Setting up your retailers for success, modernizing your brand, and supporting your retail partners through every stage of the season is important. To do this you need to have sustainable go-to-market content tools at each step of the retail seasonal journey. Envoy’s wholesale e-commerce solution provides the following features to help you achieve that goal:
- Digital catalog builders
- Printable PDF exports
- Showroom wholesale digital storefront
- Visual merchandising and line planning
- Constant sharing and asset management
- Content performance analytics and reporting
- And more...
To understand how to support your retail partners with these go-to-market features, take a look at the retailer’s perspective of the seasonal journey below to learn how to use it to build your go-to-market strategy.
Let’s go through each one of these stages to learn how your brand can help your retailers succeed by providing them with the right content at each stage.
Vision Quest: What brands align with me and my consumer’s values?
Make it easy for buyers and reps to see your vision for the season.
At this first stage of the season, your retail partners are asking themselves, “Which brands do I want to carry during the season?” As a brand, it’s your job to demonstrate that you hold the same values as the retailer. At the same time, it’s important to showcase your product story for the season, along with your plan to support the retailer until the final “Sell Your Season” section of the journey.
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Content Best Practices:
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Content to Provide:
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Key Features to Utilize During this Stage:
- B2B Opportunity #8: Content sharing and asset management tools to allow your retailers to get to know you better, understand your brand, and have a better view of co-op marketing opportunities.
- B2B Opportunity #1: Digital catalog builder to showcase your brand’s key products to the retailer.
- B2B Opportunity #8: Showroom whole digital storefront to provide a greater context to the content of who you are as a brand.
“You know right away when you sit down with a marketing team or a rep whether they genuinely care about your shop and consequently your community, or if they’re just chasing self-interest.”
Brendan Madigan, Alpenglow Sports
Numbers: What’s worked and what hasn’t?
You’re off the hook for this stage of the season journey. No content is needed from you.
Collaboration: Let’s start merchandising!
Merchandise collaboratively and visually with your team.
Your retailers want to see what they’re going to be selling. At this stage, your reps should be going out to showcase the brand and assist retailers in building assortments that fit their store’s needs.
Our advice: Do this in person. And don’t be afraid to go over the Vision Quest again from stage one. Doing this will help show your retailers that you’re the real deal.
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Content Best Practices:
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Content to Provide:
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Key Features to Utilize During this Stage:
- B2B Opportunity #3: Visual merchandising and line planning to showcase everything that your brand has to offer.
- B2B Opportunity #8: Content sharing and asset management tools so that your retailers have access to your content after you have presented it to them.
- B2B Opportunity #8: Printable PDF exports of your content so that they can share and review with colleagues.
- B2B Opportunity #1: Virtual Showrooms to allow your brand to deliver target specific products, innovations, or initiatives.
- B2B Opportunity #1: Digital catalog builder to tailor a custom catalog to what products the retailer is looking for.
The Buy: Stay in budget.
No content is needed at this stage of the seasonal journey.
The Plan: How will you support me in my market?
Provide supporting in-market marketing materials.
By this stage in the seasonal journey, your retailer's are asking, “Now that I’ve purchased all of this product from you, how are you going to help me sell it in my market?”
This is where you need to gain their trust and support them by helping them market to their loyal consumers. Provide them with imagery to show your products in their store and through their online channels. Involve them in co-op marketing opportunities and promotions for social media, print, events, and everything in-between for the specific products they’ve purchased. Do this by utilizing content sharing and asset management tools.
Here are the facts:
- When retailers were asked, “How can brands best support their retail partners?” they replied that they want brands to provide co-op marketing opportunities as the 4th top method.
- The 3rd biggest problem that retails have with working with brands is that brands don’t provide support in marketing to their communities.
- Retailers that are experiencing growth year over year said 68% of that growth came from in-store sales by driving traffic through advertising on social platforms.
- Click here to see the research!
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Content Best Practices:
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Content to Provide:
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Key Features to Utilize During this Stage:
- B2B Opportunity #1: Digital catalog builder to help build specific campaigns for the retailers
- B2B Opportunity #8: Content sharing and asset management tools to perform cohesive marking co-op pieces
- B2B Opportunity #4: Content performance analytics and reporting so that that retailer knows what’s working and what needs to change in their marketing initiatives.
“At SunSki, we’ve found it invaluable to share D2C analytics with your retail partners because…”
Grand Mahn, Director of Wholesale at SunSki
Create Experts: It’s time to activate my team!
Create experts through simple digital training content.
Now’s the time to turn your retailers into the experts. If you can nail down this part of the season, this will be a foundational step for them to leverage when working with their customers. Help them learn about your product, what makes it unique, and how to sell it based on what they’ve purchased for the year. You can do this through Envoy B2B features like building a digital catalog, providing them with printable PDF exports about the items, and sharing content with them about your brand.
Here are the facts:
- When retailers were asked what kind of assistance they typically need from a brand’s rep, assistance learning about the product was number one.
- When retailers were asked what the main problems are when working with brands, they cited no available educational opportunities to learn about the product as one of the top five issues.
- Click here to see the research!
Providing education for reps to support their retailers and opportunities for retailers to learn about the brands they’re selling are the two main focal points for this stage in the seasonal journey.
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Content Best Practices:
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Content to Provide:
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Key Features to Utilize During this Stage:
- B2B Opportunity #1: Showroom wholesale digital storefront to help retailers learn more about your products
- B2B Opportunity #8: Printable PDF exports to keep as resource guides about your brand and your products
- B2B Opportunity #8: Content sharing and asset management tools to enable retailers better understand your brand by educating themselves on your materials.
Sell The Season: Managing Seasonal Demand.
This stage of the seasonal journey doesn’t need your content focus, but there are still a few more things you can do to provide your retailers with the best content to succeed.
A Modern Tooling Approach
Having a modern tooling approach helps support your reps and retailers by containing everything in one easy spot. This means no more looking through piles of print materials, searching through thousands of emails, or logging into separate platforms.
A modern tooling approach doesn’t replace real interactions between reps and retailers though. Instead, it provides a central location for your reps and retails to engage with your content throughout the seasonal journey. This can be done through content sharing and asset management tools.
Here are the facts:
- Retailers are busy! 97% use more than 5 B2B platforms.
- It’s important to be the best partner you can be because 66% carry more than 20+ brands.
- Click here to see the research!
Recap
Support your retail partners with sustainable go-to-market content tools by using the following features in your modernized wholesale B2B solution:
- A digital catalog builder
- A digital storytelling destination
- Presentation functionality with flexible exports
- Content sharing and asset management tools
- Reporting and insights on activities
Start supporting your retailers through every stage of the season with Envoy B2B!
Get started by modernizing your brand, streamlining your wholesale channel, selling your season, and going-to-market smarter through our fully featured wholesale eCommerce platform.
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