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Independent Resellers and the Digital Workplace

Independent Resellers and the Digital Workplace

Reading time: Approximately 45 minutes

 

Converting a legacy analog presence to a futuristic digital one requires a new set of skills that most resellers in the Office Products and Business Equipment channel verticals do not have.

 

The market for office equipment, products, and supplies is mature and a steady decline in the overall market size is now taking place.

Compounding the now-evident market-shrink is a rapid transition from analog to digital that the industry has failed to keep pace with. Without prompt action, independent resellers face years of stagnation, accompanied by revenue declines at rates greater than that of the overall market decline.

It’s difficult to imagine a successful business not having a strong digital presence that caters to the search inquiries of potential buyers. However, without this presence (which is predominantly the case), customer churn (loss) is taking place at higher and higher rates that combine to threaten independent resellers with the loss of 40%+ of their top line over the next 4-years.

In this paper, we explore the critical elements that must form the foundation for a conversion from the legacy analog practices to futuristic digital workplace solutions that are necessary for survival.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. How the industry has failed the resellers

It’s hardly surprising the resellers have failed to embark on their digital transformations when the industry leaders on whom they depend have failed to figure out their own.

 

2. Domain Age and Authority

With over one-billion websites on the internet, authority and trust must be established as part of a comprehensive strategy to develop visibility.

 

3. Sub-Par Website Grades

User tolerance for poor website design and sub-standard content is very low. The Office Products reseller community must step-up!

 

4. The Role of Backlinks

Backlinks are a vital component of web traffic development strategy. However, they cannot be developed without high-quality content that third-parties voluntarily link to.

 

5. Lack of Traffic

A business without a website is unthinkable but, why bother if you don’t have a strategy to develop traffic?

 

6. Social Activity and Social Shares

High-quality content alongside an engaged audience will lead to shares. Shares become the fuel for audience amplification.

 

7. Lack of Social Authority

High-quality content shared with an engaged audience helps develop social authority. As social authority increases then an ever-expanding audience places higher trust in that content.

 

8. How to set about fixing the problem

What’s it going to take to pull this off? There’s no silver bullet, it’s time and effort. Who’s going to step up?

1. How the industry has failed the resellers

It’s hardly surprising the resellers have failed to embark on their digital transformations when the industry leaders on whom they depend have failed to figure out their own.

It’s difficult to escape the general sense of gloom in the office products and supplies industry. We’ve entered a period of great change that’s creating uncertainty which, in turn, is unsettling even the largest players, and further contributing to the general malaise. In this article I’m going to explore some of the failings of the industry to embrace the digital environment we now operate in, and how important addressing these failings are, in order to improve its outlook.

I sense the manufacturers and distributors harbor feelings that the smaller independent resellers kind of deserve the difficulties they’re experiencing, believing they [the resellers] are solely responsible for their circumstances and, in failing to keep up with the changing requirements of the market, have no one to blame for their difficulties but themselves.

In some respects, this is true. Every business, large or small, must accept responsibility for its own performance. However, the success of the three components of the value chain in the office products and supplies industry, (the manufacturer, the distributor, and the reseller), are inter-dependent. In other words, for the manufacturers and distributors to be successful, they must rely on the success of the resellers as, the more successful the resellers are, then the more successful the manufacturers and distributors will eventually be.

The irony is that the manufacturers and distributors have failed themselves and, in failing themselves, have thereby failed the resellers they serve.

In failing to do more to position their independent resellers for success in the modern digital environment, the foundation for my argument is established. The manufacturers, the distributors, and the buying groups, in failing to digitize their own businesses, are collectively more responsible for the challenging conditions faced by the resellers today, than the individual resellers themselves are.

The History:

  1. There’s a mature business model in place revolving around manufacturers selling to resellers who are big enough to buy direct, while selling in parallel to national wholesalers (distributors) such as Essendant & SP Richards, in order to enable smaller resellers competitive access to smaller order quantities from nearby distribution centers.
  2. Financially, there’s been an established system of volume-based pricing, volume-based back-end rebates, marketing development funds, etc. that provide incentives for resellers to stay loyal to the cross-section of products made available from the Tier-1 manufacturers and distributors.
  3. The Buying Groups, such as BTA, Tri-Mega, IBPI, & Office Partners (collectively with 1,700 members or so), have negotiated price lists from manufacturers and distributors for their individual members to take advantage of.

This mature system is the core of the problem. It’s been in place for 30 years or more, remaining substantially unchanged while the market itself has radically changed. The world has transitioned from analog to digital and the office products industry has been left behind leaving resellers unable to compete effectively.

Resellers have remained analog businesses in large part because the manufacturers and the distributors have remained analog businesses. In failing to digitize, and in sticking with increasingly obsolete elements of their business model, the manufacturers and distributors have failed their resellers.

The volume rebates, market development funds, etc. have been used to prop up margins rather than invested in helping transform resellers from their analog platforms to digital. Now that business volumes are decreasing, everyone in this value chain is, in fact, losing.

If you invest in a brick and mortar store, you need visitors to come into the store. They need to like what they see, they need to like you, and, for you to be successful, they must purchase the products and services you offer. A website is no different, if there’s no strategy to develop traffic, then why even bother to go to the time and expense of putting one up? 

The Evidence:

There are several compelling performance metrics I’m presenting in the following set of tables to support my argument that the industry leadership (manufacturers, distributors and buying groups) has failed to provide their resellers with the necessary support for accomplishing digital transformations. The metrics I’m highlighting include web traffic, web site quality, domain authority, and backlinks.

Before I explore all the aftermarket shortcomings, look at Table 1 and Table 2 and the examples they contain demonstrating how the job should be done.

TABLE 1: Global Brands Licensed to Aftermarket Office Products
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
IBM 20 99 84 157,483 610
Xerox 20 93 74 12,904 11,431
Kodak 28 94 72 8,993 32,212
Group Avg. 23 95 77 59,793 14,751

 

These blue-chip global enterprises have leveraged each of the important metrics into websites that successfully attract traffic. They have strong domain authority (95/100), their website quality grades well at 77/100, they have large numbers of high-quality backlinks and, they all have high web traffic rankings. (Note, lower numbers are better – IBM with a global rank of 610 means there are only 609 websites in the world that have more traffic than IBM).

TABLE 2: Tier-1 Resellers – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
Staples 22 86 57 11,365 1,318
Office Depot 18 85 63 6,456 2,781
T-1 Average 20 86 60 8,911 2,050

 

The two primary resellers of office products have also done a good job, developing strong domain authority (86/100), a decent website grade (60/100) and large numbers of high-quality backlinks. They are also both highly ranked in terms of daily traffic volumes.

