Manufacturers and distributors who supply mid-market and corporate retail businesses will sometimes pay these retailers to place advertisements alongside content as part of a cooperative advertising program. The secret to receiving this funding lies in the way the retailer requests it.
Cooperative advertising is common in the retail trade. It is normal for a retailer to place an advertisement specifically mentioning a brand and, in return, this brand reimburses the retailer for a portion of the advertising costs.
Some providers may even pay 100 percent of the cost of advertising if the retailer uses advertisements specified by the brand or that meet other requirements.
Inheritance of brick and mortar
Cooperative advertising programs have their roots in brick retailing and traditional advertising.
Apply for co-op funds for a newspaper advertisement or radio ad, and the answer is probably "yes." But ask for the same amount of money to pay for an article online as part of a content marketing initiative and you could get "no".
For many vendors, content marketing is hard to understand and justify.
First, your sales representative – the person who sells the supplier's products to your company – may be responsible for approving cooperation requests. This is a problem because salespeople are not usually marketing experts. He may well know the product line, but he does not know about content marketing.
Secondly, your supplier's executives probably do not understand marketing either. Your sales rep should probably justify its decision to approve your cooperative financing application to an executive, perhaps the company's national sales manager, who also does not understand content marketing.
Finally, content marketing can be difficult to evaluate. When he co-ops a newspaper ad, a provider bases the value of this ad on newspaper circulation. Likewise, he has an idea of how much the radio ads or television commercials cost, and he will ask for a copy of the bills to justify the expense. Your supplier usually makes this kind of valuation. But this provider may not have a way to evaluate content marketing. From the supplier's point of view, content marketing could throw money.
Providing an advertising vehicle
So, that's the dilemma.
You want to have a robust content marketing program with professional and beautifully presented articles that attract, engage and retain customers in your business. You understand that in the long run, this type of owned media will be much more valuable to your business than just a newspaper advertisement.
If you want cooperative financing, you also need to think about your suppliers and what they need: easy to understand and evaluate advertising.
The solution is to provide an advertising vehicle with your own content.
North 40 Outfitters, for example, is a brick and click retailer based in Montana. The company regularly publishes "emagazines" via the Joomag digital publishing platform.
Editorial content is good for readers. In addition, vendors pay the co-op's money to run ads – with an emphasis on advertising – in these ezines.
Your suppliers understand what a magazine is, even though this magazine is online rather than printed. Plus, your provider may be more likely to pay for an advertisement in an online magazine, alongside your written content, than to pay for the content directly.
Another example, a retailer from Idaho launched its second radio program in 2017. This radio show is played every weekend in four different stations with about 6,000 weekly listeners.
The reseller bills eight providers $ 750 each for a 30-second ad that will run in a month of episodes, either four or five weeks depending on the number of Saturdays in a month.
Collectively, these advertisements generate a total of $ 6,000 in co-op funds per month for the radio program. This radio show is also published as a podcast and transcribed for blog posts. This is an important part of the content marketing business.
In February, the same retailer launches a monthly online magazine, using the Issuu publishing platform. It will ask its top 30 providers to place ads in various numbers, and if successful, it will generate more than $ 200,000 in cooperative advertising payments in 2018.
Funding Content
In each of these examples, the retailer offers its paying suppliers a cooperative a form of traditional advertising that is easy to understand.
However, the commercials are in the retailer 's own product – based content, whether it' s for a radio show or an on – line magazine.
This is an approach of just about any ecommerce business or brick and clicks of medium or large size that can be executed.
There are a few things to do.
- Be aware of your plans. Your suppliers need to know that this is your magazine. They need to understand your plans to promote it and your expected traffic.
- Implant on the cost of advertising. Cooperative programs often reimburse a company for some of the actual costs of advertising. Suppliers have the habit of seeing the bills for these costs, which you will not be able to provide. So set the cost of advertising in advance and have an agreement signed by your provider's representative.
- Diversify your cooperative advertising. Until you are able to establish a cooperative relationship based on trust with your suppliers, advertise in your media owned a relatively small portion of your overall investment in cooperative advertising. .