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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Distributors are customers too Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. It struck me today that in over two years of writing Marketing Booster I have never mentioned the importance of effective marketing activity with distributors and business partners. It's perhaps natural that we often tend to focus on the end-users of our products or services. After all, they are the ones who ultimately generate revenue for us. But as any marketer knows, marketing activity should often be aimed at distributors, retailers and other 'channel partners'. I am sure that there are readers among you who do an excellent job of building good relationships with distributors. But for those of you who need to do better of it (like me) then I'd like to share some successful ideas I've picked up over the years. Here are three excellent examples I've seen: 1. A tourist department in a local council. I heard just today about someone who is responsible for encouraging more people to visit tourist attractions in a city in England. She realised that hotel receptionists often act as her 'distributors' as they can recommend visitor attractions to hotel guests. To encourage the receptionists to make more recommendations she took groups of them on tours of the city's museums, churches and other places of interest. As a result, they were better informed about the attractions and therefore more likely to give hotel guests useful and relevant information about them. 2. A motor manufacturer. Some years ago I had a short spell in the motor trade, in a non-marketing role with a large central London car dealership. I'll always remember the time that one of the manufacturers whose cars we sold ran track days for dealership staff from around the country. We had a great day driving all the latest models, taking high-speed cars round a racing oval (I reached 140 mph) and even testing the anti-lock braking systems on a skid pan. When we went back to our dealerships the next day, we were much better equipped to give customers appropriate advice on the models in the manufacturer's product range. And of course, we felt very positive about the manufacturer in general. 3. A manufacturer of audio-visual equipment. A couple of years ago I heard about a hi-fi manufacturer who wanted to educate retail staff across the world about its new range of home cinema equipment. They set up an online 'virtual living room' in which the retail staff could set-up and operate the equipment. The staff learnt how to use the gear and were then able to advise customers. The chances are that the retail staff were more likely to recommend this manufacturer's equipment than gear from rivals who hadn't done such a good education job. So what next? Maybe (like me) you are starting to think that maybe there IS more you could do to build relationships with your distributors and other partners. If that's the case, a good project for you or a colleague in your marketing department might be to review your marketing activity among distributors. Perhaps the two common themes of good distributor marketing are: * Education. If they don't understand your products then they can't really promote them to end-users. * Motivation. You are good at including 'what's in it for me' messages when communicating with end-users - are you giving just as powerful motivation messages for distributors? One final thing. Distributors could be anyone who recommends your product or service, even if you don't have a formal relationship with them. So a project like this could start with some 'outside the box' thinking on who you might identify as your targets for new marketing activity. Copyright 2005 Richard Groom |