Whether you are a startup brand looking to get your products into retail or foodservice for the first time, or a more established brand looking to expand your distribution, at some point, you will come across RangeMe and ask yourself, “Is a RangeMe subscription worth it?”
The purpose of this post is to give you all of the information you need to answer that question for yourself, by making sure you are aware of all of the features, benefits and opportunities that the platform offers for your business across each of its subscription tiers. But I’m confident that, once you have this information, you’ll be able to answer the question above with a resounding, “YES!”
Here’s why: RangeMe is the smartest, easiest and quickest way to get your brand in front of thousands of retail and foodservice buyers. How does RangeMe accomplish this? It does so in several ways, by providing brands with:
- An “Always on” brand exposure
- Exclusive retail discovery opportunities
- Data-driven insights and analysis
- Education and support resources
Below, we’ll take a deep-dive into each of these.
Always-on brand exposure
It all starts with your RangeMe Brand profile page. Your Brand profile is where you highlight your products, capabilities, unique story and points of differentiation through images, videos and text, and we provide step-by-step guidance in building your profile page to ensure maximum discoverability and impact. This is your digital sales sheet, if you will.
Your profile is always on, always out there, highlighting your brand 24/7/365 to our buyer community. You can get started at no cost with a Free Subscription, so there is no reason NOT to have one – it’s just one more additional opportunity to get discovered by buyers.
Keep in mind, though, that you get out of RangeMe what you put into it. Just because it may be Free doesn’t mean you can just give it minimal attention and expect to get amazing buyer engagement. If you want serious buyer engagement, you need to put some time into developing a serious profile. Make sure the images are hi-res and professionally done.
Have a banner that calls out your hero products and points of differentiation (see the Sugar Bliss banner below for a great example). Be sure that the copy is SEO-friendly and includes relevant keywords so that the right buyers can find your page during searches, and be sure that all of your relevant certifications are indicated.
Remember, your profile is the first thing buyers will see, whether they find you via search or a product submission, so you want a profile that will grab their attention. A fully optimized profile can actually do the buyer engagement for you, something that Sara Delaney, Founder and CEO of Sarilla, discovered firsthand.
Last summer, she was at a college and university show in D.C., and met with many university buyers who were interested in her product and said she should be working with Vistar, a foodservice distributor that services universities. So she tracked down the buyer on LinkedIn, who asked her to start doing the vendor paperwork.
“I met her in person a few weeks later, and when I started doing my presentation, she cut me off,” says Delaney. “She told me she already saw me on RangeMe and knew what we’re about, and wanted to work with us, because they were looking for women-owned brands like ours. I don’t know how that would have gone if we weren’t on RangeMe; she may not have even replied to us.”
To build on the solid foundation of a strong profile page, RangeMe offers several subscription tiers, beginning with Starter (which is $99 a year), and including Premium and Pro options, to unlock additional opportunities for exposure and buyer engagement.
Exclusive discovery opportunities
Our exclusive discovery opportunities transform RangeMe from a passive platform on which your products can be discovered into one of buyer outreach. All RangeMe Starter subscribers have the opportunity to participate in Immediate Opportunities – which are buyer discovery and sourcing campaigns around specific categories or themes (like sustainability, private label or supplier diversity) during which buyers are actively looking to review new brands and products.
These campaigns are initiated by the retailer or foodservice operator whenever they have a specific sourcing need or upcoming category review, and RangeMe hosts approximately 400 of these campaigns each year for retailers like CVS Health, Dollar General, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Kroger, TikTok Shop and Walmart.
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These Immediate Opportunities are very effective ways of engaging with buyers, as there is no better time to submit your products to a buyer than when they are actively reviewing your category, and many of the retail and foodservice deals that our brands get come from participation in Immediate Opportunities.
Sugar Bliss is a case-in-point. Over the past two years the brand has applied to 15 Immediate Opportunity campaigns, secured deals with KeHE Distributors and Compass Group for its gourmet cookies, and is in conversations with a half dozen others – all from these submissions. Other brands that have seen success from these include 8 Track Foods, Sarilla and GearHaul.
Keep in mind that some of these Immediate Opportunities include a meeting component – either in person at an ECRM Session or virtually via ECRM’s virtual platform, ECRM Connect, and if you are selected for one of these meetings, there may be an additional cost (including travel expenses, if the retailer holds these meetings in person). But, since landing one of these meetings means you have gotten one step closer to success, it’s well worth the investment. After all, buyers do not travel to meet suppliers, and setting up one of these retailer meetings on your own requires a much greater time- and resource commitment vs. having us do it for you!
“These active campaigns that come through – such as buyers looking for women-owned or locally-grown brands – are very powerful,” says 8 Track Foods Founder Maggie Sadowski. “Our Meijer deal, for example, came from a submission we made via RangeMe to the Meijer Localization Summit, which got us into 250 stores.”
