BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #176

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #176

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Future customers first learn about your brand through promotions. Retailers and shoppers expect them. About 25% of a brands gross sales are tied to trade marketing and yet over 70% (higher in natural) of your promotional spending is wasted or ineffective.

Welcome. With all the uncertainty in our industry, I'm focused this month on helping you get more bandwidth for helping you get more runway out of your available resources and the number one way I'm going to help you do that is by helping you understand the intricacies of trade-marketing. Let me explain. Trade marketing includes everything it requires to get your product in the hands of a new consumer. That's it. That is the sole function of all your trade spending. Let me explain. 25% of every brand's gross sales is typically tied to trade marketing and yet over 70% of that money is wasted or ineffective, even more so unnatural. As always, I want to thank you for listening. This show is about you and it's for you in appreciation for your time.

Always include one free downloadable guide at the end of every episode, one that can help you grow sustainable sales and compete more effectively. One that can help you stand out on a crowded shelf and level the competition between you and the most sophisticated brand in your category. If you like this show, please share it with a friend. Subscribe and leave a review and don't forget to go back and listen to previous episodes where it may solve some of your most pressing bottlenecks. You know the things that keep you up at night. Remember, the goal here is to help you get your products are no more store shells and into the hands of more shoppers, empowering brands. Raising the bar. Today's free downloadable guy is my trade marketing essentials. How to grow and scale your brand. It's the essential download that you need so that you can understand the basics about trade-marketing and then how to take it to the next level.

How do you maximize your trade marketing ROI? How do you identify which promotions make the most sense for you to participate in this free download will help you get the foundation that you need to be able to make some of those decisions anyhow? You can learn more about it at the end of this podcast episode. What I mean by this is that if I go into a store and I'm going to buy your product anyhow and you have a promotion and I'm able to take advantage of it, well that's good for me, but it's not efficient for you. What you want to do is design a trade marketing program that brings new customers into your brand that gets new customers to try your products. I've got a lot of creative strategies around that and I cover that in a lot of the different podcast episodes.

The point is this, if I can help you save thousands of dollars a year by helping identify which promotions make sense and which promotions don't, then that's going to give you extra dollars that you can put toward growing and scaling your brand. It can help you make your more brand more valuable, which will give you an opportunity to be able to negotiate perhaps better rates with investors. In addition to that, it'll help fuel your innovation. Retail's expensive, it's pay to play and everything that you can do to manage your costs more effectively is going to help you grow at scale. This week's free downloadable guide is by trade, marketing essentials. Everything that you need to grow and scale your brand. This is something that every brand needs to understand and this is something you definitely don't want to farm out. You need to own this in-house.

You need to be able to understand how to manage your trade marketing more effectively. For example, I'll give you a quick tip. Never, never, never pay on something that doesn't include some performance. So when you pay a retailer so many cents per unit that scans or register, that's paying for own performance. However, if you just handle a blank check to a distributor or a retailer or someone else and you don't know what they sell, and as a result of that, then that's a waste of money. On the other side of the question, you need to know how your money attracts customers, how your money is able to leverage more sales at shelf. I have a lot of expertise in this area. I've been the keynote speaker, a lot of different events about trademarking in addition to covering this topic a lot of different podcast episodes. More importantly, when I was at Kimberly Clark, I had seemingly unlimited resources available to me and I was able to create some really cool tools.

They were able to help me identify the contribution back to the brand or to, to the retailer. Now contribution is what the retailer takes to the bank or the brand takes to the bank. The reason this is so important is because when you manage a promotion by the amount of contribution, how much you contribute to the brand growth, that changes the conversation. So instead of just being an ATM machine for a retailer, now you're able to help the retailer that this promotion that you're thinking about is more effective or better promotion because you can drive more contribution or more profit to that retailer. And at the end of the day, that's what they care about most. I appreciate you for listening. You can download today's show notes at brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session176 thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Thanks again for joining us today. Make sure to stop over at brandsecretsandstrategies.com for the show notes along with more great brand building articles and resources. Check out my free course Turnkey Sales Story Strategies, your roadmap to success. You can find that on my website or at TurnkeySalesStoryStrategies.com/growsales. Please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

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Until next time, this is Dan Lohman with Brand Secrets and Strategies where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.