Examples of the industry shortcomings are shown in the following set of six additional tables.

TABLE 3: Aftermarket Manufacturers – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
Katun 20 42 55 164 260,231
LMI Solutions 13 32 74 46 868,522
Clover Imaging 2 31 42 36 1,840,692
Ninestar 15 37 52 21 3,517,421
Turbon Group 15 20 35 21 8,374,017
Group Avg. 13 32 52 58 2,976,325

 

Look at the aftermarket manufacturing industry listed in Table 3. Although they’ve had plenty of time (average domain age 13 years) to work on their website strategies and performance, based on these metrics, their accomplishments are poor. With an average domain authority of 32/100, a website quality grade of 52/100, no backlinks to speak of, and minimal traffic volumes, there’s no evidence of a successful leadership strategy for their resellers to follow.

TABLE 4: Tier-1 IT Distributors – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
Ingram Micro 18 76 44 1,642 13,761
Tech Data 26 68 76 803 15,407
Synnex 10 43 43 66 250,659
T-1 IT Dist Avg 18 62 51 827 93,276

 

The Tier-1 IT Distributors listed in Table 4, have decent domain authority averaging 62/100, a below average website quality grade of 51/100 and, much lower volumes of backlinks that should be expected of enterprises of this stature. Ingram and Tech Data have decent traffic volumes with the average for the group being dragged down by the poor performance of Synnex.

TABLE 5: Tier-1 Office Products Distributors – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
Essendant 18 40 48 132 531,824
Supplies Net 15 34 65 57 1,223,834
SP Richards 17 39 47 83 1,534,824
Arlington 18 23 66 14 2,599,058
T-1 Dist Avg. 17 34 57 72 1,472,222

 

The Tier-1 Office Product distributors in Table 5 have very poor domain authority (34/100), average website quality grades of 57/100, no backlinks to speak of, and modest traffic volumes.

TABLE 6: Tier-2 Office Supplies Distributors – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
Supplies Whole 7 18 32 14 2,599,058
ACM 19 19 38 25 4,866,820
Image Star 16 24 40 9 6,838,157
Copy Tech 18 20 24 6 8,653,863
Nectron 20 15 22 14 13,273,534
Aster Imaging 5 9 38 2 14,685,709
PrintRite NA 5 20 42 10 15,826,172
T-2 Dist Avg. 14 18 34 11 9,504,415

 

As a group, the Tier-2 Office Supplies distributors listed in Table 6 fail on all of the key performance indicators, inadequate domain authority (18/100), poor quality sites, 34/100, no backlinks, and virtually no web traffic.

TABLE 7: The Buying Groups – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
BTA 19 40 44 99 2,723,754
TriMega 16 29 27 44 3,713,992
Office Partners 19 23 22 11 12,250,603
IBPI 18 25 28 10 12,562,262
Group Avg. 18 29 30 41 7,812,653

 

The Buying Groups that are shown in Table 7 also fail on each of the metrics with the lowest quality websites and the weakest traffic numbers beside those of the Tier-2 distributors.

TABLE 8: Industry Media – United States
Company Domain Age Authority Grade Backlinks Global Rank
RT Media 5 19 49 613 464,111
Toner News 14 26 40 165 738,547
ENX 17 28 35 81 1,192,496
Action-Intell 6 31 59 52 1,642,471
IS 5 38 42 56 4,487,832
Ind. Dealer 5 25 37 13 13,642,365
Media Avg. 9 28 37 163 3,694,637

 

Finally, the media outlets, the “youngest” group (in terms of domain age) of the industry components I’ve analyzed but, nevertheless still with an average age of 9 years. Unfortunately, they have very low domain authority averaging 28/100, poor website quality with an average grade of 37/100, no backlinks and very weak traffic volumes.

Conclusions:

With the average domain “age” of these six aftermarket categories shown in Tables 2 – 8 being in the region of 15 years, there’s been plenty of time for each of these enterprises to achieve the following minimum performance standards:

  1. Domain Authority – 55
  2. Website Quality Grade – 70
  3. Backlinks – 750
  4. Global Traffic Rank – 250,000

In failing to achieve these minimum standards, the industry leaders have failed to build a model for their own success and, in so doing, have failed to provide an example for the resellers to follow.

Had the industry leaders achieved these minimum standards and, had they [for example] adjusted their incentive programs to support efforts for helping motivate and educate their resellers to achieve similar performance standards, then we would be looking at a very different industry profile to the one we currently see.

  1. Consider for a moment these twenty-nine aftermarket companies [listed in Tables 2 – 8] with 750 backlinks each and forming an aggregated total of nearly 22,000 compared to the less than 5,000 that exist today. These backlinks would go a long way toward improving the mission-critical domain authority rankings that are vitally important for decent search result rankings.
  2. Furthermore, let’s assume for a moment, that a global traffic ranking of 250,000 equates to 5,000 unique monthly visitors. This would aggregate to monthly traffic volume of 145,000 visitors compared to less than 10,000 taking place today.
  3. By restructuring manufacturer rebates and designing them [for example] to incentivize resellers to develop web traffic, backlinks, and relevant social audiences, then increased business volume would have followed. Unfortunately, as shown in the tables above, none of the aftermarket industry leadership appears to know how to accomplish this for themselves, let alone their customers.
  4. Finally, just imagine for a moment, if 2,000 resellers had accomplished similar performance metrics as the targets I’ve shown! We’d now have 1.5 million industry backlinks and 10 million unique monthly visits to reseller sites. Just imagine all these sites populated with high-quality educational content, fine-tuned to provide answers to the 80% of buyers who research and qualify potential vendors (i.e. resellers) before the reseller even heard of them. As I’ve said before, this kind of aggregated scale can move the needle for the collective benefit of the resellers and their customers.

Unfortunately, it’s too much to expect of 2,000 smaller independent resellers to individually try and figure out how to achieve these performance parameters. If they were able, then they would have already done so. Unfortunately, most don’t know where to start and, without strong initiatives from those with the resources to help, they will continue to flounder in the obsolescence of the analog world.

 

 

 

2. Domain Age and Authority

With over one-billion websites on the internet, authority and trust must be established as part of a comprehensive strategy to develop visibility.

I have built my argument for the industry failing the resellers around various internet terms, such as domain age and authority, the website’s “grade”, its backlinks, and its global traffic rankings. I realize not everyone may have a full understanding of what each of these terms means and, therefore, why each of them is so important for a business to focus on.

