For some products, it’s a win just to end up on retailers’ shelves. But in reality, product placement is just the first step towards increasing sales and adoption by consumers. Today’s sales environment requires that brands actively engage retailers by providing the means to promote your brand.

Fortunately, social media marketing provides many ways to do just that. Let’s focus on how brands can use social media to to drive retailer engagement:

Help retailers build awareness of brand products with their local consumers.

While national brands spend millions of dollars on advertising, translating those campaigns to the local level can pose quite a challenge. Social media platforms, especially Facebook, offer a natural space for retailers to adopt national campaigns and tailor it according to their own customizations directly to local shoppers.

One of the best examples of this approach is Chevrolet‘s campaigns with Promoboxx.

• Chevy leveraged the Promoboxx platform to deliver customized campaigns to dealerships in order to drive increased consumer awareness of its larger, national campaigns.
• You’ve probably seen the commercials from the Super Bowl used in this campaign.
• The campaign invited local dealers to customize their Facebook page with Chevy national content, and engage car shoppers directly.
• This approach helped dealers take advantage of national advertising efforts while maintaining the personal connections from their local dealerships.

Equip retailers with easy to manage promotions that reward consumers.

Promotions and coupon sales can be incredibly effective at the local level, but are often difficult to administer and execute without the necessary resources. So how can brands help their retailers take advantage of “checkout” promotions?

• Profile Design, a producer of world-class biking gear, accomplished this with a campaign that it managed on Promoboxx.
• The Profile Design brand was able to control all of the standard items: the duration of the offer, the specific offer details, and the area where the offer was available for redemption.
• This particular promotion allowed local retailers to select the offer they wanted to promote, which fit the needs of each local retailer. This flexibility helps to better engage participating retailers, making them more than just a delivery mechanism, but an active partner.

In all, co-branded promotions are a great way for local retailers to take their Facebook content to the next level by incorporating national brand content. As a result, this level of retailer engagement– as well as the ease of use for local retailers to execute and manage a campaign–makes these approaches on Promoboxx effective for both brands and retailers.

We’re capping off our four part series on steps brands can take to better engage retailers by focusing directly on the brand-retailer connection. Whether it’s co-marketing opportunities, sending an email, conducting a survey, picking up the phone, or visiting the store – connecting with retailers is dependent on the brand taking a deep interest in their retailers’ pains and successes.

Our team has spent the better part of their careers creating and developing ways for brands to more easily connect with retailers. Through those years, we’ve found the simplest and most direct approaches work best.

4 Ways We Help

1. Co-Brand Your Content: Provide free brand content that’s easily customized to your local retailer.
    Providing ongoing marketing content helps retailers sell more brand products.
2. Don’t Be Afraid To Educate: Give retailers tips on upcoming promotions and events, and allow them to
    pass co-branded tips to their consumers.
3. Send A Survey: Do you want to know what’s working best? Send a quick survey to your retailers to see
    what content they like best.
4. Give Retailers The Spotlight: Collect retailer co-branded content and shares for your newsletters and blog
    posts. Retailers love the spotlight.

To conclude our series, when you implement the 4 things we’ve covered below, you’ll vastly improved your overall level of retailer engagement. And higher levels of retailer engagement equals happy retailers.

1. Utilizing Email Digests
2. Leveraging Facebook Timeline
3. Launching co-branded Marketing
4. Connecting with Retailers

How do you engage retailers? Let us know your tactics in a comment below!

In the first two parts of this series, we talked about using email digests to engage retailers and using your Facebook Timeline to strengthen your retailer marketing. Now let’s discuss successful strategies for using online tools to execute co-branded marketing campaigns.

Co-branded marketing has long been an effective way for brands to engage retailers in carrying brand messages to their local audiences. Promoboxx makes co-branding efforts even more successful. Now brands can set up valuable online tools that promote brand messages onto retailers’ more localized social channels.

4 “Musts” To Building Successful Online Co-Branding Campaigns:

1. Must be very easy for retailers to join and implement

2. Must include an appealing consumer offer

3. Must be free for retailers

4. Must clearly answer retailers’ question “what’s in it for me?”

Today, it’s easier than ever to set up campaigns that meet these needs. In fact, this is the exact area that Promoboxx specializes in. In the past you either had to use very rigid approaches for co-branding or completely trust retailers to execute locally. Now you can recruit retailers, offer them choices, and manage the entire process to the benefit of both the brand and the local retailer.

The Promoboxx approach lets brands roll out campaigns that allow retailers to customize their participation and target their local audiences with national, brand-generated content. It really is as simple as clicking a link, filling out a form, making a few selections, and launching a fully-branded campaign.

