Building a more trusting relationship with distributors, retailers and other channel partners is the best way for manufacturers to better understand who their end users really are.
According to a study from the Poole College of Management’s Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC), trust and collaboration are becoming both more valuable and costly, because supply networks are increasingly more complex.
The majority of respondents (31 percent) felt that supply chain fragmentation marked the most severe pain point, and it also had a fairly high probability of occurrence. A lack of global project resources (12 percent), collaboration and business intelligence (10 percent), commodity price increase (10 percent) and IT integration were also seen as troublesome.Becoming more marketing driven is a key to addressing this perceived lack of trust and adding downstream value. Hubspot’s Manufacturing Industry News Blog explains that manufacturers must reach customers in different ways – i.e. offering them something they can’t find online themselves and providing value instead of a mere “hard sell.” Marketing automation can also work well here, because efficiency would be increased, human error is reduced, and it ensures the message is delivered to the right audience with the right message, providing downstream visibility.
What’s more, using social media marketing to increase a company’s perceived legitimacy can help mitigate a lack of trust, and create more satisfied end-users because they’ll be interacting with a platform they’re familiar with.
In closing, manufacturers can improve marketing tactics by using automated marketing tools that allow them to build more meaningful and trusting relationships with channel partners and customers. By using multiple sales channels that meet customers where and how they want to do business, the focus is transferred primarily to the consumer rather than the channel itself.