As a wholesale B2B marketer in the footwear and apparel industry, it’s likely one of your goals is making sure content and product information reflects your brand’s story. From product images and descriptions, to sales presentations and catalogs, all materials must align with your brand.
I’ll never forget the first time our team was asked to sit down with a major footwear company’s marketing team because they wanted to see how we might help integrate with the work we were already doing for their sales reps. The team was frustrated that all their great product shots, sophisticated design and unique aesthetics were either going unused or being bastardized. For the next couple hours, their team shared example after example of how the beautiful catalogs, lookbooks and presentations they created to tell the story of their brand were getting sliced and diced by sales reps who needed just a piece of content or wanted to tell only a specific part of the story to an account.
In my experience, the breakdown of building a consistent brand story almost always happens in two ways:
First, I often run into marketing teams, always on tight deadlines, that are simultaneously trying to produce great pre-season Go To Market content, but also being stuck customizing the Go To Market content for reps’ accounts post-season. I’ve found this leaves very little time for marketing teams to get ready for the next season, and leads to a very inefficient team and tension between marketing and other departments.
Second, faced with this frustration, the marketing teams often give up all control and reps end up using the Go To Market content inside their own favorite design or presentation tool, completely changing the visual aesthetic and brand story along the way. This creates even more confusion between the marketing and sales team, while disrupting the brand’s story.
When you have reps customizing these materials for clients, it’s easy to lose sight of a brand’s story. Especially when multiple sales reps are working with different accounts, valuable brand information can get lost in the shuffle. One solution to this challenge is using the right B2B marketing tools, such as a wholesale B2B e-commerce system like Envoy. The right tool should seamlessly integrate content and commerce so your users are experiencing your products and placing orders in one place.
Here are a few ways these tools can boost your team’s efficiency and maximize success:
1. Build customizable content.
Many marketers spend too much time customizing content from scratch for specific customer needs on behalf of their sales team. When you build Go To Market content in the right tools integrated within your Wholesale b2b e-commerce system, it can remain flexible and dynamic. Your lookbooks, catalogs and other Go To Market content will all be customizable by your team.
2. Get your job back.
Products are changing all the time and your sales reps need to be prepared for those changes. Fortunately, when your team has the right tools, your sales reps can quickly customize content for multiple accounts so your team doesn’t hold that responsibility. This allows the content to stay aligned with the brand’s or season’s message while looking amazing simultaneously. Now that your team is doing the customization, you can start planning the next season with more focus.
3. Protect your brand’s story.
Another benefit of equipping your marketing and sales team with the right tools is that it allows you to concisely tell your brand’s story. This way, when you’re developing Go To Market materials, everything reflects your brand, even when sales reps customize materials for each account.
The #1 one way to improve your sales team’s efficiency is to provide them with the right tools. If you want to create amazing content while keeping everything consistent with your brand, then it’s time to implement a wholesale B2B e-commerce platform that satisfies both your marketing and sales teams, as well as content and commerce. This will save your marketing valuable time and headaches, and ultimately strengthen your wholesale B2B strategy.
