the time. However, without cooperation from your retailers, you’ll miss major opportunities to reach consumers in their local markets.
Brand-retailer relationships are more important than ever
Consumers have more choice than ever, so brands must work hard to earn customer loyalty. Since the pandemic, consumers across industries report a new openness to trying new brands and services. That means you can’t take for granted that your hard-won customers will stick with you forever. In the evolving digital landscape, amid changing consumer behavior, brands and retailers must collaborate to succeed.
Retailers struggle with social media
While they appreciate its importance, many retailers fall short on social media because it isn’t any one person’s job. While they handle walk-in customers, answer phones, fill online orders, and stock shelves, posting to social media often gets neglected.
When retailers do find time to share content, they may use low-quality images, less-than-ideal angles of your products, or old or pixelated versions of your logos. They simply aren’t thinking about your brand in the same way you do.
Consistency in branding
Presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. Consistency across retailers is an essential element of overall brand integrity, yet one of the hardest to control. A retailer who misses the mark harms your brand, however inadvertently.
Consider some of the ways a retailer might shortchange your products:
- Bad lighting
- Low-resolution or pixelated images
- Typos or misspellings in supporting copy
- Wrong tone of voice in supporting copy
- Showing your product right next to your competitor’s
- Showing an outdated model of your product
- Showing your product being used improperly or without protective equipment
- Using an old or modified version of your logo
- Failure to leverage appropriate hashtags
In a worst-case scenario, a retailer could align your brand with a controversial, volatile, or unsafe point of view.
Retailers want a strong connection with their brands
The good news is retailers want to strengthen their connection with the brands they sell. They are looking to you–the brand–to guide them in positioning and promoting your products. They’re forced to offer a vast number of products online in order to stay competitive, and cannot possibly give adequate attention to each and every one. Here’s proof:
- According to Retail Touch Points, “Retailers are looking for lower prices, better content and more co-op investment from their brand partners.”
- 36%of retailers said they struggle to keep pace with changing consumer expectations, and 69% said they have to work harder than ever to retain customers.
Simply giving retailers access to a content portal ignores the big picture. You can improve your relationship with retailers by providing them with great content — freeing more of their time to focus on their business.
Gain control over how retailers distribute your content
Distributing your content more widely and guiding its correct usage will increase your ROI and support strong brand consistency with your retailers and consumer fans. ThumbStopper delivers your content directly into the social media feeds of your retailers with no effort for you or, more importantly, them. You maintain complete control over how it looks, what it says, and when it can be syndicated.
It’s time to get proactive about enabling retailers to communicate your brand effectively and consistently. By distributing content to retailers through ThumbStopper you will:
- Build a conduit for your brand content to flow across your retailers’ social networks
- Keep your content consistent across retailers
- Regionalize and segment your content so the right message shows to the right person at the right time
- Make it easy for the retailer, strengthening your relationship and their loyalty to your brand
- Gain the peace of mind knowing that your content investment is always brand-compliant
- Get more ROI from your content assets
- Take the digital shelf space on your retailers’ social feeds
Are you ready to give it a try? Contact ThumbStopper today for a free demonstration of our product.
If you’re unsure about how your brand is currently being represented by your retailers–or if it’s being represented at all–let the team at ThumbStopper perform a Brand-to-Local Social Audit.
Learn more about the audit and find out if your brand qualifies for a Brand-to-Local Social Audit at no charge.