3 Best Practices For Brands

1. Market to the marketers: A big part of your campaign will be convincing retailers to participate, to sign up, and to take action. It’s easy to leave this as the last step, but start here instead and you’ll design a clear roadmap for your campaign. Think through this part of the campaign to set the entire effort from the the perspective of the retailer.

2. Don’t reinvent the wheel: Setting up Facebook pages and landing pages on your own can be complex and expensive. Take advantage of the tools and experience that Promoboxx already uses for big brands to streamline this process by involving retailer’s social channels with easy set-up and sharing tools.

3. Keep promoting: Online co-branding is perfect for multiple “light touches” through email and social media. Keep in touch with your retailers and help them reach new levels of success (and you guessed it, Promoboxx is built to help you with this, too).

In all, online co-branded activities are a great way for brands to keep retailers continually engaged. Brands can focus campaigns on events, seasons, or any short-term promotion. Using Promoboxx means great engagement for retailers. And this engagement will strengthen overall brand marketing.

Engaging and enlisting your retailers to take advantage of your marketing programs can be a challenge, but there are some fresh approaches that can work to get your retail base excited about your brand and your messages and programs. In Part 1 we covered how to use email digests to get retailers engaged in marketing programs.

In Part 2, let’s discuss how to use your brand’s Facebook Timeline to feature retailers. Facebook’s Timeline feature is fairly new and many businesses are uncertain how to use these new features. It can be a terrifically visual and active way to both engage retailers and to get them excited about your brand.

Here are three basics you’ll need to master:

1. The Cover Image: This is a large image that runs across the top of the Facebook Timeline page. You’re restricted from using this as a promotional space and your logo will show up separately (lower left). Consider using this space for images of ideal retail displays, top retailers, or your products in action. Use this image space well and updated it frequently!

2. Activity Log: Use this feature to edit things out of your timeline. Some Facebook activities and postings might not further your goals of engaging with retailers. Remove them from your timeline here. See the little gray circle to the right side of each entry? Hover over it and select “Hidden from Timeline” to remove it.

3. Friends: This space will feature a few of your friends. Since this is your brand’s page, this will be a selection of your retailers (hopefully). If you prefer not to have these displayed you can modify it so they can’t be seen (or seen only by other “friends”).

On Featuring Retailers:

The bulk of your timeline is made of activities. You can also edit these separately to decide what to display or hide. This is the core of your timeline. Fill it with features of retailers, brand activities, and news.

How will you find these activities? Visit your retailers’ timelines and look for items that you can share. These items will show up on your timeline. Retailers can be encouraged when they see that you’ve focused on them and their activities.

You can also feature retailers directly. Pick out individual retailers, display photos of their retail locations, logos, and staff. Welcome new retailers in this way or feature retailers who take advantage of programs or that have notable success with your programs.

Ideally, when you scroll down your timeline you’ll see story after story, image after image, of successful, happy retailers—because that’s what you want your retailers to see. And encourage other retailers to send you images and items you can use. You can also encourage them to share the items that you post, too. All of this will help you engage more closely, more personally and individually with your retailers and encourage them to do more with your brand marketing.

How do you feature your retailers on Facebook? Let us know in the comments below or @Promoboxx!

Cutting through the clutter of messages overwhelming retailers today can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. In this four part series we’ll cover steps that you can take right now to drive higher levels of engagement with your retailers, and hopefully, increase sales.

Part 1: Leveraging Email Digests To Increase Marketing Program Participation

Your retailers are busy and their attentions are divided. If you want to get them to take better advantage of your marketing programs you need to A) Find more ways to get through to them and B) Get them to take action. Retailers tell us that they prefer email over other forms of communication, but what’s the key to cutting through all their inbox clutter? Keep things short, snappy, and action-oriented. And you can do that by sending email “digests.” A digest is a “Just the facts, Ma’am” approach. It’s not intimidating, in fact, just by glancing at a digest you should get the impression that “Hey, this is short. I can read this now.” Which is exactly what you want your retailers to do.

Getting Started

Here are two simple steps plus some tips to help you get started. If you’re already sending digests, these are ways you can revamp your current retailer e-communication efforts:

Step 1: Recruit your retailers to sign up for a digest by telling them that you plan to send this communication more frequently (perhaps weekly) and that it will be filled with important, yet short, actionable tips and benefits. Show them an example so they’ll know exactly what they’re getting. This protects your larger mailings from subscriber fatigue and recruits a core of active, engaged retailers.

Step 2: Deliver the goods. You can prepare big, long, detailed plans, but what you put in your digest will be just one short paragraph, maybe an image, and a link to your site to learn more. Each digest item should be action oriented.

