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what if you sell through resellers or distributors how do you do marketing so for example if you sell software for larger corporations or you sell medical devices or you sell most types of manufactured products tend to go into this but this applies to a lot of services as well i'd say that there are three distinct types of marketing you can do and you need two of them to get good results consistently and if you want the best results you should probably do all three there's many variations of all of those three so it's not always the same exact steps but there are three types of marketing and if you don't even really understand what they are which seems very common people get confused by the details and miss the bigger picture of how these three different types of marketing really play out in this sort of situation then it gets really really hard to even plan effective marketing let alone actually do it because you might be doing a lot of things but it's only one of those three types and that's very rarely going to work even if you do it really well my recommendation is that you start with two because you generally you need to to get good results but you don't start with three because that's added complexity and i talk about marketing essentialism only do the essentials and once you do the essentials then start adding more on top of it because that way you get good results much faster it's much more likely you get good results and if there are any issues they are much easier to pinpoint and fix so start with two and add the third into it a little bit later it doesn't have to be months later but a little bit later once you have the first two working fine at the end of the video i'll give a quick idea of how i think you should get started the very first steps that and i mean one of the mistakes there is one that just about all kinds of businesses do very often but anyway i'll get to that at the end but let's go through the three types first but before we get even to those the overall purpose of marketing when you have the situation where you sell through resellers or distributors the overall goal of marketing generally speaking is to make it more appealing and easier for the resellers or distributors to make a profit by selling your products or services because if you think about the reseller or the distributor and i mean you can use those words now interchangeably they are different types of businesses yes but for the purposes of this video we can talk about just resellers or just distributors reseller is easier for me to pronounce so i might use that anyway if you think of the resellers perspective if they have let's say 100 different products or 100 different services that they could sell forward even if they haven't explicitly made a list like this they probably have a list in their head at least an approximate one where all of those products and services are ranked based on how easy it is for them to make a profit with each one so for example it could be that well if i spend 10 hours selling each one of these if i spend 10 hours trying to sell each of these products which one is going to give me the most profit for that time that's the the big picture perspective of a reseller or a distributor what is actually profitable for me your marketing's purpose is to make them feel that they can and will make the biggest profit if they put time into selling yours if your products aren't super valuable or super expensive and there isn't a huge amount of profit in each sale that just means you have to make it even easier for the reseller or distributor to make those sales so let's go through the three types of marketing the first one is targeting the resellers or distributors the point of it is to get more of those if you're in a situation where you already get i mean there's a line of those knocking at your door and they all want to sell your product or service then you probably shouldn't put all that much effort into this type of marketing but if there isn't a line behind your door if there isn't just more resellers and distributors waiting to sell your products and wanting to sell your products then what you can handle then you probably should do this at least in a business where you already rely on resellers and distributors the point of the marketing generally speaking is what we're always talking about which is to make them think that they can make profit with this that's generally speaking the big picture goal of the marketing and what the marketing is focused on so it's about help them believe they can make a profit and help them believe it's easy and the easy part isn't just about how easy it is to sell it's a large portion of that is how easy is it for them to start selling things so when they if if they bring a new product into the catalog it probably takes them them some time to learn the details to learn how to sell it to learn the like differences between the variations you sell understand the competitors so they can actually describe what you sell or your product in a way that makes the target customers the ultimate end customers buy it so there's a lot of work in the very beginning in most cases at least of course there are cases where the product is super super simple you know like let's say you sell some like simple clothes or something then all the reseller has to do is maybe take new pictures of the clothes and that's about it it's not a huge deal but even in that sort of case there's often worries about how the billing works how many products they will get at the time what are the minimum orders how quickly the the deliveries will work what if they run out of something can they get it can they get more very quickly or what if they just can't sell something like can they are you guaranteeing something will you buy back some products that they can't sell there's a hundred questions though so getting started is a big part of how easy does it feel for them to make profit with this some exceptions to this would be let's say you sell art