What is domain authority?

Domain authority is calculated on a 100-point logarithmic scale and is used as a measure of the power of a domain name and a predictor of how well a website will rank on search engines. The domain authority score will constantly fluctuate, both up and down, with it being much easier to get from 10 to 20 than it is [for example] from 60 to 70.

How can I find out what my domain authority is?

You can click on the following link “How do I check my domain authority?” and check a specific URL at the SEO Review Tools site or, use this embedded link to https://www.Moz.com and install their free Moz browser extension. Once the extension is installed you have the option to display a toolbar in your browser that shows the domain authority, the page authority, and spam score. Every website you then visit while signed into Moz will automatically display its domain authority.

What’s the role of domain age in search engine ranking?

The clock starts ticking, in terms of the effective age of the domain, once the search engines have crawled the site. Generally, well established and reputable sites have older domains, whereas spammers quickly register and drop domains. Google and other search engines are likely to treat newly registered “one-year” domains cautiously or even suspiciously, at least until the site operator starts to place high-quality content and to accumulate quality backlinks. Of course, sites that search engines treat with suspicion are not returned in search results because the search engines want their users to stay away from them.

No one really knows how much weight Google [for example] places on the age of a domain and its impact on search results. However, it’s fair to say, the age of a domain in conjunction with numerous other factors plays an important role in terms of how highly a site may rank in search results.

For example:

  1. The website age in conjunction with its backlink profile

  2. Over time, the owner of a domain has the opportunity to build high-quality backlinks

  3. However, if an owner neglects this task then, even an old domain with stale content, few backlinks, and not optimized for mobile, will rank lower in search results than a newer site that is.

Search engines reward sites with frequent content updates and well-structured internal links between individual site pages. New sites with high-quality unique content, active and frequent updates, are mobile responsive and display an increasing numeric trend of high-quality relevant backlinks are, almost certainly, going to be ranked higher than older sites lacking these attributes.

Domain Age & Authority

There’s an important difference between the “effective” age of a domain and the date on which it was first registered.

A domain may be registered and then “parked” without being taken live or populated with content. But, it’s only when a site goes live and the search engines are able to index it, that any “credit”, or domain authority can start to accumulate. In other words, registering a domain and then leaving it dormant for months or years, isn’t going to do the owner much good with regards to the longer term goal of building domain authority.

The future term of a domain registration is an important consideration of the search engines. An owner who registers [and necessarily pays] for a domain five or more years into the future is considered to be making a statement of intent and commitment to the future of that domain. Conversely, a domain with a registration expiring in a few months may send an alert to the search engines that it’s about to be closed or left to expire. This may be particularly so with a domain registered less than 12 months because it mirrors the behavior of spammers and is a profile the search engines are programmed to flag .

Conclusions:

The older a domain the better but, only if it has a history of frequent updates with high-quality content, authoritative backlinks and a registration extending a significant time into the future. Other requirements also come into play such as the need for a well-structured site with logical internal page links and, particularly so in our increasingly mobile era, is fully responsive to multiple screen sizes.

3. Sub-Par Website Grades

User tolerance for poor website design and sub-standard content is very low. The Office Products reseller community must step-up!

In this section, I’m going to identify the deficiencies of a typical office products resellers website, explain how it can be graded, what must be worked on to improve its grade and, finally, why it’s so important this objective must be accomplished. I already explained the mission-critical nature of working to improve Domain Authority (DA) so now it should start to become clear the DA objective cannot be accomplished unless the effort to do so is built on the foundation of a world-class website.

Introduction:

In a 250-unit case study carried out during 2015/16, I found the grade of a selection of sites from the office products industry averaged just 35 while the minimum acceptable grade, necessary for embarking on a digital business transformation, should be targeted at no less than 80.

Most business owners must recognize we’re in the middle of a massive transformation from an analog to a digital world. However, these same owners may not recognize quite so readily that, unless they commence their own digital transformation then ultimately, they will not survive.

Businesses that fail to deploy websites capable of earning high performance grades will be left further behind as the digital transformation continues.

It’s free, and it’s easy, for small business owners to determine what grade their websites currently earn. A simple Google search for “website graders” identifies many sites with tools for generating site performance grades. I’m a big advocate for HubSpot and you can use their HubSpot Website Grader to determine a site’s grade. However, there are many others that perform just as well, seven of which can be accessed from Kevan Lee’s “Indispensable Website Graders” article.

There are four important categories of requirements underlying high-quality websites;

  • Accessibility
  • User experience
  • Marketing
  • Technology

These are shown in the table below along with each of their sub-category components, all of which play their individual roles in establishing the overall quality of the website. You will see there’s overlap – for example, “Internal Links” is important to all four categories, whereas “Incoming Links” [for example] is specific to the marketing category and not the other three.

The Four Categories and their Sub-Category Components
Accessibility Experience Marketing Technology
Internal Links Facebook page Incoming links Meta tags
Code Quality Popularity Meta tags Domain age
URL Format Amount of content Facebook page Images
Page Titles Twitter account Social interest Internal links
Headings Images Popularity Code quality
Mobile Internal links Amount of content URL format
URL format Domain age Headings
Printability Twitter Printability
Mobile Internal links Mobile
Server behavior Page titles Server behavior
Headings
Analytics

 

Building a website that incorporates these characteristics requires a range of human resource skill sets, including those with advanced technical skills, proficient content writers and skilled graphic designers. Because of the broad scope of requirements, it’s unlikely a single person will have all the necessary skills to develop a site that scores a grade at the target level.

Although there are numerous platforms available that permit amateurs (even those with modest technical skills) to build sites of a quality that would have been unthinkable just a few years back, an amateurs ability to ensure it’s optimized to meet all the requirements is remote.

In typically neglecting to build and deploy high-quality sites, office products and supplies resellers are overlooking the necessity for their websites to become the foundation for their digital business transformations and that inadequate sites compromise transformations from the outset.

Conclusions:

There are over one billion websites on the internet but most of the traffic goes to a tiny percentage of the highest performing sites. Unfortunately, because most small business websites are low quality, they grade poorly, they lack strategy, know-how, and investment and are unlikely to ever meet owners hopes and expectations in terms of traffic, lead generation and business development

To be fair, I must point out that many sites with large traffic volumes also don’t score well on the various website grading platforms, a fact that may make some wonder if a high-quality site is really such a necessary requirement. However, to counter this potential fallacy, I must also point out that poor quality, high traffic sites, usually belong to larger enterprises that had already established brand recognition in the analog era and, despite their website limitations, have been able to leverage their analog brand equity into site traffic.

