One of the biggest challenges that you would face as a wholesaler, and if you locally manage the product on behalf of a global brand is marketing. Your main goal is to make sure the product moves but you have to do so with little to no marketing. This means that you have to work with a lot of third parties to assist, including stores, supermarkets, and local traders. In addition, you are limited in the form of marketing as you may only be doing discounts or beautiful ladies pushing your brand to people already in the store. This is not a bad strategy. It plays very well in sales. On a stretch, it encourages word of mouth. However, this leaves a lot of room for brand growth.

With the onset of Covid-19, if you are a wholesaler and are finding it difficult to reach your market, you may want to go digital. In fact, social media should not be a space that you should dread or ignore anymore. This should be a time to really embrace the global network and give it proper attention. When my team took on a brand that is internationally recognized but had a limited budget locally to splash on big media houses, we decided to really focus our efforts on the digital front. At the onset, we decided to focus on the awareness of the brand. The strategy was to get the word out there. We worked with influencers, creative content animations, and short skits. This excited the audience. We had a lot of people flocking on the page.

As time moved on, we moved to engagement. Developed content that would work well to build discussions around the things that affect or touch the brand. While the engagement picked up we noticed that quite a number of retailers started reaching out. Both locally and from across regions. This in turn gave the business a lot more impetuous to reach out to different markets and grow in spaces that the plan was not there. The writing is clearly on the wall and its pointing to a digital space that we should boldly step into and expand our markets.

While we are here we have to act locally but really think global. Our market in the digital space has immediately grown in leaps and bounds. The people we talk to are keen to see if we deliver. We also have to manage our digital footprint well. One wrong move and it can take a journey like “The Hobbit” to come back. Lastly be active, engage with the very best you can. A lot of pages and websites are not even trying, but have amazing potential. With as little as 100k per month, you can stamp your authority on the digital platform and look bigger than you actually are, leaving your competition in the dust