How to turn your resellers into brand advocates 

All of your product resellers should also be advocates. They need to be marketing your products all the time. And that doesn’t necessarily mean running from door to door screaming your brand’s name, or whipping out your products over lunch – it means using their human face and voice to push your company products over and above your competitors’.

Something that manufacturing vendors need to start thinking about more and more is brand humanization. Distributors, contractors, and VARs are faced with “content fatigue” – they’re constantly being pushed promotions, campaigns, and product information from a plethora of different vendors. Your brand and voice need to stand out from the rest, so that your partners feel driven to pass your brand message on to their customers.

And the sad reality is that there are really few manufacturing brands out there that are actually successfully humanizing their brands. They’re stuck in the past, focusing on their products, instead of using their most powerful resource – people. Humanizing your company in the eyes of its many potential customers means that you’ll create that spark that keeps them engaged with your brand.

Utilizing social

You have a whole host of “thought leaders” at your disposal who can have a major impact on their customers.

Blog posts, reviews, testimonials, and social media posts are written by individual partners about your products can have a major impact on your brand. Just getting these guys to share what they know and think can propel your brand to the limelight. They can add their voice to your company blog, upload photos and videos of themselves working with your products, and publish unscripted video testimonials about their work.

That’s when the best form of marketing kicks in – word of mouth – creating a marketing multiplier effect. According to a McKinsey report, word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchase decisions.

For your company to incentivize channel partners to showcase and sing your brand’s praises you need to:

1. have accurate real-time data about what they’re up to
2. have ways of rewarding positive brand advocacy
3. monitor which channel partners are doing the best in order to reward top players for their A-game