For a small business with little to no brand equity, developing web traffic on the back of an analog past is not feasible.

The new digital era provides a unique opportunity for savvy, small business owners to level the playing field in their battle with much larger enterprises and to subsequently leverage a strong digital presence to help develop their business in local markets.

Despite my obvious passion for small businesses to establish the very highest quality websites, a website in itself will never be a single “silver bullet” solution and, owners who mistakenly adopt a “build-it-and-they-will-come” approach, are all but guaranteed to fail.

A high-quality website is no more than the foundation for future success and, as I’ve written on numerous occasions, the value proposition, the business intelligence, and the continued development of real, face-to-face relationships in local markets, all remain critically important as small businesses strive to prosper in our twenty-first-century digital era.

Bottom line, both small and medium-sized local businesses must focus on deploying high-quality websites that add value to their target audience. The future combination of technology, alongside a strong physical presence in local markets, can lead to sustainable competitive advantages over much larger enterprises.

4. The Role of Backlinks

Backlinks are a vital component of web traffic development strategy. However, they cannot be developed without high-quality content that third-parties voluntarily link to.

In this section, I’m going to explain what backlinks are and why they play such an important role in the development of web traffic to office products resellers websites. Put in the simplest terms, backlinks are hyperlinks installed on a website that links back to a page on an independent third-party site and, due to their influence on search results, are often described as the “Holy Grail” component of search engine optimization. As I’ll go on to explain, there are two important aspects, firstly the number of links and secondly, the quality of the links.

Backlinks are powerful because they’re created by an independent third party who perceives the content on the site they’re linking to, to be sufficiently relevant and valuable that they want to facilitate sharing it with their audience.

Backlinks should not be confused with outbound or internal links. While a backlink to one site cannot exist without an outbound link from another site, outbound links do not carry as much weight in search engine results as backlinks do. Think about it this way, the owner of a website could sit down for a weekend and build a thousand or more outbound links to reputable third-party sites but, to attract a similar number of high-quality back (or inbound) links, is completely dependent on successfully marketing a site populated (and continually updated) with high quality content that others voluntarily elect to link to. It’s because of this voluntary aspect that it should be obvious why the search engines reward backlinks more than they do outbound links.

An outbound link is a link from your site to another site so, it’s important to understand, a visitor clicking on an outbound link will be directed away from your site. Because of this dilemma, building outbound links may seem to be at odds with the inherent objective of keeping visitors on your site. So, in order for the outbound links to have value, they must point to relevant, original and high-quality content you believe will be helpful for your audience. As a best practice, they should be set so they open the target content in a new browser window in order to avoid closing and replacing your site in the user’s browser.

Remember, an outbound link from your site represents an inbound link to the destination site. At the end of the day, summing the global total of all outbound links and subtracting the sum of all inbound links, must equal zero. If no one was prepared to build an outbound link, then there would be no inbound links.

An internal link is a link between pages on your site. A well-structured site should include links between the pages that encourage a visitor to embark on a “journey” through the site from one piece of relevant content to another. Each link must have a start and an end so, just like the external links, the sum total of the internal “launch” links (outbound) minus the sum total of the internal “destination” links (inbound) must equal zero.

The quantity of backlinks (or inbound links) to a website is a simple link concept to understand as it’s exactly what it implies. Generally speaking, the more inbound links to a website the better. However, the quality of those backlinks is very important as inbound links from irrelevant or untrustworthy sites are more likely to be a negative factor in search engine results than positive.

Inbound links with “do not follow” instructions have no value to the website hosting the linked content and do nothing to improve domain authority. However, high-quality, relevant content should motivate high-quality “do follow” inbound links that search engines reward.

The quality of backlinks may be a little more difficult of a concept to grasp. There are two main components, firstly the relevancy of the link and secondly, the domain authority of the site the link originates from.

Relevancy:

It must be remembered that you have no control over the links that point to your site and if for some reason, your site attracts links from irrelevant or disreputable sites, then it will harm your SEO rankings.

By way of example, in the office products industry that we focus on, a link from say Clover Imaging Group (an important aftermarket supplies manufacturer) to an office products resellers site, would constitute a relevant link. However, a link from Macy’s department store, while perhaps authoritative, would not be relevant. Irrelevant links will not increase domain authority or improve search engine results performance.

Services exist, such as those provided by SEMRush, that allow you to discover and work off “toxic” backlinks. As a last resort, for those links an originator will not take down, a submission can be made to the Google Disavow Tool, to ensure unwanted links are ignored by their search engine algorithms.

Authority:

As I explained earlier, domain strength comes in large part from the quality and quantity of inbound links. A high domain strength is indicative of authority and, links from domains with high authority, help build authority at the sites they link to.

Although an “external” link building strategy should involve both inbound and outbound links, for the inbound component to be successful, you must create content that other reputable sites are motivated to link in to. In other words, if you fail to accomplish the requirements for establishing a world-class website that I explained in Part II, then you will utterly fail to build high-quality inbound links because there will be nothing of value for third party sites to link to. If you utterly fail to build high-quality inbound links, then you will utterly fail to develop your domain strength. If you fail to develop your domain strength, then you will never rank well in search results and your website will stay buried in the hidden depths of the internet, remaining an unproductive asset for the business it was built to serve.

Conclusions:

It should be clear that search engines reward authoritative sites with higher placements in search results. This reward mechanism is designed to motivate owners to optimize their sites and thereby allow them to join a virtuous circle of activity that links an ever-expanding network of sites together. These sites can then collectively continue to build their individual domain strength which, in turn, enables them to further expand their influence or “reach” and to continue to attract more and more qualified visitors.

 

 

5. Lack of Traffic

A business without a website is unthinkable but, why bother if you don’t have a strategy to develop traffic?

I’m now going to explain the importance of website traffic, how it’s measured, how it can be managed, and its development motivated. For small business owners, just like winning a new customer is hard work, so is developing web traffic. Unfortunately, there’s been little understanding or vision within the office products industry that, by working to fix the web traffic issue, it may in fact subsequently become easier to win new customers!

The Importance of web traffic:

As this paper has been prepared to explain, there are many digital components that need to be in place and in order, before serious web traffic development can effectively commence.

  • World-class website with frequent updates
  • High-quality, relevant content
  • Social Media audience development and engagement
  • Inbound marketing (social and email)

My sense is that many small business owners don’t know where to start, either with the foundational components listed above or with the subsequent strategies for developing traffic. Although almost all of the reseller businesses have websites, I’ve have heard more times than I can recall that “My website is there for a different reason, my customers don’t need me to have a website”, that I, in turn, have interpreted as another way of saying “I’ve got a website but I really don’t know what to do next!”

