How do you grow your product manufacturing business in a world where retail avenues appear to be shrinking? Welcome to the second episode of This Works Marketing Live, our weekly Facebook Live show we produce and air every Wednesday, where we discuss business marketing news, strategy, as well as interview some of the most interesting people from the world of business marketing today!

When you look at business news, it would appear that a new product has fewer and fewer options to find space at retail. Smaller brick and mortar stores across the nation are closing, while big box stores, if they aren’t going out of business, are scaling back their operations dramatically. Online retail provides many new and innovative options, but how does any one company have any leverage with a massive retailer like Amazon, that already carries seemingly unlimited products in your category? What is a business to do when the cost of doing business begins to seemingly outweigh the benefits?

Fortunately, strategies exist to not only create a stronger identity for your product or service with your customers, but to find entirely new streams of customers you didn’t previously reach, which at the same time makes your company less reliant on retailers, whether brick and mortar or online — which also gives you a leg up on dealing with them. What Ken discusses in this week’s episode is a way to change the way you think about how marketing is done, by more directly reaching out to individual customers through performance marketing tactics.

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