Tag: brands

More than just imagery or a logo, a brand encompasses your company’s digital assets and physical products, as well as the intangible. You might say that your brand is the experience customers have with every touchpoint of your business. You must communicate your company’s brand to your target audiences to differentiate it from competitors. It’s important that any potential customer, in any retail market, experience your messaging in a way that’s meaningful to them — yet cohesive across all channels. This delicate balance requires a strong brand strategy.

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is a blueprint for the expression of your brand as it aligns with specific goals. Your brand strategy should serve as a plan for everything your business does: its purpose and goals, how it communicates with the target audience, and how it visually expresses itself.

Developing a comprehensive brand strategy includes many key components, starting with purpose and audience. It also takes into account market positioning, messaging strategy, visual branding, and content marketing. 

Establish your brand’s purpose

Simon Sinek’s concept of The Golden Circle is a helpful, simple way to think about your brand’s purpose. The Golden Circle, part of Sinek’s TED Talk “Start with Why,” breaks purpose down into three parts: Why, How, and What. Why does your organization exist? How can it achieve success? What does your business do? Once you know why your brand exists, you can begin to convey your value to your target audience, as well as to your retailers’ customers.

Target audience personas

The narrower your target audience is, the more effort and resources you can spend growing that smaller audience. Your brand probably has a strong sense of who you want to target in terms of demographic and psychographics. As you refine your personas, keep in mind that where they shop for your products locally may influence how you communicate with them. You might actually create personas built around physical location or the size and type of retailers where they tend to shop — for example, big box retailers vs. neighborhood stores. Understanding those communities and retail locations can help you design more effective marketing campaigns.

How to develop a localized brand strategy

The retailers who carry your products play a role in your brand strategy, actively or passively. Their purpose and audience are perhaps more narrowly focused than yours. They have direct contact with customers in their local markets, which you can use to your benefit. Let’s look at how to tailor your brand strategy for local audiences, via your retailers.

Localized social media posts and pages are typically more successful than their non-localized counterparts. A study by Nieman Journalism lab found that geo-targeted social media posts were six times more successful than posts shared globally. Localizing your content goes beyond translating content into different languages. It means connecting with retailers to build customer loyalty and trust. 

If your social media content doesn’t perform as well as you want, develop a strategy for supplying high quality brand content to your retailers. They are likely to welcome the help, especially small businesses who are strapped for time and resources. Great content using quality visuals and your brand standards, distributed through the channels of local retailers, benefits you both. It has a better chance of engaging customers, and it strengthens your brand reputation.

Use ThumbStopper for effective local marketing

Once you have your brand strategy and local target audience defined, let an expert deploy your  content — across social networks and retailers. ThumbStopper’s segmentation services manage content flow to hundreds, even thousands, of retailers that carry your inventory. Content gets delivered straight to the feeds of potential customers, expertly timed for the greatest visibility. You and your retailers both win.
Now that you know more about how to create a brand strategy for local retail marketing, learn more about ThumbStopper’s services for brands today.

Co-op marketing can be an incredibly effective strategy for brands and retailers alike. It’s efficient, opens doors for potential growth and enhances exposure for everyone involved. Unfortunately, co-op marketing can also present lots of hurdles for marketing teams and leaders who are working to promote their brand through retailers. Differing budgets, processes, strategies — all of this can quickly create a major disconnect between everyone involved. 

That’s where ThumbStopper comes in to reignite the spark between retailers and brands. As a turnkey automated solution that automates brand content on retailers’ social pages, we help bridge the gap that brands and retailers struggle to close. Here, we’re breaking down the biggest challenges retailers often face when it comes to co-op marketing, and how ThumbStopper (and you) can help solve them.

1. They Don’t Have the Time

It’s a question that’s constantly asked when it comes to social media management: Who has the time? Our best answer: Not a lot of people. Brands know that retailers are incredibly busy and don’t have the time to maintain a consistent social presence for themselves — let alone the brands they sell. 

ThumbStopper does the heavy lifting for you and them. By automating your content distribution, both teams can spend less time on manual, drawn-out processes and tasks and instead focus on more valuable initiatives, like strategy and engagement. In this case, it truly is a set-it-and-forget-it tactic that actually works.

2. It’s Too Expensive

Retailers are consistently struggling to reduce their overhead costs, which is why it’s common for them to take a red pen to the marketing budget wherever they can. With ThumbStopper, you can choose a customized pricing plan that works for everyone. 

Want just two posts a week? It will only set you back the cost of a few coffees a month. Looking for unlimited posts? You can opt for our annual plan that will save you more than $600 a year. That, coupled with the time saved with our automation, and the ‘too expensive’ argument becomes a lot harder to justify. 

