Sound Press President, Adam Smith, spoke at the Automotive Communications Council Annual Conference. Download the presentation on Top 5 Growth Strategies he presented for Automotive Manufacturers and Distributors and see the top 3 for Manufacturers here.
While understanding the needs of your consumers is important, it is also crucial to know what businesses you are working with expects from you. Finding the balance helps you deliver the value on both ends.
Manufacturers! Your marketing should be just as impactful as your products. Let’s dive into the first three growth strategies that will drive demand. You will find the rest in the full slide deck!
- #1 Good Catalog
Without an accurate and complete catalog it is simply impossible to get your product into feeds and buying portals. At the very least, you need high-quality photos, clear descriptions, marketing content, specifications, and all the applicable data fields populated in the ACES and PIES formats. In North America, ACES and PIES formats are to-go standards. For international markets like Europe, the TecDoc format is more commonly used. If you are working globally, it is important to understand the difference and how to convert from one format to another. That’s when Sound Press comes in. We specialize in managing that data and can help you to build catalog and convert existing data from TecDoc to ACES and PIES. - #2 Promoting Your Brand
No one is more responsible for promoting a manufacturer’s brand than the manufacturer itself. While distributors can offer support, they have multiple loyalties they need to take care of. At the end of a day, no one will deliver and understand your brand’s value better than you. Some well-established B2B businesses may not need much promotion. But for many manufacturers, especially in competitive categories like brake or suspension components, standing out is essential. Clear value proposition, quality statement, downloadable materials, and warranties of guarantees make a real difference. - #3 Supply Chain, Politics, and Tariffs
In today’s unpredictable world, managing your supply chain effectively means staying alert to political and trade-related risks. Tariffs, trade regulations and issues such as a foreign manufacturer flooding the market in a product segment can impact pricing and profitability over night. Keeping an ear and eye on these political topics like tariffs and a competition matrix can help you make wise decisions to protect your margins, and even work to make sure you have multiple and redundant suppliers in your network.
What Manufacturers are doing right
Relationship-Driven Growth in the Automotive Market
Want to know the best thing Manufacturers can do to grow sales? Answer – Build relationships with your Distributors. Sound Press works with distributors all over North America, and in recent discussion on this topic, we can safely say that the relationship factor is the most important. What does that look like? Well for Automotive and HD Distributors, a relationship looks like this:
Distributors want to grow their businesses. They want manufacturers to be a part of that process. One way to do that is to give Financial Rewards back when the Distributor purchases from them. This really helps the balance sheet. It helps Distributors plan cash flow. The Distributor can convey to their team about brands they want to promote that are helping in this way.
Next is not having a cookie cutter approach to the business. Be flexible. Have flexible terms and conditions.
The last and most important point of the Relationship is this – and this is really most important:
Be Easy to do Business With.
We often get an earful about the difficulties of returns, pay terms, commitments of taking on a full line vs just parts that serve their customers in their areas.
So Be Easy to do business with. Build the relationship. If you don’t have boots on the ground, work the communications you can with your Distributors. And remember, Distributors talk. They know who is serving them well and what other choices they may need to make on the lines they carry.
Sound Press works with Distributors and Manufactures and knows both sides of the business, both what manufacturers want to sell, and what distributors are looking for from those manufacturing companies to be ABLE to sell and grow their business. Download the full deck below for more insights.