This kind of reseller thinking defies logic. Why bother with a website at all if there’s no plan or objective to develop traffic? It’s like setting up a conventional brick and mortar store in a remote, isolated location, which everyone instinctively knows would be a waste of time and money, but for some reason not having a similar, intuitive understanding, that a website isolated in the depths of the internet is also a complete waste of time and money.

“Money has been invested to build websites, but money has not been invested to develop traffic to them. Oftentimes the site investment will now turn out to have been a waste, because the structure and design wasn’t suitable for traffic development in the first place.”

According to the 2014 State of B2B Procurement study from Accenture’s Acquity Group, 94 percent of business buyers do some form of online research before making a buying decision.

  • 77% use Google Search
  • 84% check business websites
  • 34% visit third-party websites
  • 41% read user reviews

“For office products resellers, who have failed to deploy websites designed to satisfy the requirements of the 94% of B2B buyers who conduct online research before making a buying decision, these statistics should send a deep chill down their collective spines!”

Office products resellers must understand that over 90% of their potential customers, and perhaps just as important, their existing customers, are researching online. Once this fact, and its implications are understood, then content relevant to these searches must be created and placed on their websites in an effort to become a source of authoritative information that’s responsive to these searches. If this can be achieved, then the foundation for developing traffic has been established.

How to measure web traffic:

Most are probably familiar with Google Analytics and perhaps, somewhat less, with the Alexa analytics service provided by Amazon. In order for the analytics to be accurate, both services require tracking code to be installed on the owner’s website. Once this has been done, then detailed metrics regarding all aspects of the traffic to the site are available, such as the sample set shown in the table below.

Web Traffic Metrics
Metrics Actual Budget % of Budget
Unique Visits 3,049 4,000 76%
Total Visits (includes returning visitors) 4,457 6,000 74%
Page Views 8,167 12,000 68%
Search Engine Referrals 186 500 37%
Social Referrals 440 800 55%
Visits from Links 493 600 82%
Direct Traffic 4,535 4,000 113%
Bounce Rate 46.5% 30% 65%
Page Views per Visit 1.83 2.00 92%
Minutes per Visit 8.48 4.00 212%
Total Time on Site (hours) 629.92 400.00 157%
Visits from Mobile 896 1,000 90%
Global Rank (Google = #1) 698,392 500,000 71%
USA Rank (Google = #1) 140,663 120,000 86%

 

How to manage and motivate web traffic development:

A major part of the answer to the management and motivation for ongoing traffic development is the preparation of a budget and then closely monitoring ongoing performance compared to that budget. Small businesses often neglect to prepare traditional budgets for sales, operating expenses, profits, etc. and it’s doubtful many have ever even thought about preparing a budget for the key performance indicators associated with web traffic development and visitor engagement. However, web traffic is not a passive thing that just happens, it’s hard work and, to stay motivated and keep doing the work day after day, you need to see the results of your efforts as they’re tracked against realistic goals. Otherwise, and I’ve seen it many times, the initial effort quickly winds down and is eventually abandoned.

“I know first-hand it’s hard work, the numbers in the data table are our numbers!”

We registered this domain for Executive & Strategic Solutions in January 2015 and launched the site with basic content a few months later. I started my blog in September 2015 and we did a major upgrade of the site in mid-2016. We’ve worked hard on the content and on our efforts to develop an audience. We still have a long way to go but, in a sad reflection of the industry, these numbers are already significantly better than the individual performance of most of the businesses that make up a $5 billion aftermarket office supplies industry in the United States. We’ve been going for just a short period while the industry’s average domain age is well over 15 years. I’m not bragging here, as our intent in disclosing these metrics is not to “toot our own horn”, it’s to expose the terribly weak performance of the industry as a whole.

Conclusions:

As we approach 2020, a viable business without a website is unthinkable and a website without traffic, or a strategy to develop traffic, is useless. The office products and business equipment resellers must stop ignoring the traffic problem and start to deploy and execute strategies to address the issue.

Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse but, when over 90% of buyers are researching online before making a buying decision and, with as many as 5,000 independent resellers in the United States failing to build effective landing pages for these searches, then why should we be surprised most resellers are now experiencing revenue declines in excess of the market shrink? Unless something changes, resellers are now poised for the double-whammy of losing market share in a now shrinking market.

 

6. Social Activity and Social Shares

High-quality content alongside an engaged audience will lead to shares. Shares become the fuel for audience amplification.

In this section, I’m about to explain the importance of social activity and social shares. Sometimes described as the “social currency”, or the accounting for information that’s shared by people as they go about their everyday lives and, for which a concise definition was provided by Russ Klein in an American Marketing Association blog:

“Social currency refers to the pull or influence that a consumer has among his peers, and social currency strategies are arguably the most critical point of leverage for a marketer.”

 

It’s the social shares that make up the currency of the internet and it’s the shares that amplify a message across the expanse of the internet. As also explained by Russ Klein, social currency describes how word of mouth “that has value to a user but then increases in value as that currency is passed along from one to another or, in the most powerful cases, from one to many.”

Look at the example displayed in the image below.

As you can see, this article was shared on LinkedIn 72 times.

Let’s just assume for a moment that the average audience of each of the 72 persons that shared the content is 500 persons. The math is simple (72 x 500 = 36,000) and represents a substantial audience that we couldn’t have placed the content in front of without the amplification the shares provided. Furthermore, each of these shares was made with the implicit endorsement of the sharer, effectively carrying his or her seal of approval before it was placed in front of their personal audiences.

It should be clear, from the title of the article, that the subject matter was focused on the aftermarket office supplies industry. Its initial publication was targeted at relevant LinkedIn Groups and a specific network of Business Supplies and Equipment Industry, LinkedIn members. As such, we know the publication was delivered to a relevant audience, whereupon it was then shared a further seventy-two times to each of the sharer’s respective networks or audiences.

It’s not an unreasonable assumption to make, that the interests of the secondary audience were also significantly concentrated in the area of Business Supplies and Equipment. If this were not the case, then you’d have to ask why these 72 members elected to share the content at all. The underlying behavioral characteristic of a sharer is to help make themselves look good in front of others and they will fail in this goal if they don’t expect the information they share to be relevant and of interest to their respective audiences.

So, I can conclude from this activity, that ultimately, not only were we able to place this content in front of as many 36,000 LinkedIn members, it’s also likely that a high proportion of these members had relevant interests.