3. They Aren’t “Digitally Savvy”

It’s no secret that retailers still like to rely on more traditional marketing techniques. In-store swag, print advertisements, billboards, radio ads — tactics like this have been used for decades before the birth of digital marketing. As a result, a lot of retailers may feel overwhelmed or intimidated by online strategies, techniques, and tools they haven’t even heard of. Who can blame them? 

The great news is this: With ThumbStopper, retailers can subscribe to an automated feed of your branded content — no software or agency jargon necessary. Easy for you, and even easier for them.

4. They Don’t Think They’ll See Results

In addition to letting go of outdated marketing tactics, retailers also have a hard time investing in something they don’t know will actually work. That’s definitely a fair point. But if they need further nudging, here are a few facts to convince them of co-op marketing — particularly with ThumbStopper:

• Traditional marketing techniques can’t be tracked, but all of ThumbStopper’s can.
• The analytics will quickly paint a picture of whether our solution is working.
• Retailers don’t have to opt-in to an expensive and binding contract; they can start out with a few posts a month without investing a lot of time or money.
• Other retailers who use ThumbStopper are experiencing a 50% increase in in-store traffic and up to 10x customer growth.

5. It Takes Too Long

Lack of coordination, outdated platforms, asset approvals, missing administrative access to profiles — all of this and more can slow down the social media posting process immensely. And by the time everyone’s on the same page, you’ve likely missed several opportunities to capture attention and engage your audience.

As you may have already guessed, ThumbStopper has a solution for that, too. We replace every inefficient process, outdated tool, and time-consuming content calendar to deliver high-quality content that posts without lifting a finger. It really doesn’t get any better than that.

Overcome Co-op Marketing Challenges With ThumbStopper

The benefits of our automated solution don’t just stop there — we’re talking incredible benefits like:

• Multi-tier segmentation (powered by machine-learning algorithms)
• Robust analytics and insights
• Quarterly performance reports
• 15 years of innovation developing technology
• Multi-location management — whether you sell to 1, 100, or 1,000 retailers
• …and much more!

Ready to reignite your co-op marketing spark with retailers? Schedule a 15-minute assessment with our team to learn how we can amplify your brand’s message together.

The role of the social media manager has changed over the past few years—from learning new platforms to responding to customers online, each day can be vastly different. Social media management plays a crucial role in maintaining your brand’s integrity and it’s even more important today to make sure you’re effective. Embrace some of these techniques and strategies to ensure your brand remains top-of-mind amongst all the social noise.

1. They Set Clear Goals and are Driven to Achieve Them

Each month be sure to set clear goals for yourself and for your brand’s social performance. After all, without goals, you will likely get caught up in daily tasks like posting and creating content. However, in order to truly grow social channels organically, it is important to keep the following in mind when setting goals you can stick to.

Make them SMART

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Instead of saying “I want more followers next month”, set an achievable number and select a deadline for yourself. For example, setting a goal of adding 100 new followers in the month of June holds yourself more accountable to the growth of your channels. 

Base them off performance

Reviewing your social media performance ensures you are creating the best social strategy possible and evolving it over time. By analyzing optimal posting times, impressions and engagement rate, you can set monthly and quarterly goals that are effective and attainable. 

Ensure they feed your organization’s goals

When setting goals, make sure to consistently ask yourself how that goal will directly benefit your brand management and business. How would gaining those 100 new followers for the month of June help increase your ROI? How does it benefit your bottom line? Answering these questions will ensure you’re working towards goals that make a difference and an impact within your organization.

2. They Keep an eye out for Sources of Inspiration

In order to foster an online community, it is imperative to pay attention to not only what your audience has to say, but what other brands are posting as well. If you aren’t observing what competitors or other brands are doing, you’re missing the opportunity to grow and expand your community and social strategy. Set aside time everyday to take note of what your audience is talking about and audit your competitors’ feeds. If you aren’t socially aware of other brands and news that impacts your community, you aren’t being effective. Take a step back, listen, and learn. 

3. They Focus on Building a Community, not Just an Audience

While every social media manager knows that impressions and engagement are key metrics, it’s important to prioritize fostering an engaged online community that listens and trusts your brand. Of course you want more followers, but strive for quality over quantity. As a social media manager, it is important to know inside and out who you want in your online community and what that audience wants to hear. Oftentimes, social strategy falls on deaf ears when the social media manager can’t form a brand community, only able to preach to a brand audience. 