Some Important Tips

• - Use content from your eNewsletters and website. In fact, digests are a great way to direct retailers to this longer form content. Use this sort, snappy email to attract attention. Think of the paragraphs as executive summaries, just enough information to get the reader to click through and read the full article, sign up for a program, or share something successful that they’re doing.
• - The entire digest should be short. Typically three to five items, especially if you’re sending it out weekly. But make them count! The best items to include will be tips, things that retailers can implement quickly and easily.
• - Feature the participation activities of your retailers. It’s probably not a surprise to know that your retailers don’t pay attention to everything you do, but they do pay attention to what their fellow retailers are doing. Featuring your retailers in the digest will help you train and encourage other retailers to take advantage of regular brand-supporting activities. And that will pay off big time.

Coming Soon, Part 2: Using Your Brand’s Facebook Page to Feature Retailers

Social media is all the rage, but is it paying off for local retailers? It can, especially when helped along by brand manufacturers.

In social media, there are actually two things going on at once:

1. Consumers are talking about the things that they buy and want to buy.

2. They’re doing this while they’re moving about in their lives.

They are using their devices to record and report where they are. This combination of mobile and social is dramatically changing the shopping experience. With help from brands, the local retailer can reap significant and measurable rewards.

Brands Can Help Retailers

Brands want their retailers to “be more social” while providing them little to no help with content. It’s easy to suggest to a retailer to put up a Facebook page and join Twitter, but then what? And how can brands help? 

Brands are making significant advertising and promotional investments that go right to the consumer. Smart brands are also listening to consumers. They monitor consumer responses to advertising by tracking mentions of their products on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media venues. It’s happening right there in the open.

And since social consumers are also largely mobile, they’re not just telling you that they are interested in your product, they’re telling you where they are, right at that moment. You only have to make the next easy step and inform them where they can buy close to where they are right now. It’s instant gratification on a whole new scale.

This is a great opportunity for brands and retailers to work together. If brand management can collect the local retailers’ Twitter and Facebook information and encourage them to pay at least minimal attention to their own feeds, then real magic can happen.

Retailers aren’t just hungry for content for their Facebook timelines and Twitter streams—they’re starving for it. Savvy brands can get more bang from their national advertising expenditure by feeding retailers specialized content for multiple uses, especially targeted social media content.

Basic Steps To Supporting Retailers

How can brands support local retailers’ social media campaigns? Here are some basic steps:

1. Create a social media guide for retailers that includes copy and product images that they can use to create the base content on their web sites and Facebook pages. Consider including images of people using the featured product and images that they can draw upon for future use.

2. Collect retailer data like their web, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media identities and locations. Use this information to let consumers who come directly to you to find their local retailers and follow them in the social media avenue of their choice.

3. Send the retailers regular social media “feeds” filled with short, focused content that they can use as their own. Remember: Monthly is good, weekly is great; and always reward retailers that follow through.

4. Feature the social media successes of other retailers and pass on tips that work.

Remember To Keep It Simple

What you feed to retailers can be very simple. “We’ve got the all new Product X in stock!” “Seen Product Y on ‘The Office’? We’ve got it. Come and get it.” Useful, practical content is highly effective: “Grass stains? Product Z obliterates them. I tried it and love it.”

Featured coupons, specials, and discounts through social media can give retailers an immediate bump in sales. It’s exciting and effective, but it takes a steady stream of content. Retailers may not have or take the time to create their own content, so if you supply it to them, they’re more likely to regularly feature your products.

Here’s the key thing that brands need to impress on retailers: word of mouth has always been powerful, but in the new social world, word of mouth travels at the speed of light. Just one delighted consumer can set off a wave of positive impressions. And sales.

That’s a social “win-win.”

QR codes are a great way to provide shoppers with more information than you have room to display in stores. But can brands use them to help drive sales to retailers? They can, if done right (and far too many brands are doing it wrong).

In part 1 of this article: QR Codes—What Are They And Should I Use Them?, we covered the basics of how QR Codes work, the possible pitfalls, and the real value they can provide to retailers. In this part we’ll lay out some of the most effective ways of brand usage of QR code to drive retail sales.

QR codes are still somewhat of a novelty. If brands want to use them effectively, they’ll need to do more than just paste them on everything.

Effective QR Usage

Effective QR code usage can show a consumer something they couldn’t have seen by simply looking at the product or the packaging on the shelf or that could be seen on any in-store display. It’s frustrating for a consumer to simply see that same information, just smaller and on their phones. Codes that go direct to video and audio don’t work great in stores either, especially where it’s noisy and public.

What does work is giving the shopper access to detailed product information, customer testimonials, and special offers. All things they might not see standing in front of the product.