A snapshot taken from the “unique visitor” data provided by our Alexa analytics is shown in the chart below. You can see the traffic spiked at the same time as the shares of this content were taking place. This, of course, fits our goal of driving relevant traffic to our website and clearly shows a correlation between the size of the audience obtained for this article and the number of unique visits to our website.

To further help with our web traffic objective, all the content we publish contains links back to other relevant content contained in our blog or elsewhere on our website. Each piece of content also includes at least two “calls to action” that provide access to other, more valuable pieces of content that we’ll provide access to in exchange for contact information such as an email address. If our audience judges our content to be of enough value or interest that they’re prepared to provide us with their contact details and grant us permission to include them on our blog subscription list, then our content has done its job. In it doing its job, we gradually expand our audience and we gradually increase our brand equity. Furthermore, in capturing these details, we are able to subsequently determine whether a contact can be qualified as a sales opportunity or not.

“So long as we maintain the relevancy and quality of our material, then we will continue to expand our audience and continue to increase our brand equity with an ever-increasing number of social shares. This process thereby starts to feed upon itself in a virtuous circle of activity”

As we develop our social currency and authority in our field, we also start to accumulate backlinks from our audience that value our content and insights. These, in turn, help increase our domain authority which, also in turn, then places us higher in search rankings. The whole process is interdependent and, if one piece is missing, or goes missing, it all breaks down. No one shares poor quality, irrelevant content, and no one spends time on poor quality websites. Therefore, it’s logical to conclude, it’s not possible to substantially improve domain authority or organic website traffic without this process being in place.

Of course, there are other ways to reach an audience, but these involve paid advertising which can quickly become expensive, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. I’ll be including the subject of paid advertising (which has its role) in the next post in this series (Social Authority) so you’ll then have a better understanding of just how this can be tailored into an overall digital strategy.

Conclusions:

Office products resellers have been extraordinarily slow to adopt modern digital marketing tactics and their failure to use social platforms to communicate their value proposition leaves consumers paying much higher prices for office supplies than they could be. The opportunity to profitably grow small to medium-sized dealerships still exists but, in order to do so, it will be necessary to overcome the current reluctance to use social media, email marketing and modern inbound techniques deployed for the purposes of developing relevant web traffic.

The requirements for digital success revolve around content. Unique, relevant and high-quality content. This is the starting point for digital marketing and also the foundation for developing authoritative leadership positions promoting the story for why consumers should adopt smaller resellers value propositions as opposed to the higher priced “big-box” alternatives.

 

7. Lack of Social Authority

High-quality content shared with an engaged audience helps develop social authority. As social authority increases then an ever-expanding audience places higher trust in that content.

I’m now going to explain the concept of social authority as it may relate to office products and equipment resellers in the United States. Many may wonder why it is that I believe the need to establish social authority has become such an important component of the increasingly digital environment we operate in.

Most independent resellers lack a social strategy and appear skeptical of the role of social platforms in business. Perhaps this is partly so as a result of the highly visible use of social media by celebrities as part of their, very different, business models.

For those reluctant to participate on appropriate social platforms, whether they like it or not, the clock is not likely to be turned back. Social media is here to stay and it will have an increasingly important role to play in the functioning of a modern business.

Merriam-Webster’s definitions of authority:

  1. The confident quality of someone who knows a lot about something or who is respected or obeyed by other people.

  2. The power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior.

Both these definitions are relevant to the theme of this article but, particularly the second one, as it strikes directly at the heart of where we aim. Remember, content, content, content is our King because high-quality content is the platform from which an author is able to demonstrate his or her command over a subject matter.

“By demonstrating knowledge via content, then the power to influence thought, opinion or behavior can be established”.

Remember, over 90% of buyer’s research online before they make a buying decision. If a business, such as an office products or equipment reseller, wants to be a beneficiary of this research then they must publish high-quality content, content which has been developed specifically for that purpose.

“Ultimately, why would a buyer make a decision to buy anything from a company or individual that’s unable to demonstrate it knows what it’s talking about?”

For content to rank well in searches, it must be accurately targeted at the researchers, it must be placed on a website that’s built and designed to perform well in today’s online environment and, it must be placed on a site that’s viewed by the search engines as trustworthy. In fact, the website must possess all the attributes we’ve been advocating in this current series.

Measuring Social Authority:

“Trust grows by being able to view a person’s social content in aggregate!”

How do you measure the power to influence or command thought, opinion or behavior and why is it important to be able to see the results of such measurements?

The volume of content being posted on the internet is staggering and continues to accelerate. Everyone’s time is valuable and, with over 4,000,000 search inquiries on Google every minute of every single day, how on earth can a researcher know whether to trust the information accessed from a search inquiry? Multiple searches and manual validation is one way, but another, perhaps more efficient, can be through the use of platforms set up for the purposes of measuring the online authority of content creators.

There are two popular, easily accessible platforms widely used to measure levels of online influence or authority which award scores on a scale of one to one-hundred as indicators of influence or authority.

  1. Klout Score
  2. LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) Score

Of the two examples shown in the images below, who would you instinctively be inclined to trust more?

Example # 1

Example # 2 

My LinkedIn SSI, as of the date of this publication, is 67 and my Klout 47, which compares to the SSI of 17 and Klout of 17, of a relevant individual and company I randomly selected out of the office products and supplies industry. You may or may not like my content, or agree with my views but, that’s not the point here. Instead, it’s simply to demonstrate that one set of index scores are higher than the other which may, in turn, be interpreted by a reader that the content may be treated with a higher level of trust and authority.

Ultimately, the higher your scores, the more views, shares, likes, etc. that are likely to be generated from your content which, in turn, translate into still higher levels of influence and authority.

As we’ve learned earlier in this paper, when I dealt with the topic of Social Shares and Social Currency, the larger the audience and the larger the numbers of shares and likes, then the greater the value of the accumulated social currency. Accumulated social currency translates into brand equity.

The role of paid advertising:

As I’ve written many times, developing relevant website traffic is hard work, it takes time, and there are no effective shortcuts that I know of. The process I’ve been explaining and advocating for is lengthy, it’s laborious and, not many have the fortitude to independently stick with it. At some point, those who do may look to accelerate the process which, while possible, must have the fundamentals in place first.

One of the acceleration paths is to pay for content to be placed in front of a larger audience. There are two key words here, firstly, “pay” and secondly “content”. Put bluntly, if you don’t have high-quality content, then don’t pay as you will waste your money. This is what I mean by stating the fundamentals (i.e. content) must be in place first. Once a library of high-quality content has been established, then and only then, may it be time to start considering the potential benefits of reaching an expanded audience through payments to a platform operator such as Facebook, Google, Twitter or LinkedIn, all of whom have very large networks containing potentially relevant audiences.