A community is built on mutual trust. Your audience trusts you through the humanization of your brand voice. They feel a connection to your products, your voice, and your mission. While an audience simply views your content, the community digests it, processes it, and connects with it. They keep coming back for more. It is vital to be present, respond to messages (good or bad), and give thoughtful support. Your community can tell when you’re being genuine or when you’re being fake.

4. They Know Their Audience and Brand Voice

Building a strong relationship with your online community is key to effectively message all that your brand has to offer. In order to do this, you must embrace and know your buyer personas inside and out. Who is your target audience? What are their interests? What do they do in their free time? What pain point are they trying to solve when purchasing your product? In order to build an effective social strategy, you must have solidified answers to these questions. Become your target audience.

5. They Look for Opportunities to Reach a Bigger Audience

Consistent, quality engagement with your social fans is a pillar of a solid brand marketing strategy, but making sure that content lands with the right people at the right time can be a challenge. Look for ways to syndicate your brand’s content on multiple social media pages, not just the ones you own. ThumbStopper is a social media automation tool that creates custom curated feeds for your content and syndicates directly to the social media feeds of your local retailers.

Co-op advertising is a joint effort between a manufacturer and their retailer. Brands have the resources to create larger campaigns advertising their products and retailers need those resources to drive sales. Ultimately, co-op advertising benefits both parties, the manufacturer and the retailer, and enables them to reach their goals of increased brand awareness as well as driving more consumers to purchase.

How Does Co-op Advertising Work?

It’s common for manufacturers to offer co-op advertising programs to retailers as a way to share co-op advertising funds. There are multiple types of plans that manufacturers and retailers can create. A simple co-op advertising plan divides the marketing costs 50/50 between the manufacturer and retailer. In other cases, the manufacturer may cover 100 percent of the retailer’s advertising costs or provide the retailer with a fixed marketing budget annually. 

What are the Advantages of Co-op Advertising?

By sharing financial resources between the manufacturer and the retailer, a co-op marketing plan provides several advantages.

1. Mutual Cost Savings

By leveraging the manufacturer’s marketing resources and the retailer’s relationship with customers, the two sides create a more efficient marketing operation that delivers considerable cost savings for both parties.

2. Increased Brand Awareness

Another benefit of co-op advertising is increased visibility for the manufacturer’s brand and products. When a manufacturer subsidizes the marketing efforts for retailers, the brand is able to share its message with a larger and targeted customer base. 

3. Better Content Quality

Retailers may not have the branding expertise or advertising experience to create high-quality marketing materials. Most brands have marketing professionals who already create a lot of content. A co-op advertising plan makes it easier for independent retailers to get their hands on it. 

How Co-Op Advertising Can Help Boost Digital Marketing

Co-op advertising is a great way to expand your network and to share the cost of marketing between interested parties, but how does social media fit in with all of this? Co-op marketing often means traditional marketing materials like print handouts, but with digital marketing, a whole new frontier is available.

While 50% of consumer time is spent digitally, only 15% of ad spending is digital. So, if most of co-op marketing is not digital and it’s not on social media, where the majority of Americans have some presence, there are untapped marketing opportunities here. 

Grow Your Co-Op Program with ThumbStopper

Engaging in a co-op program is a mutually beneficial opportunity that can lower advertising costs and achieve outstanding ROI in your digital marketing efforts. As a retailer and manufacturer, you should be taking advantage of co-op advertising programs. Put the money toward social and digital media advertising to expand your reach, increase customer engagement and boost website traffic. ThumbStopper does the heavy lifting to publish your brand’s content to your social feed so you can take advantage of the resources brands are already creating and market your products. Contact ThumbStopper to learn more about what co-op programs may be available to you.

Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, Hubspot; you’ve heard these names before – social media management tools that help automate your workflow and deploy your brand’s content on various social platforms at the time of your choosing. If you are a small or medium-sized brand operating with a handful of retailers in your ecosystem, these tools are more than enough to amplify your social presence.

But what if you have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of independent retailers, all selling your products? Chances are, those same management tools can’t provide the things you need most for your social strategy: segmentation, access, and therefore scalability.

Brands and retailers understand the importance of delivering high quality, brand-curated content at the local level. If you operate in a brand-to-local model that relies on independent retailers, localizing your brand content through your retailers can help your content go much further, providing your expensive marketing assets a much longer runway to work for you.

But if you don’t have the ability to effectively segment and syndicate that content at scale, everyone loses.

Not All Tools Scale Alike

Scalability in social marketing is vital to achieving the maximum amplification of your brand. You know this already, but it’s difficult to find a tool that effectively scales to meet the intricacies of your brand and retail network.

