We’re so happy to have this time to talk with you - could you start off by telling us a little bit about PromoBoxx and what you all do for your customers?
Rancourt: I'm Ali Rancourt, the VP of customer success at Promoboxx. I've been at Promoboxx for about six years on multiple teams, and have learned a lot from every team that I've been on. I’m super excited to chat more today and talk about how we work with brands and retailers.
Ruthfield: My name is Mark Ruthfield - we really appreciate you having us today. I have the privilege of being our chief revenue officer, as well as chief operating officer.
The best way to describe Promoboxx is that we are a software platform that allows brands to very simply leverage and redirect the consumer-facing content that they're pushing out nationally through the voice into the social following of their independent retailers.
Retailers can then access pre-built, click to publish organic and paid social media content from brands in one centralized location, and that allows them to easily share on their social channels Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. From there, the benefit to brands is that they gain analytics and reporting into which of their independent retailers are sharing their approved content, how the consumers are engaging and how they compare to other brands in their space.
Shreve: Accessing national insights from local interactions is so important for brand marketers to understand what's happening throughout the entire customer journey, and to know how their messaging, positioning and overall strategy is being received by consumers.
What are some of the more frequent marketing challenges that you see dealers having and how do you help them?
Ruthfield: I think it's a challenge that the brands have with their independent retailers. Brands have great national following on their Facebook, Instagram, X, and other social media pages. Often, though, their retailers are tight on bandwidth.
They're wearing multiple hats and they don't have extra time. A lot of times retailers are getting social content from the brands that they carry and sell from many different sources - a web portal, a DAM, via email from their sales rep. Content can be provided in many different ways, and it takes a lot of time for these retailers to search for, download, customize, and then upload it on their local channels.
So on one hand, independent retailers struggle to have enough time to promote their brands and leverage brand approved marketing assets. In addition, if brands make these assets available, how do they understand performance? Do they get insights into what campaigns or posts are working? Can they learn how often the ads are being used, and what insights can they gain from consumers that they may not be receiving at the national level?
Rancourt: From the retailer perspective, our main network is built of small mom and pop shops. They often don't have a marketing person in store to run their social media and may not even realize the importance of it. To solve for both of those gaps, we make sure retailers understand why it's important to have a social presence. But at the same time, making that as easy as possible for them, especially when they don't have an additional person that they hired for that role. They need a central “one-stop shop” to access every brand that they carry.
Brand consistency is also very important, and if retailers are taking product pictures in-store, they may also use copy that is about a different product. That means marketing is not streamlined or accurate a lot of times.
On the brand side, we make sure that that brand message and marketing is clean and formatted. Everything is packaged together in that click-to-publish post so that the retailer doesn't have to take the picture, come up with the copy, do all of that marketing, that's taken care of for them.
It’s really important on both sides that we're solving for the busy retailer. But then also making sure that we're getting that brand message correct through the local retailer to the consumer.
Shreve: It’s the time of year when dealers need to be posting the most because the consumers are shopping - which means it’s also the time of year that they're too busy to be managing all of their social posts. Automating the process works well for them because they are busy and they're thinking about everything from paving the parking lot to servicing products.
That means marketing isn't always the thing that they can spend the most time on, but it's so important.
We've talked about the brands and retailers - why is it so important for them to be connecting with the local customers? How are customers engaging with social and learning more about the brand and the dealership?
Ruthfield: What we focus on with brands that offer a considered purchase, where there's a lot of educational, informational, complementing the product, promotional type content, is to use a combination of social media, email, and other channels to share that information with the consumers.
And if they supply information on a considered purchase, it's really important to get these consumers into an independent retailer so that they can be further educated. If you can move consumers down the funnel through that life cycle, and get them in stores, you're helping the brand, you're helping the retailer and ultimately getting people in store to get further educated and to feel comfortable to make that purchase.
Rancourt: Many local customers of these businesses might not be aware of the brands that the retailer carries. Our goal is to make sure that brand awareness is being spread across potentially new customers. But the most important thing is the relationship between the retailer and the local customer - these customers are loyal to the businesses where they shop. Again, they trust that business. They go in store for more than just one product. Maybe they're going in once a week, once a month to shop the new products that they have. That strong relationship between the local business and the local consumer is a lot more beneficial than just seeing a message coming from the national brand level.
We recommend to all of our brands, of course, that they place national marketing. But repeated customer awareness, seeing it from the brand and then coming from a local retailer that lives five minutes up the road, increases the likelihood that they go in-store chat with that retailer, learn more about the product they've already built, the relationship with that business, ensuring their relationship continues to build and there is customer loyalty there.
Shreve: When national brands get local insights, it creates a powerful funnel because then they start to change or optimize their marketing activities and build up lookalike audiences, increase personalization and improve their messaging.
