How to Grow your Brand with Dealer Advocacy & Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a fundamental part of business that can massively impact brand awareness and online presence. For companies with a franchise or dealer network, dealer advocacy provides a solution to own the way their brand and product are marketed by their dealer network and grow their brand in the process.
Many brands rely on dealers or resellers to sell their products to end customers. These can be regional, national, and international, and the way the relationship with these dealers develops can have a huge impact on sales but also on brand awareness and online presence.
The way it usually goes is that once a partnership is signed, the brand owner keeps in touch with the dealers, but it’s ultimately them who are responsible for the sales and the promotion of the products — which is when dealer advocacy comes in.
The importance of content marketing for dealers
Customers — consumers like you and I — are nowadays used to doing their research online before going out to a physical store to make the purchase, sometimes even opting for an online purchase instead. That is the main reason why it’s so important for shops, dealers, and resellers to not only have an online presence (which just implies having a social media account and posting content on it) but also make content marketing a priority.
Content marketing can massively impact revenue and sales — even when we’re talking about physical shops that want to make sales in person rather than online. As a store, you want to build up your promotion and your expertise online so that consumers come back to your social media pages and your website time and time again to do that online research on products they are interested in.
As a brand owner, in turn, you want to make sure that your products are promoted in the right way and consistently. And, of course, you want to make sure that your branding gains popularity at the same time that your brand awareness grows. And your dealers inevitably play a pivotal role in that.
The struggles of content marketing
It goes without saying, though, that with content marketing also come several challenges. Let’s zoom in on two main issues we’ve seen recurring over and over and for which Ambassify is the right solution here:
- Lack of creativity. Dealers aren’t content creators, and dealers cannot be content creators and come up with original and on-point ways to promote the multitude of products and brands they offer in their shops or on their websites.
That’s why brands should be looking into dealer advocacy solutions such as Ambassify to be able to tackle this problem and own the content marketing and promotion of their products that happens through their reseller network. - Lack of time. No need to even make an argument for this one. I think we can all agree that time is an essential factor in mastering social media and content creation. And when you’re busy with a business (physical and online), time isn’t always a luxury dealers can flaunt.
How dealer advocacy can solve these issues and grow your brand
This is where dealer advocacy comes in: by centrally driving your online marketing as a brand, you have more influence on how dealers promote your products online.
With this, you guarantee consistent and on-brand promotion — in terms of both visuals and messaging — and reach more people in your target audience regionally (and nationally or internationally, even) through the dealer network.
Ambassify allows you to streamline content created by your Marketing team to your resellers or dealers with automated emails, a mobile app, or a desktop community, depending on your preferences and needs. This will help you facilitate the lives of your dealers by:
- Easing their struggle with content creation. You’ll be creating the content for them and streamlining it through a platform that delivers it to them automatically and regularly.
- Driving more business to the physical shops. You can shape promotions and deals together with your network to encourage physical sales and bring more traffic to the physical shops.
- Boosting sales through market insights. You can help your dealer network determine what their next best-seller could be based on your own market insights while at the same time helping them decide which products they should showroom or carry in their store to resonate with more consumers in their trade area.
Dealer advocacy is a way for you to have a better, stronger grip on your brand and how it is portrayed online. While your dealer network is showered with these practical benefits, you’ll be also growing your brand by leveraging their established brand awareness and social media presence. Whatever their area of expertise, these shops and dealers often already have an established and trusted network of aficionados and customers, which is what will help you broaden your reach and claim visibility in the eyes of a whole new audience.