Making it through the wilderness

As you may have seen elsewhere on our website, one of Clear’s specialist areas is something called through-marketing. We thought we’d explain a little more here about what through-marketing is and why it might be important to your business.

Through-marketing is about ensuring that your marketing influences all aspects of the sales process, particularly where channels such as distributors or other third parties are used to get to market. .

Broadly speaking it’s about affecting both parts of the sales process; the pull though from customers and the push through from third parties such as retailers and distributors.

These relationships can often make or break companies and are much more complex than direct business to business communication. You can do a lot of good work in terms of brand image and product perception, but if at the end of the day, the distributor or reseller says ‘naah, you don’t want to buy that – you want to buy this one’, all your good work is undone. So it’s critical to factor them in to the marketing strategy to ensure that you don’t lose a prospective customer at the last hurdle.

Clear identifies all the points of influence and creates inclusive strategies which take in to account different audiences and agendas – often spanning different markets and industries. We work with distributors in many different ways; in some cases it’s creating dedicated material/collateral for them, running promotions or supporting them with press and publicity. Equally as important as creating the ‘push through’ from the distributor is the ‘pull through’ from the customer, so they are requesting the product by name, or at the very least have your brand front-of-mind.

It boils down to taking an integrated approach to marketing – ensuring that you’re not just working on short term tactics, but instead on a long term strategy which matches where your business is looking to go. Through the wilderness to the oasis of bounteous sales.