Unfortunately, many social management tools that offer enterprise plans for interested brands simply don’t go far enough to cover every single independent retailer in your network and their unique needs. What’s more, once you’ve bought the software, you are left on your own to onboard each of your hundreds or thousands of retailers. Getting the attention of your entire retail network and getting them on-boarded with a new platform can be costly and time-consuming, especially if you don’t have a framework for an effective adoption strategy that you’ve used in the recent past. What’s more, if social tokens break or fail, troubleshooting and re-establishing retailers can be burdensome and tedious. When considering software solutions for your network, you need to ensure that you have a plan to successfully onboard your network or a partner that has the expertise to do it for you.

And the problem isn’t just a matter of how many people you can deploy to; once they’re on board, you still have to find a way to ensure that Retailer A–who only sells Widget A–doesn’t mistakenly get content for Widgets B and C. When you have a diversified product line that serves different markets and considerations like language, location, climate, regional regulations and other factors come into play, the same considerations must factor into your digital content syndication as well.

The Tool You Didn’t Know You Needed

We believe that it’s important to have a tool that can effectively segment your content while maximizing its reach across your entire retail network.

Enter ThumbStopper.

With machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence in our software, we’ve made it easy to ensure your brand’s content is in the right place at the right time while synchronizing your brand’s messaging across your entire network of local retailers. Through our Brand Manager™, we’ve enabled brands to deploy their digital content to their subscribed retailers with ease and efficiency.

Our tool allows brands to manage the content flow to their retail network without having to ask the retailer to do anything once they’re connected, making it possible to maximize the ROI from the content your brand creates to establish a powerful network effect.

What’s more, each instance of our software comes with a dedicated Brand Concierge, focused on maximizing the adoption rate of your retail network. Our extensive knowledge in working with brands that rely on a large network of independent retailers means that we know exactly how and when to communicate with your distributors, sales team, and retailers to ensure everyone is in-the-know and connected to your brand’s program.

ThumbStopper turns the once tedious work of onboarding retailers and deploying content into a passive afterthought rather than an active responsibility. ThumbStopper brand clients spend an average of 1-2 hours per month in our software but see an average of 300% more impressions on social media for the effort.Interested in learning more? Drop us a line and find out how thousands of business partners are achieving maximum brand amplification at scale with ThumbStopper.

You developed a marketing strategy for your brand and your retailers. You’ve drafted the perfect messages, crafted the right designs to pair, and published your posts across your social outlets.

But what if the content you’ve published isn’t gaining the traction you expected with your target audience or the followers who subscribe to you on social? Fortunately, this happens far more often than you think.

On any given day, there are’s thousands of pieces of content that are vying for your customers’ attention on social media. For many businesses marketing on platforms like Facebook, you will rarely see more than 1% to 2% reach on your digital content at one time.

However, this doesn’t mean that your content can’t cut through the noise. With many individuals turning to social in recent weeks for news consumption and updates, a few adjustments to your marketing strategy can give your content the boost it needs to cast a wider net with your next customer.

Define the Audience You’re Reaching

Before deploying your marketing strategy on social, it’s important to know the audience in which you’re looking to target. A concrete social media strategy is not built overnight and requires in-depth research to identify who your next customer comes from.

To start, identify some key qualities of your current customer base – age range, spending habits, and other demographics. Creating an ideal customer profile for your target market gives you the tools to craft content and advertising efforts tailored to meeting their needs.

Read the Room

In these uncertain times, many individuals have turned to social for updates on how COVID-19 has affected their communities and the businesses they support. As a franchise brand, it’s imperative to create and share content that is relevant to the issues of your demographic while promoting your product or service

By staying on top of issues that matter to your audience and crafting safe, on-brand content, you’ll avoid alienating your customer and ignoring their issues. This in turn will influence your brand’s reputation for the better in the coming months.

Give Your Content a Boost

Unfortunately, hashtags and organic reach alone won’t be the answer to gain traction towards your brand. Luckily, paid advertising is here to give some extra oomph to your social strategy.

Paid media has emerged as an essential component to successful marketing strategies, enabling businesses to promote content beyond their followers based on cost-per-click and other ad spend. With the right content, budget, and call-to-action, your business can successfully boost its content and home in on converting your target audience into leads.

Outro

Once you’ve tailored your marketing strategy, it’s off to work! While it is not assured that your business will immediately see greater reach with your content, the tips above are a good starting point to cast that wider net for your consumers.But if you’re still having some trouble cultivating the right strategy for your business, it always helps to get a pointer from a business that’s helped many brand partners amplify their organic reach over 700%. Drop us a message at the link here and see how we’ve helped brands amplify their social thumbprint across their retail network.