While you may sell your products via a distributor or supplier, it pays dividends to think about the needs of the real end-user.
While a business customer may make the short term buying decision, ultimately they are swayed by the user’s needs and the demand from their own customer base.
Benefits of proactively improving your brand positioning
Investing in a B2C marketing campaign to raise the profile of your business and intentionally alter your brand positioning has several key benefits:
- Increase your reach – If you take control of your marketing and run your own campaigns, you are no longer limited by the reach of your distributors and can do more to proactively increase the reach of your business. This could include entering new markets or selling to new demographics.
- Put pressure on suppliers – By marketing straight to the end-user you put pressure on your distributors and suppliers to stock your products and also give yourself more bargaining power when it comes to cost. If their customers are repeatedly asking for your brand, they may be inclined to take products at a lower margin than usual to avoid losing the business.
- Support for add-on products – Building brand awareness among your end customers can create a halo effect, making it far easier to sell additional extras or follow on products. If you want to build a business with real longevity, having a portfolio of products is important, and your brand recognition will make each subsequent product easier to sell.
- Collect data – Data is an increasingly important part of modern business. By running marketing campaigns you can start to collect data and analytics which will feed back into your overall business strategy.
Selling D2C – Direct to Consumer
Another key benefit of raising brand awareness among your ultimate end customers is that long-term, it could give you a strategic opportunity to cut out the middle man and sell direct to consumer. If you’ve built sufficient traffic to your website and your social platforms, you can greatly increase your margins by engaging customers directly and therefore not paying commissions, or selling at wholesale prices to distributors.
This is becoming increasingly popular among product manufacturers as a means to increase revenue and profitability.
Brand positioning support from AsOne
At AsOne, our approach has always been to look at digital marketing from the broadest possible context, thinking about the holistic digital business development strategy and commercial goals. Correctly positioning your brand to reach the right audience is vitally important and something that we regularly work on with clients from a wide range of industries.
If you’d like more information on how to make brand positioning work for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch and speak to one of our marketing strategy experts.
For businesses based in the North East, you may be eligible for financial support from the NEBSF funding scheme, which provides up to 40% off the cost of qualifying projects.