However, even with paid advertising, it does not obviate the requirement for continuing to build authority as, paid or otherwise, without “authority” no one will listen. Furthermore, if the message is too bluntly focused on sell, sell, sell, then it will fail. Trust must be established first with unique, proprietary content structured to educate, combined with the sharing of relevant, high-quality material authored by others and then, finally, promotion of your own selling collateral. To be most effective, each of the three content components should be in equal proportions to the others.

Conclusions:

It’s all about your content, your audience and your engagement with that audience. This should make up your marketing and your development of brand equity in the modern digital world.

However, although my emphasis is on digital marketing and the use of information technology, it should not be mistakenly thought to be exclusively so.

Focusing 100% of relationship efforts online is likely to prove to be a terrible mistake. As I’ve written many times, social media is not a “silver bullet”, either-or decision. It can be used to effectively complement (not replace) traditional relationship (face-to-face) selling and marketing strategies. This distinction is also wonderfully explained by Freek Vermeulen in his recent Harvard Business Review article titled “What So Many Strategists Get Wrong About Digital Disruption.”

 

8. How to set about fixing the problem

What’s it going to take to pull this off? There’s no silver bullet, it’s time and effort. Who’s going to step up?

As I conclude this paper, I’d like to remind you it started with my argument that the Office Products manufacturers and distributors have failed both themselves and the independent resellers. The industry has failed to transform itself for the digital age and it has failed to provide a leadership position for the resellers to accomplish the same for themselves. As a result, the resellers are now positioned for the double whammy combination of losing market share in a shrinking market.

As explained in our recent article The Transfer of Commerce with B2B e-commerce set to grow 45% and eclipse $1.1 trillion by 2020, it’s simply too big a deal to ignore.

Before I go any further, and because this topic is so important for the future of the aftermarket and the office products and business equipment reseller community, let’s look at a definition of just what B2B e-commerce is. As provided by Wikipedia, with italics added for emphasis:

B2b e-commerce (also written as e-Commerce, eCommerce or similar variants), short for business-to-business, electronic commerce, is selling products or services between businesses through the internet via an online sales portal. In general, it is used as a means to improve transactional efficiency between businesses.

If office products and business equipment resellers fail to deploy the systems necessary for participating in this transfer of commerce, then they will necessarily miss out on a share of the business they may otherwise have been eligible to compete for.

Simply deploying a shopping cart site is not enough to satisfy the requirements for B2B commerce. While it may theoretically permit an online sales transaction, it does nothing to improve the efficiency of a business considering a transaction. So, even in the remote chance a resellers shopping cart is organically [accidentally] located from out of the depths of the internet, a transaction will be unlikely to occur because the options available from the site fail the test for improving efficiency.

Any reseller can quickly, and relatively easily, deploy a shopping cart site. There are numerous options available to support this and, as a result, over the last decade or so hundreds of these basic “cart-sites” have been deployed and many subsequently retired.

As I’ve gone to some lengths to explain in this paper as well as in many other blogs, deploying a website and operating it with an objective to develop relevant traffic is not easy. In fact, there are few examples of successful office products or business equipment e-commerce enabled websites within the reseller community.

Option 1, the easy option, doesn’t work and Option 2, the hard one, is mostly beyond the skillset and resources of the typical office products reseller.

Clearly, there’s considerable complexity in accomplishing a digital transformation and, clearly, few office products or business equipment resellers are currently on the right path. Given the complexity, effort, and specific skill sets required, our purpose is to explore what tools and mechanisms could be deployed that may help facilitate and incentivize resellers to start a concerted effort to go down the digital path.

First, we must identify what is the nature of the primary change that needs to occur for the subsequent sequence of changes (that make up a digital transformation) to be able to take place.

As you may not be surprised to learn, the first step in the solution involves money! Unfortunately, there’s nothing else that’s likely to successfully motivate the required changes at the reseller level. This requirement for funds (of course) represents a problem, but it can be overcome as it doesn’t necessarily need to be provided for from additional funds that the industry cannot afford.

Money that already comes into the reseller community via the Tier-1 manufacturers rebates needs to be repurposed and paid according to newly negotiated metrics based on digital key performance indicators.

Repurposing Existing Funds

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just recalibrate calculation of rebates from a volume-driven plan to an alternative, digital plan. Part of the bargain that needs to be driven (if the Tier-1 manufacturers were understanding of the concept to eliminate volume driven rebates in favor of a suite of digital metrics) must also be to include a demand by the manufacturers for their resellers to implement radically different compensation plans for their sales personnel.

New key performance indicators for the reseller’s sales team must be established that are closely aligned with a series of new digital metrics negotiated by the manufacturers in order for resellers to qualify for their rebates. Everyone here (manufacturer, distributor, reseller, and reseller sales teams) must be dancing to the same tune!

I’ve explained all the key components necessary for a digital transformation elsewhere in this series and now I’ll present a framework for how a rebate plan could be structured to help incentivize resellers to transform their businesses into the digital world.

1,000 resellers tweeting 5 times each per day to a relevant Twitter audience of 2,000 each, can collectively be expected to generate 100,000,000 impressions per month!

The Twitter example above is presented in order to highlight the power of amplification and to open some eyes to the potential of an orchestrated marketing (i.e. OEM conversion) plan at this level of audience magnitude. Note, this example applies to just one social media platform, so think also about the additional audience amplification leveraging multiple platforms such as Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn alongside Twitter!

Performance metrics can quite easily be established for each of the major elements necessary for a digital transformation. Certifying the validity and accuracy of the performance for the purposes of calculating rebates is a little more challenging but, technically, not that difficult to accomplish.

Just imagine how much improvement a small to medium sized reseller of office products (with, for example, four salespersons) may be capable of if each of the salesmen carried a quota structured along the lines of the one shown in the table below.

Audience Development Quota – Four-Man Sales Team
Channel Start Mth. Quota Annual Quota 4-Man Team + 12 Mths.
Twitter Followers 150 50 600 2,400 2,550
Google+ Followers 10 10 120 480 490
LinkedIn Personal 800 8 96 384 1,184
LinkedIn Company 10 5 60 240 250
Facebook Followers 75 5 60 240 315
Facebook Likes 25 5 60 240 265
Email Contacts 500 25 300 1,200 1,700
Totals 1,570 108 1,296 5,184 6,754

 

Just imagine if 1,000 resellers were all aligned in their goals and launched similar strategies and achieved similar results. This would result in a combined [relevant] audience of nearly 7 million!