Rancourt: They learn a lot about their audience, especially in some of the ads that we run and the reporting that we provide. They learn that their audience sometimes is a bit different than what they initially thought. Insight and feedback is really helpful to provide so that we can tweak their strategy in the future and make sure that we're reaching that right target audience.
We’re talking a lot about how relationships and social are such a good way to build those relationships. Do you see changes in the way customers are interacting? Are they evolving in the marketplace or directing what's coming from brands and dealers?
Rancourt: We've continued to see a steady increase in the amount of consumers and users on social media. So that's why, again, we reiterate the importance to our brands and retailers, why it's so important to have a social presence. We've seen fluctuation generally with the channels that we see customers more active on, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, we look at that at both what retailers are using, as well as what consumers are using and where that network is in the marketplace.
Many of the insights that we provide back to the brand tell them where we're getting the most engagement, and we do speak with the brand about creating different types of content through the marketing funnel, whether it’s educational, inspirational or promotional product related. The insights that we see help us guide that strategy.
For example, you're getting a lot of interaction and engagement on the funny, inspirational posts that you're posting and not as much on the product posts. Of course any picture with a dog is getting 100 times the organic likes, so we learn a lot from that.
Shreve: Puppies and babies, right? Isn't that the key?
Rancourt: No matter what industry, it seems that pictures of puppies work!
But yes, we learn a lot about consumer engagement based on our reporting, looking at what types of posts customers interact with, where they're most active, and then of course, we funnel that all back into our strategies and recommendations that we're providing, both to our brand and our retailer. And not just what type of content that they should be sharing, but also the frequency of how often they're sharing.
Shreve: I really like how you have content types categorized into educational, inspirational, promotional, and product groups. Balancing that mix based on customer interaction is a smart strategy.
Rancourt: We recommend the 80/20 rule to our brands. Many marketers think that 80% should be product and promotional. It's the opposite. We recommend that 80% is fun, educational, or brand awareness. And then 20% should be focused on getting the sale.
Shreve: Those of us in sales and marketing mistakenly believe that consumers are making rational decisions based on features and benefits, but people are not rational purchasers, we are emotional purchasers. So your 80/20 recommendation reflects how people actually shop.
We love data and talking about insights. Is there anything that you're doing from an innovative perspective with data to get insights back to brands and dealers?
Ruthfield: In some industries, a brand might have hundreds of dealers, some have thousands. A brand obviously knows their most important independent retailers and the sales that they do. We can also append the number of followers on each of their independent retailers so that, while they know who's doing what as far as sales, they can also see the potential of their entire retailer base using follower counts. Perhaps there is a retailer that may not be doing sales today at the level the brand wants, but they might have a huge social following. We share insights like this to help prioritize getting the most important retailers on board for that specific brand.
Rancourt: All of our data is self-serve and available directly to brands to access anything that they need. But what we’re focused on right now is building that retailer profile for the brand.
The profile pulls together a variety of data points and insights specific to that retailer. We are also diving into foot traffic reporting that includes demographic data. We are able to focus on key accounts, and based on the data, sometimes those accounts change because they realize that there are other accounts they should focus on that have more potential opportunity. And that helps determine their strategy going forward.
The topic that everyone talks about and “must” be mentioned in every article is AI. Are any of your clients leveraging AI or using that in any way that's creative or interesting?
Rancourt: We recently announced one of our first AI features in the platform - AI Smart search. We’re introducing it first for brands and later to retailers. The new tool allows users to search for an asset within our platform using keywords. AI Smart will scan the full image, not relying on asset titles or tags. For example, a user could search for a red truck or yellow scooter, and AI will review all of the images that it’s been given access to and pull options that are most appropriate to that search. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they're looking for and surface exactly what they need based on those searches.
It sounds like you’re starting to get into interesting uses of AI. Maybe we should end by talking about what you enjoy the most about working with brands and retailers and where there are opportunities to help them grow.
Ruthfield: Our number one goal is to build and demonstrate value, putting ourselves in our customer's positions to understand their challenges and how we can align to make them more productive and accomplish their priorities for the coming year.
If we can align and solve their challenges, that's pretty rewarding.
Rancourt: It’s very fulfilling to work with the retailers and hear how much value we're adding to their business. We want to make social posts easy for them and save them valuable time. And we know that it's actually doing something beneficial for their business and helping their business grow.
For the brands, the true value is providing insights from the data and reporting, and give them access to information that they didn't have previously. It’s all part of creating the connection and closing the gap between the brands and the retailer.
Shreve: Thank you so much for the insights that you’ve shared today on the opportunities and challenges that brands and retailer networks face. This go-to-market strategy can be complex, but also offers a wide variety of benefits, especially for consumers. We appreciate your insights on data and automations, and where you are heading with AI. We really appreciate you joining us - it's been a pleasure to talk with you both!