and you sell it to cafes so cafes that will just display the art it's people might not even realize that it's for sale so it's not there just to make profit for the cafe but rather it's there to create a good mood or it's there to help with the branding as a as a cafe that helps local artists sell their products or something there can be other motivations for having your products there and in that case obviously things look very different on the marketing side but just keep in mind their perspective another common exception would be selling some very specialty products or services things that very few people will buy so why a reseller or distributor would take that into their catalog would usually be more about their own branding so that they can tell their potential customers we have a super wide selection of things like look at even this weird stuff we have here like no one else bothers to keep these things in their catalog but we have even that thing so it's not just about how easy it is to make a profit with it that's usually the key thing but there are exceptions and overall it's almost never the only thing that matters it might be things like if you don't sell super high quality things but their entire marketing is about how they provide high quality things then it's going to be very hard to convince them to buy your things or sell your things so keep in mind how it fits into what they do that's what your marketing should fit into it it's not about the end user at that point it's about the reseller or distributor and their business what are they doing what do they want to do and how does your product fit into it the second type of marketing is the one you do for the end customer this can happen at any point of the sales process or buying process it can be even before they even know that the type of product exists that you sell because if they don't know that that sort of thing even exists it's going to be much harder for the resellers or distributors to sell it to them so you might want to do marketing that targets people who don't even know that the type of thing exists that's usually relatively difficult to do most likely quite expensive and a long road but it still might be effective so at least consider it it could also be that you target people who haven't like they know that the type of product exists but they don't know that you or your product exists so again that would be more about the awareness because it's more likely that they will buy your thing if they know that it exists instead of a reseller just coming and saying hey i have this thing do you want this but that can also mean that you start pushing them to ask their reseller or their distributor do you sell this this product or it can be that you just give them a list of distributors that like hey find a reseller from this list it could also be people who are now about to buy something like your product or it could be right after they buy your product and this is especially one that most businesses or let's say a lot of businesses in this type of situation don't even consider but it has a lot of benefits so if let's say you sell medical devices i've had a few of these examples recently if you would contact them soon after they bought you could then be there to make sure that they don't have any issues with getting started with it you could get their true honest direct feedback about what is easy or what is difficult about getting started with the product and that's really really helpful in most cases the primary benefit is that you don't usually get that truly unfiltered direct feedback if all you hear is what the distributors tell you they won't usually tell you exactly what they heard from the end users and overall the end users are much less likely to tell the distributor any super specific detailed things about the product whereas they might tell you so if you have a product that includes let's say some menus in it they they might not tell the distributor that the menu system is a little difficult to use or it's hard to understand or it takes a long time to click through things whereas if you would talk with them and ask how's your experience they might very well like to complain about it to you and then you can fix it there's other benefits to to getting into contact with the buyers whether it is very soon or much later after the purchase the point is that you can then build a relationship with them it's not just the distributor that builds the relationship with them but rather you directly have that relationship so that you can tell them about new products you can help create more sales for them you can provide good support if they have any questions you can overall make them much more likely to stick with you or stick with the types of products you sell and to buy more things from you when you have new things so it's not just that they will keep using your one product but when they're replacing some other type of product they will know that hey you sell that type of thing so let's take a look at that doing marketing for the end user you can still divide it into two types of marketing and you can divide all marketing into these two types branding and direct response branding basically means that you create a positive image of your business that's it you're not asking people to do something right now you're just trying to make them have a positive feeling about you or a specific product and it can work but you can't measure it and when you can't measure it you can't optimize if you can't know if something's working or if it's not so the direct response is what i almost always recommend there are very few exceptions there are exceptions but they're very unusual so the direct response could like generally just means that you ask people to do something that you can measure right away and when you can measure it you can improve it you can optimize it you can stop anything that doesn't generate a profit and you can continue and expand on things that do make a profit so whether it is that you ask them to join your email list