How a Trade Marketing App Can Improve Your Routine

Trade marketing is all about trying to control the situation that actually can't be controlled, since each trade promotion activity involves multiple negotiations with marketing agencies, retailers and vendors’ trade marketers. In this regard, the most powerful and useful tool one can have is accurate and up-to-date information.

However, the volume of information a trade marketing specialist has to deal with is enormous and therefore difficult to manage. Not to mention that this information is hard to collect, since even one trade promotion activity requires visiting and checking out dozens of stores, which can be spread across a state or the entire country.

Combining our experience in mobile and retail software development, we encourage you to take advantage of a mobile trade marketing app. The app will help your trade marketing specialists conveniently collect data, keep it neatly organized and easily retrieve necessary information.

Enjoy interlinked functionality and automated organization

To see how effective a trade marketing app can be, let’s take a look at trade marketing specialists' workflow before the era of mobile. To collect necessary field data, they had to have different devices in their inventory: a camera, a notebook, something to write with, and a phone.

“But it’s all in a smartphone” you may say, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to say too. With a mobile device you can do everything mentioned above, including taking quick notes by typing them. Still, without specific trade marketing software all the information you collect will be scattered around in various applications (photos in the gallery, text files in the note-taking app folder, etc.), which won’t help much with organizing data.

It is more reasonable to unite all these features in one app. With a functionality like that, the application will allow a trade marketing specialist to interconnect the data the very moment it is collected and do the following sequence of actions in seconds, on-site:

1. Take a photo of literally anything: a spot where you want your new display to be placed, a shelf with your brand’s SKUs, store interior to record a certain perspective or even some promotion ideas that you liked, so that you could follow their example in the future.
2. Add captions. You can do this by assigning a tag (“planogram violation” or “wrong price tag” or “inspirational ideas”), making a voiceover or actually typing a note. All captions will be automatically attached to the taken picture.
3. Link a photo to a certain store. Or, better to say, let the trade marketing app do it for you. This step is performed automatically thanks to the geolocation feature. This way, you will gradually build a huge and useful database for each store.
4. Link a photo to a certain promotional campaign. Just like in the previous point, each photo will be automatically assigned to a particular campaign by drawing on the available information about the store and using a trade promotion calendar. 

Take your office data to the field

Apart from collecting and storing the field data, trade marketing software can also store all kinds of office data, for instance a trade promotion calendar, an SKU catalog, latest updates of agreements with retailers and much more.

Having such information in the app is much more convenient than simply storing it in a smartphone’s memory. With all the files interconnected in the trade marketing app structure, you will manage them easier as well. For instance, by making a change in a calendar or in a store description, you will have all the involved data updated accordingly.

Stand your ground

Relevant information is key to taking trade marketing under control. In order to use it effectively, you will need to collect data regularly and structure it correctly. A trade marketing app will help you to:

1. Check the latest plans or agreements and figure out if the case in question complies with them.
2. If it doesn’t, take a photo of a 'crime scene': a planogram violation, a product missing, a display’s incorrect location or the wrong price tag. The faster you report a mistake, the faster it will be fixed.
3. Submit a photographic evidence later and successfully prove your point in possible conflicts with the marketing agency, vendors’ trade marketers or the retailer’s category manager. Pictures always speak louder than words, so you will be able to resolve the issue easily.

Save time and money

A mobile app with well-organized information on a retail network's stores will spare a trade marketing specialist plenty of time and fuel. With photos of different retail outlets all in your pocket, you won’t have to go into the field each time you need to discuss a display location or a new planogram. Instead, you will simply use photos and notes when talking to a retail chain representative in their office or via email. Sure, you will have to make certain that your pictures are up-to-date, but let’s be honest – the chances that all the stores will change their layout every week or month are pretty low.

Conclusion

Trade marketing apps are effective tools for gathering field information: you can take photos of stores and products, tag them or type a caption and link them to a store and a marketing campaign in your database. Later, whether you want to recreate the interior of a certain store in your mind, check some store’s track record or prove a marketing agency that their employees have been repeatedly doing sloppy work – a well-organized archive will come in useful.