Wholesale channel strategies have shifted. Retail has moved from a landscape once dominated by big box stores, to one that is now much more centered on smaller, specialty retailers. With that comes a new growth opportunity, but the old methods for working with your retailers just won’t cut it anymore.
So how does your brand take advantage of this new opportunity to ignite your specialty retailers?
Your Strength As A Partner Defines Your Success At Retail
The experience you deliver to retail buyers is just as important as the way you market to consumers. Remember, your buyers are also consumers elsewhere. Heck, they may even be consumers of your brand. They have come to expect a certain shopping experience on the B2C sites they frequently purchase from. You should be providing that same experience for pre-books and replenishment orders.
Delivering old, complicated methods for buyers to place orders can negatively impact their perception of your brand. Eventually, they will choose to work with other brands that provide easy-to-access, buyer-first experiences.
Provide your buyers with a modern B2B experience that’s built to support and guide them to success, with engaging content and powerful commerce tools. They’ll thank you by ordering your product and evangelizing your brand.
You Might Be Missing Your Biggest Growth Opportunities
Ease of access to your brand promotes just as much growth as a quality product does. Of course, having a quality product is crucial to your brand image. However, you need a destination to educate and inspire your buyers to believe in it and buy it.
Capturing your buyers attention is challenging. Capitalizing on that attention once you do have it is an even bigger challenge. This is why content and commerce needs to exist side-by-side within the same platform. You’re engaging your buyer with powerful digital content that excites them to buy, and also empowering them with the ability to order product from that content.
This is a shopping experience your buyers understand, and are eager to engage with. Providing easy, immediate access to commerce tools within your content destination promotes growth for your brand by smoothing out the friction for your buyers, and exciting them to buy.
In The Real World
Let’s relate a typical B2C experience to what often happens in the B2B world.
Picture this: You open a marketing email from your favorite brand. Their new winter lineup is available for purchase. You click the link and jump into a website that is loaded with product information, imagery, and loads of convincing content. One of the coats really catches your eye and you want to buy it. You look for a cart button, or some way to purchase it, but there isn't anything. You notice at the very bottom of the original email that is says to reply and fill out the attached form to place your order. Your couple of minutes to online shop just ran out, so you'll come back to it later. However, like most consumers, you get busy and forget about it, or get a marketing email from a different company that you can buy from right away. You never go back to order that coat.
This might not seem realistic in the B2C world, because it's not. So, why should you let it slide in the B2B world? This is the experience buyers are having every day on outdated B2B systems that aren’t focused on supporting their partners at retail.
Doing Nothing Will Get You The Same Thing
Wholesale is changing and so are buyers. A strategy that worked 2-3 years ago might be totally ineffective today. Not changing with the times puts you at risk of having a stale brand image, and subsequently losing the interest of your retailers. In order to grow your wholesale channel and keep a positive brand image, you need a modern B2B tool to help you solve today’s challenges.