or to have a call with you or to come to an event you're doing or show up to a webinar or whatever that doesn't really matter the point is you can measure it it could even be something like you tell them to contact a reseller or a distributor as long as you can measure it that's fine it still works as direct response marketing meaning you can improve it but regardless of the type of direct response marketing you do it can still be very effective branding because it's not like you're not also creating a positive image of your business and your products you should like that's what marketing should overall do so you can think of direct response marketing as effective branding marketing that you can also measure that also creates immediate results so generally speaking stick to direct response marketing the third type of marketing is kind of in between doing marketing for the resellers and distributors and doing marketing for the end customers so the third type is to create marketing and sales materials for the resellers and distributors that they can use to do marketing and sales for the end customers the mistake or two mistakes here that a lot of people do one is to think that this sort of marketing is either marketing for resellers or marketing for the end customers and it's not really either of those at least not for the purposes of this three type marketing categorization where you need to do two to get good results and three to get the best results so if you just make brochures and such that doesn't count as marketing for either the resellers or the end customers and the other mistake here is that people don't recognize what marketing message they should put into those so in those materials those are meant for the end customers so what goes into a brochure or an event or video or whatever it is that goes to the end customers you need to be talking about things that make the end customers want to buy not what the reseller wants to buy and that's fairly clear but people often don't realize that the marketing message for the reseller or distributor can be something completely different i mean let's say the the medical device the reseller is probably never going to actually use the medical device for what it's meant for it's not like they are a hospital so it's not like they would really care about the features or the benefits or the differentiators in any other way then how does it help them sell it forward so when you think of what you actually say in your marketing the messaging of it then you need to make this separation between what do they care about and why do they care about those things and what the end customers care about and why they care about those things also notice that when you create these materials for the reseller or distributor to use those can also direct people to you so that you can have direct contact with those customers so for example if you do make a video that is on your website and you just let the resellers or distributors direct people to that video then you have the at least some form of a chance to get people's contact information or get to talk with them and then you again can start to build a much stronger relationship with them so you're no longer just one provider behind a distributor but you're someone or a company that they actually have a direct contact with which can help a lot with sales it can help a lot with selling new products it can help a lot with helping them trust you enough to make a bigger order or use you for more things or something when you actually get to building marketing you should always start by thinking through the bigger picture strategy what are you trying to achieve with different parts of the marketing are you trying to just get more distributors right now or are you focused on getting them to sell more of your things or is there a problem that you're trying to solve so is your product being replaced by a competitor's product that is cheaper or more efficient or something else so first get get clear about what you're really trying to do with the specific piece of marketing that you're going to do and then think through the marketing message so who is it actually meant for is it for the resellers or for the end customers or is it sort of the in-between thing which then the content is for the end customers but how you present that piece of marketing is actually as a tool for the resellers and then again the message is something completely different a lot of people get stuck with this sort of marketing because they try to make the marketing message one on the same for both the resellers and the end customers and that just doesn't work there might be overlap and some of the reasons why the end customers might really want to buy from you might be really good reasons for the resellers to take like start selling your product because they can see that hey there are these good reasons for the end customers to buy but it's still different it's not that they really care about those outcomes or differentiators or something they care about the fact that the end customers are easily going to buy it so the marketing message that you tell the reseller or distributor is still completely different only once you have a clear picture of the strategy and the messaging that you need to do then start actually building the marketing materials or sales materials or redoing your website or whatever it is that you're going to do if you try to do any of that before you have that clarity it's really unlikely that you would get good results or consistently good results now if you have any questions or comments about this feel free to leave them in the comments i'd especially like to hear if you've done this sort of marketing how has it worked or what have you focused on before i'm not yet sure what i'll talk about in the next video but if you want to see it remember to subscribe and if you like this video please click the like button think of it as a small thank you it really helps me so if you do click it i appreciate it i'll see you in the next [Music] video