8 Track Foods and Sugar Bliss also do direct submissions to retailers. This feature is available to Premium subscribers, and it enables brands to submit their products directly to participating retailers or foodservice operators at any time, once per year per retailer or foodservice operator.
It’s yet another way to proactively leverage RangeMe to boost engagement with retailers, and Sugar Bliss has made at least 50 of these submissions over the past two years, resulting in the opening of several new conversations with buyers. “I was very interested in the ability for Premium subscribers to make direct submissions to retailers,” says Ging. “That’s why I signed up for a Premium subscription right away.”
Data-driven insights
RangeMe also empowers its brands with rich insights on buyer and market behavior to help them better position and market their products and maximize potential opportunities. All Premium and Pro subscribers can review buyer activity around their profile and products. This gives them a window into which buyer companies have reviewed their profile, which products they have viewed, and how much time they have spent viewing each product. This information can guide the brand-owner as to which products are resonating most with the buyer community.
“In the insights section you can learn how a buyer arrived at your profile, and that is very powerful information to have,” says Sarilla’s Delaney. “Was it based on a targeted search? Were they browsing a specific collection? Maybe they were looking for specific certifications. I think many brands overlook the insights, but you can get some great information there that can help guide your business.”
These insights help direct Delaney in her interactions with buyers both on and off the platform. “There is a checklist of actions that it triggers,” she says. “For example, this week I noticed that some key retailers we’ve been trying to get in front of have been checking out our profile. So I’ll check to see when they will be reviewing beverages, and I’ll make sure to submit my products to them through RangeMe.”
RangeMe Premium and Pro subscribers also have free access to category-level insights from NIQ’s Extended All-Outlet Combined (xAOC) multichannel market data through a new offering aimed at leveling the playing field for emerging brands.
This data is segmented by week, facilitating year-over-year comparisons for both promotional and non-promotional retail sales and enables brands to identify seasonal trends, track category growth, and pinpoint opportunities for sales and promotional activities within their segments.
In addition to xAOC data, RangeMe Premium and Pro subscribers can leverage competitive insights powered by NIQ, uncovering the top-selling products and fastest-growing brands on the platform within their categories.
“There is a lot of value in that data,” says Michael Russo, Chief Growth Officer of Wild Bill’s Craft Beverage Co. “Data today is like gold because it’s expensive for a bootstrapped brand. We use it as a source of validation and to see which segments are popular. The trending lists are helpful too. I learned that Wild Bill’s was a top trending product on RangeMe, so I took a screenshot of that data and have been sending it off to buyers.”
Education and support resources
We know that many brands on RangeMe are in their early stages, and may be relatively new to the CPG & foodservice space. To help arm them with the knowledge that will help them grow and succeed, RangeMe provides a wealth of education and support services to support their growth, including:
- Pitch decks
- Learning sessions
- Retail readiness courses
- Interviews with senior merchants from leading retail chains
- Best practices case studies of successful brands
- How-to guides
What does Success on RangeMe look like?
So what does success look like for RangeMe subscribers? Well, we know that sometimes brands start a RangeMe subscription with certain expectations, so let’s start off first by level setting some of these expectations.
First, RangeMe is NOT a replacement for your sales team. We increase your exposure to buyers, but once you connect, your sales team takes it from there. In fact, your sales team is a critical part of RangeMe, as they are the ones to act on the introductions made via the platform. To this point, RangeMe cannot guarantee that your brand will secure shelf space. That comes from the communications between your brand and the buyers, as does any follow up or negotiations of deals or contracts. In addition, we don’t engage in marketing or promotional activities specific to a brand’s products.
Success for brands comes in the form of expanded visibility, strategic buyer connections made on the platform, and enhanced readiness for retail opportunities based on the insights and resources available on the platform.
Indeed, Sarilla’s Delaney summed it up perfectly when she discussed how she benefitted from RangeMe in a blog interview: “RangeMe is not necessarily the place where you are going to close a deal, though it has happened for us,” she says. “What it does is move a cold lead into a warm lead and starts to build that buyer relationship.”
Indeed, RangeMe should be a key part of your overall strategy of moving buyers into your sales funnel. And Delaney makes great use of the tools it provides to ensure optimal exposure for her brand and to gain the insights she needs to engage buyers once a dialogue begins.
Actually getting your products on the shelf or onto a foodservice menu could take months, or it could take years. All of the brands that have seen success on RangeMe have experienced both scenarios. The timing is based on several factors between the brand, buyers and the market, such as strong follow up, review timing, product-market-fit, and so on.
With 15,000 buyers on RangeMe, there are many such opportunities for brands to successfully engage with buyers. RangeMe’s role in all of this – and where it excels – is making sure that you are fully ready to take advantage of these opportunities when they come!