Now, that’s an audience of enough scale to make a difference so long as it’s targeted with a clearly orchestrated campaign with clearly defined objectives. One reseller working its socks off in a local market and it’s all but impossible to generate industry momentum. A thousand resellers working their socks off in their respective local markets, backed by a consistent and orchestrated marketing message, targeted at educating consumers on the reseller’s value proposition, is another matter. It should suffice to say, a lot more possibilities open up in terms of the ability to increase general awareness of the value proposition when leveraging a combined audience of 7 million!

Once the sales team is aligned with a compensation plan for achieving audience development goals then the manufacturer (or payer of the rebates) must demand the reseller set other, top-level, corporate goals such as web-traffic, domain authority, and social shares. The manufacturer, now knowing the reseller’s sales reps are aligned with the digital plan, can then restructure the old volume-based rebates far more heavily toward the digital components of the plan.

These digital components may be combined to form the weighted component of a compensation plan that can still be structured to include elements of the traditional sales and profit plans. For example, maybe 70% of the compensation plan is structured toward the digital goals and the remaining 30% tied to sales performance versus quota.

In this compensation plan structure, a smart salesperson will quickly be motivated, not only to focus on developing his or her relevant social audience but, also to start to understand how to use the power of social platforms for researching prospects and their key decision makers well in advance of any direct contact being made.

Read the blog I published on a fictitious office products reseller and its value proposition which explores a scenario for how these tactics may be made to work in a real selling environment.

Issues:

Nothing’s plain sailing and there are always issues and problems to overcome with the development and deployment of new ideas.

  • Unfortunately, the existing sources of cash [Tier-1 manufacturers] and the potential new sources [Chinese manufacturers] required for this concept, is currently not likely to be dispensed in accordance with a completely new set of digital metrics because, as we’ve seen, the cash dispersers themselves haven’t mastered the digital world. How on earth can they negotiate a new rebate plan with resellers based on something they themselves clearly don’t understand?
  • The aftermarket manufacturers, on the hook for paying the rebates, will incur short-term risk because there’s an unavoidable time lag between audience development, engagement and the subsequent conversion into new customers and revenue.
  • Changing reseller compensation plans will be resisted. Although the rebate payers have leverage, the proposal and implementation tactics must be carefully developed and presented.

I don’t believe these issues are insurmountable so long as sufficient positive thought is applied to overcoming or mitigating them. We’re at a pivotal point in determining the future of the independent resellers and what their role will be in the coming years. Furthermore, for there to be a sustainable future for the aftermarket segment of the office products industry, there’s no alternative but for the industry leaders to step up to their leadership roles both for their own sake as well as those of the resellers.

Conclusions:

It’s complex, it’s difficult, and it takes time. Unfortunately, none of these three characteristics are good omens for smaller, relatively unsophisticated resellers to deal with. One-thousand independent resellers (or five-thousand or five-hundred, or two for that matter) should not be expected to solve each of the issues (necessary for a successful digital transformation) independently of each other.

Let’s assume for a moment while staying with the one-thousand unit sample size, that there are twenty major issues or roadblocks in front of a successful digital transformation. A “go-it-alone” approach by one-thousand resellers would require them to solve a collective total of twenty-thousand issues. Of course, that hasn’t happened and it’s never going to happen unless something else changes to facilitate it.

A concerted top-down approach from the industry leaders in providing a turnkey solution that solves each of the twenty issues currently blocking reseller’s transformations, combined with a set of financial incentives designed to motivate the resellers to go down the digital transformation path, is the only realistic way the required transformation can be achieved.

These actions would form the foundations for change that are necessary for the beginnings of a digital revolution in the office products and business equipment reseller community to take place. In establishing these foundations suddenly, and quite simply, a viable path forward would be available to take!

 

Related Reading – Quick Links

Independent resellers in the office equipment and products channels face revenue losses of 35% or more over the next 4-years as market-shrink, price compression, and customer churn eat away the top line. A close look at analog vs digital tactics and strategy is necessary to turn the trend around.
As a budgeting exercise will show, the cost for a small business to execute a go-it-alone digital transformation strategy is usually the roadblock that prevents starting one in the first place. Learn more about the one-off costs and options for reducing the cost and mitigating the execution risk.
The path to improving the future outlook for office products and equipment dealerships and achieve digital business transformations is challenging. The current digital status is poor and, without improvements, the outlook for long-term survival is bleak!
Digital marketing for small business is an opportunity for establishing a competitive advantage in local markets and can start to build a significant enterprise value that’s usually associated with the development of sustainable, cost-effective, and relevant web traffic.
Independent office products and business equipment resellers social audience development efforts have largely stalled because owners don’t have a plan to realize the financial benefits of leveraging an audience to improve their online visibility and website traffic generation efforts.
There’s a quantitative side to web-traffic development and then there’s an artistic side that revolves around the creation of content. Without useful, relevant content there will be no web traffic and therefore there will be no audience engagement. Learn more about audience engagement tactics.
The complexity and the volume of work for resellers to execute a digital transformation are significant. Often, these are the reasons most of them have failed to start down the path but, when broken down into a series of smaller tasks, it possible to develop realistic digital performance goals.
Many independent resellers ask why social media? Not all social media platforms are equal and some are more intuitive than others. With Twitter being littered with hundreds of dormant office products and business equipment reseller accounts, we assess its potential role.
When combining information technology and inbound digital marketing alongside conventional sales tactics with a personal presence in local markets, it can improve small business online visibility and help establish the foundation for digital business transformations.
Many office product and business equipment resellers don’t know where to start for a digital transformation. However, implementing sales compensation plans to motivate stakeholders in the area of audience development and web traffic are key! Learn more about ways to create digital comp plans.
Office products and equipment resellers face a dilemma to implement a digital solution for executing their digital business transformations while competitors already on the path are building sustainable competitive advantages. Learn more about building a foundation for a transformation.
Office Products and Supplies resellers cannot survive if they continue to use analog technology in a digital world. Learn more about the use of technology to support a compelling value proposition and the path to a digital business transformation.

By the time you’ve read this entire page, it should come as no surprise that the foundation for a digital transformation is a rule-conforming, content-rich, and mobile-responsive website – a website you can rely on to promote your brand 24/7, that’s fully integrated with social media and email marketing tools, and has a clear lead conversion strategy.

Click the website image below to learn more!

 

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