The most important thing, the first thing, that a brand can do to build an effective QR code campaign is to start with the website. It’s pointless to use QR codes to send someone to a site that they can’t view on their mobile phone! That means mobile-friendly websites, no Adobe Flash, and no tiny, impossible-to-click-with-your-fingers buttons. Getting that target website done correctly is more than half the battle.

Some examples of things that shoppers want to see when they scan a QR code are customer testimonials, FAQ-style information displays, and most importantly, coupons and special offers.

This kind of special offer can be very effective. Think “manufacturer coupon” without the printing and mailing costs. A brand’s objective with a QR code should be to get the consumer to buy now, on the spot, at that retailer. Anything that can incent the shopper can be effective. Brands can use shoppers on phones to display a mail in or online response offer, even coupons that can be redeemed at the point of purchase. Make is a simple and direct as possible, requiring as little as possible from the shopper.

9 Best Practices in QR Marketing

Here are a few of the basics of great brand sales oriented QR code usage:

1. Use Signage: Use general retail store signage to inform customers that QR codes are available to provide additional product information and special offers.

2. Involve Retailers: Encourage retailers to test the QR codes you provide and encourage retailers to educate their floor sales staff.

3. Be Smart With Display: Display QR codes where consumers can easily scan them. That means at eye and shelf height, not on highly hung posters, billboards, or moving objects.

4. Make It a Win/Win: Only use codes that pay off for the consumer. If they don’t offer more than the product packaging or in-store display, don’t bother.

5. Make It Easy: Don’t use a QR code when a few words or an image can do the same job. It’s work for a consumer to scan a QR code.

6. Try To Drive Sales: Use QR codes on product packaging, shelves, and in-store displays to drive sales.

7. Provide Value After the Sale: Use QR codes on the product or product materials to offer post-purchase value to consumers, like usage suggestions (for example, recipes for food items).

8. Be Descriptive: Use text with the QR code to indicate what the shopper will get by scanning the code. “Scan this to see it in action!”

9. Be Thorough: Also use a simple URL as an alternative method of getting the same information, just keep this website address short!

QR codes are still a novelty, but they’re worth experimenting with, especially if you can use them to drive retail sales. The additional engagement between the brand and retailer is an added bonus.

Mohr-McPherson: Boston Retailer Utilizing QR www.mohr-mcpherson.com

Manufacturers and vendors seem to be attaching those little black and white pixilated squares on everything. There was one on a ketchup bottle that sat on the diner table at lunch today. But do real people, consumers, actually using these things? Do QR codes work? And can they work for your brand’s stores?

Those are some big questions and not all of the answers are good ones. But there’s something to be gained from understanding what QR codes are and how they can drive sales for retailers. Used well, they can help turn a shopping trip into a purchase.

Many retailers are uncomfortable with shoppers using their Smartphones in stores. Retailers fear that consumers are price shopping and will buy online or elsewhere. This is called “showrooming.” Frankly, it’s unavoidable. You can, however, interrupt that activity by capturing the shopper’s attention and giving them what they need to buy now. You can use this fact to help retailers accept QR codes on promotional materials. That’s where QR codes can be important.

Let’s start from the beginning.

QR stands for “Quick Response.” The basic idea is that it takes too long and is too difficult for someone to type in a URL to visit a website. A QR code is just like a UPC code, but it’s aimed at consumers, not retailers or inventory control. If a consumer, equipped with a Smartphone or mobile device, aims his camera at the code and uses the right app, he’ll get to see a web page, information, and perhaps a special offer. But that’s a lot of big ifs.

1. The consumer has to understand what a QR code is.
2. They have to have a mobile device with a camera.
3. They have to have a connection to the web – either cellular or wifi.
4. They have to have an app that can read and interpret QR codes.

And perhaps most important: They have to care enough to go through all these steps.

For the manufacturer and their retailers, it’s an opportunity to engage a consumer more completely than with a conventional shelf talker or promotional display.

It’s unfortunate, but many consumers have already had poor experiences with QR codes that don’t pay off. Too many vendors or organizations promoting the products and services get the whole experience so wrong, so backwards, that the results are often hilarious. Search for “bad QR codes” and you’ll find some terrifically awful examples. On top of all that, QR codes are ugly. Inside the tech industry they’re know as “robot barf.”

So why use a QR code at all?

Because used right, a QR code can show a consumer MORE. It can deliver the information that they need, right then, on the spot, to help them make their buying decision. You have limited space on the shelf or end-aisle. A QR code can open up an interactive display, something that can be easily updated, and provide
exactly what they wanted to know, even create a call to action to entice them to buy NOW.

That’s worth doing. Next week I’ll layout the basics of using QR codes to drive retailer sales.