If I asked you who the most important people to help extend your product reach are, I’m certain you’d answer this without hesitation:
Retailers, resellers, and your sales reps!
And you’d be absolutely right, of course.
After all, retailers, resellers, and reps are the ones who bring your products to new customers. They offer them to their audiences, generate sales in new markets, and often provide immediate post-purchase customer service and support.
But to succeed, retailers and resellers need your help, too.
For one, resellers cannot sell more products or service them unless they have access to relevant product content – product information, visuals, pictures, videos, point of sale materials, and more.
After all, that content helps them introduce the product to their market, communicate its value, and provide customers with all the buying information.
And what’s important is that it is your responsibility to equip them with such content.
The problem? Well, it’s often easier said than done, isn’t it?
After all…
- Your retailers need constant access to product content, and often need more and more of it. Sending them a product brochure in PDF is simply not enough.
- Many retailers will also need different content assets for different customer segments. International resellers will need the content to be in their language, not yours, etc. And that really is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Finally, in some instances, reps, retailers and resellers might need to tweak and tailor the content or create specific assets they need, and they need to do it without compromising the brand.
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In this guide, you’ll discover one of the most effective ways to do it all, and that’s regardless of how many reps, retailers or resellers you have.
Before we get to that, though, let’s take a closer look at your challenge….
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Table of Contents
Why you absolutely must support retailers and resellers with extensive product content.
As a manufacturer, you share a very strong bond with its resellers.
After all, it’s resellers (as well as retailers and sales reps) who:
Facilitate your expansion to new markets. Often, it is precisely the reseller who does all the work to bring a new product to the market.
- They educate the market.
- They seek new distribution channels,
- Resellers work with individual retailers to ensure your product gets prime placement and more.
Provide local market knowledge that makes such expansion easier. Resellers not only introduce your product to their markets. They also provide market insights to customise your marketing collateral and product positioning so that it resonates with that specific market.
Such customisation might be as simple as localising the documentation to that market or as complex as adjusting point of sale or advertising materials to the local culture.
Product images show you what it looks like, often in the context of how you’d be using the product.
Resellers help diversify your sales channels, too. In many cases, it is they who find and liaise with local distributors and retailers, ensure your product gets enough promotion to local markets, and more.
Finally, resellers often act as the first line of customer support, freeing your support channel.
But to do it all, resellers need your constant support.
In practical terms, such support often takes the form of content.
Lots and lots of it.
Resellers need product information and training materials. It helps them to understand your product better, and gain the knowledge to inform customers and provide product support.
They also need marketing product content. They need content that would help present the product to their audience:
- Product descriptions, brochures, or catalogues.
- Product images, 3D renderings, etc. that show clients what the product looks like.
- Point of sale materials that attract their attention to the product when shopping.
- Videos and images that further explain what the product does, and also, give customers a sense of ownership.
- User guides and manuals that provide them with instructions on how to use the product and how to overcome issues you may encounter while using it.
- Product comparisons, use cases, and more to give customers more information to make a better buying decision, and so on.
Not to mention that your resellers need sales content, too. Materials like sales guides, product sheets, case studies, regional price lists, instructions, technical drawings, or training videos help them engage new retailers and find new local markets for your products.
But why providing relevant product content to resellers is so challenging?
I guess the simplest way to answer this is because offering that content means more than just emailing resellers with product images or case studies in PDF.
Not only, what you can realistically send via email is far from sufficient to support resellers. This way of providing support is also far too time-consuming and chaotic to deliver any meaningful results.
After all:
Resellers, usually, need quick access to the most relevant content. Most will not have the time to browse through all your content library or scan their inboxes for the n-th time to find what they need.Â
- In fact, if forced to do so, many will turn attention elsewhere, causing your product marketing to suffer. Alternatively, your resellers might begin to create their own marketing materials that are not brand-compliant.
- Retailers and resellers often operate in different geographic or niche markets, each with its own unique customer preferences. As a manufacturer, you must provide them with customised marketing materials to suit their retailers’ or resellers’ unique markets. And you must do it at a scale to support all retailers or resellers simultaneously.
- Retailers and resellers often need specific custom materials, too. What’s more, they might not have the time to wait for your marketing or creative departments to create and forward those to them. Unfortunately, in most cases, resellers choose to create marketing materials themselves, often coming up with assets that are not brand-compliant.Â
Luckily, there is a solution...
In fact, there are many things you can do to help you equip sales representatives and resellers with the brand and product content they need, when they need it.
Provide instant access to global and local content
The Challenge
We’ve already discussed it, actually. One of your biggest challenges is providing resellers with quick and easy access to ALL product content they need.
Naturally, this wouldn’t be a challenge if you had only one set of product content to share with resellers. But in reality, you might need to provide custom content to almost all resellers in each market, and that creates a scale that seems almost impossible to support without a relevant system.
The Solution – CELUM Portals
CELUM Portals allows you to create and launch dedicated content hubs for your sales representatives in each market.
With Portals, you can build comprehensive content libraries containing specific assets relevant to each market.
With Portals, you can give resellers an instant access to global and local materials, such as price lists, brochures, demos, and more, during retailer visits, keeping the right information at their fingertips.
Offer a centralised database of curated product content
The Challenge
Not all resellers need access to your entire content library. For many, having such access would require having to manually search for relevant assets across your entire product content portfolio. But, as you can imagine, they shouldn’t have to look for assets that are relevant to them but have immediate access to those.
The Solution – CELUM Portals
Portals allow you to delight your resellers with convenient access to curated content.
With Portals, you can collect all the product content they need in a single location, and provide them with easy (and constant) access to that.
- With powerful search and filtering options, resellers can find whatever assets they need incredibly fast.
- Editing options will help them resize and tweak assets to suit their needs, and more.
Control the materials resellers create themselves
The Challenge
Sometimes, resellers might need a custom product content asset. It might be a sales sheet for a specific product use case, a brochure, or custom price list.
The problem is that they might need it immediately and, as a result, might not be able to wait until your creative team has the opportunity to create it. This means that many might resort to creating such assets themselves.
Unfortunately, they usually disregard the brand in the process.
They create the document with Word or another text process or use some basic graphics software to output whatever visuals they have.
The result, although communicating the right value, doesn’t match your brand and sometimes, even misrepresents what it stands for.Â
The Solution – CELUM Content TemplatesÂ
CELUM Content Templates is a unique solution that allows resellers to effortlessly create marketing materials for any channel using pre-defined, brand-compliant templates.
Because every asset they’d create would be based on interactive templates, each of these assets will always remain consistent with the brand.
About CELUM
CELUM is an advanced content supply chain platform helping brands create engaging product experiences by creating, approving, managing, and using content in every channel and understanding its impact.
With CELUM, you can:
- Collaborate on content in shared project spaces.
- Review and approve creative work with advanced online proofing solutions.
- Transform files into assets by adding metadata.
- Manage digital assets in a powerful content hub.
- Route into any system or channel.
- Curate content for specific audiences to wow them with an exceptional content exploration experience and more.
Find out more about CELUM’s three core products:
