Partnering on Digital Marketing: Partnerships with suppliers and other experts can help build store traffic and close more deals – June 2024

By Jennifer Bardoner

With fewer consumers shopping for new flooring due to the current inflation and interest rates, leads have become increasingly important, yet harder to generate. Carole Cross, managing director of Mobile Marketing, a Cyncly company, explains the importance of lead generation simply: “Without leads and people coming in your store, you don’t really have a business.” Attracting potential customers can happen in a variety of ways but strong partnerships are key.

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS
Prior to the Internet, would-be customers would find a store based on proximity or word-of-mouth. Perhaps they’d seen a billboard or heard a radio advertisement promoting the business. While those are still viable pathways to potential clients, the Internet has changed the roadmap.

“Almost every shopper now starts their journey online, so every dealer needs to know how to reach customers digitally,” says Reid Waxman, a senior manager with Roomvo. “Dealers don’t always know which digital solutions are out there to drive shoppers to their website or store, which means they could be missing out on opportunities.”

Amid today’s digital landscape, lead generation is extremely nuanced and difficult for most retailers to execute on their own, especially if they want to do it well.

“People will say, ‘It’s easy; just turn on some ads, turn on some Facebook,’ but there is expertise and skill in really understanding how to work these channels,” Cross says. “It’s something everybody thinks they can do themselves, but they typically fail.”

Mobile Marketing was recently named a Google Premier Partner, denoting its ranking among the top 3% of all Google advertisers worldwide. In addition to independently working with retailers to hone their digital media presence and related marketing campaigns, Mobile Marketing partners with Shaw to provide tailored services for its Shaw Flooring Network (SFN) group of aligned retailers via the manufacturer’s Velocity digital marketing platform. Likewise, Broadlume powers Mohawk’s Omnify program for its Edge retail partners.

“Before we got really serious with Omnify, we were doing lead generation on our own,” says Brett Bentz, owner of Harrisburg Wall & Flooring in Pennsylvania. “One of the hardest parts on your own is having the people to do it. Every day you set time aside to do it, but it seems like something jumps in front.”

And working with a local media buyer unfamiliar with the flooring industry proved equally difficult since flooring is niche and technical, he adds. SFN member Jason Jabara, CEO of Jabara’s Carpet Outlet in Wichita, Kansas, says the money he saves by partnering with Velocity far outweighs the cost of using a local agency that doesn’t know anything about flooring, something he also learned from experience.

“Unless you have somebody on your staff who’s going to attentively monitor activity on your site and what’s working and what’s not and what your ultimate cost is per click or per lead, I think it’s extremely important to partner with somebody that’s very focused on our industry,” says Deb DeGraaf, a member of the National Floorcovering Alliance (NFA) who co-owns Michigan’s DeGraaf Interiors. Though she participates in both Edge and SFN, she works independently with Mobile Marketing. “Have I come up with some good marketing ideas?” she adds. “Sure. But it’s about having the right eyes in the right spots.”

Successful retailers utilize a variety of avenues to advertise their products and services. “The more leads you have, the more likely you are to close a sale-it’s a numbers game,” Waxman explains.

Cross advises reinvesting 6% to 7% of total sales into advertising and funneling two thirds of that spend into digital marketing. Until DeGraaf began partnering with Mobile Marketing, she admits she wasn’t spending enough to generate a real return on her investment.

“It may seem obvious to most people, but the more money you spend for greater saturation, the more return you’re going to have,” says the retailer. “If you set a super-low budget and you’re only able to sprinkle, that money will likely go to waste. When I started, I was budget-conscious, and I had very little activity. Now I have five, sometimes ten leads a day that come in. They’re not all great leads, but there are a lot of really good leads in there.”

Bentz says that his “Mohawk leads are great because they’ve already been searching for flooring,” but he also does independent campaigns “looking for the next customer that might not always be looking for flooring.” While the majority of his leads, as many as 20 per week, come through Mohawk, he views the tag team approach as a win/win, noting, “We’re getting co-op money to use toward the lead for the next customer.”

A NEW TOOL
Google recently introduced a new tool to help retailers close the loop with their ad spends. Store Visits tracks customers’ in-person visits to stores after they’ve seen a related ad with the feature enabled, tangibly measuring the efficacy of specific campaigns.

“Because we’re doing this with the intent of generating a store visit as the outcome, you can then have Google go do more of that and find more Store Visit clients that are out there,” Dave Geipel, vice president of sales and marketing for Mobile Marketing, explains. “What did they respond to that made them drive to you? You’re able to then reoptimize that campaign the next time.”

PARTNERING FOR AWARENESS
Manufacturer websites provide a low-effort way for retailers to connect with shoppers. Citing organic Google traffic metrics, Cross reports that Mohawk and Shaw receive millions of unique visits each month between their various brands. And those are people who are actively searching for flooring, she notes, though Waxman points out that such consumers are at various points in their sales journey-they may not be ready to talk to a local retailer yet, or they may have already partnered with one.

“You can’t rely solely on leads generated from manufacturers’ websites because those are people out there just looking for ideas,” says DeGraaf. “It’s more the awareness that manufacturer websites offer independent retailers when people are searching in their market, so hopefully, when it does come time to shop, they remember us.”

Even when manufacturer-supplied leads do pan out, Jabara says that when those numbers get drilled down to the hyperlocal level, they are not always super-impactful. But they illustrate the power of brands, says Cross, who recommends including select manufacturer brand names in retailer advertising.

“We’re doing some billboards and some radio, and everything has ‘Mohawk’ in it, so if they forget the store’s name, they might remember Mohawk,” Bentz says.

Most agree that there are very few consumer-recognized flooring brands, but Cross says that through creative content, even smaller and unestablished brands can help their retail partners. In addition to key features and benefits, manufacturers can offer helpful content around selection criteria, design trends and other topics related to their products.

“There is a lot more value than just a brand name that manufacturers can bring,” she says. “Some might bring value with content and education. Some might bring value with a phenomenal product that has additional features people will look for. Retailers still need to tell a story about why somebody needs to buy flooring from them, and they are not always great at coming up with the creative elements about why somebody would want to buy a product, and that’s what manufacturers do really well.”

By all accounts, Coretec and Karastan are among the few recognized flooring brands. DeGraaf reports that Mohawk’s biannual National Karastan Month is “always very positively received,” adding that the resultant leads are typically more lucrative due to the definitive timeline.

Such national campaigns can also help retailers enhance their own advertising with premade marketing materials that can typically be customized while also providing a lift for their ads. Though not everyone has access to co-op money to supplement their marketing budget like Bentz and Jabara, the increased ad concentration around national promotions can amplify retailers’ related personal promotions.

In Bentz’s and Jabara’s case, the additional co-op money they receive helps them spread their budget so they can run their campaigns longer or try some new things. Jabara says it’s “probably the biggest way Shaw helps me.”

PARTNERING FOR THE SALE
When it comes to closing leads, the most important aspect is simply following up, but that’s not always as easy as it sounds. Independent retailers often have small staffs, who can get pulled in different directions throughout the day, and they may also have tenured personnel who have not fully adapted their mindset to the digital age.

Bentz says he used to try to divvy up the leads between his staff for follow-up but has found that having a dedicated person is more effective. Jabara employs a similar method, separating his leads into buckets depending on the call to action from which they stem.

“It’s important that you’re making sure you can keep connected to that customer,” says Geipel. “Every phone call counts these days. You have to be more serious about it.”

That includes arming yourself with all the customer information available to you so that you can tailor each interaction. For instance, he notes that more than 75% of customers are interacting with a site through their mobile device, which offers unique opportunities to engage with them. Likewise, knowing if they found you through a manufacturer’s site can provide product information that can help guide the conversation.

“We find that the customer you’re communicating with throughout the whole process is actually going to be a happier customer at the end,” he says. “And if you can get a happier customer, you’re going to get a better review, and they will tell people about you.”

QUALITY LEADS
Leads are not all equal. Their true value lies in retailers being able to convert them into sales, and the farther down the funnel shoppers are, the more likely it is that a retailer can move them to purchase.

DeGraaf, who has a reported 60% to 70% closing rate, notes, “We ask the question, ‘Are you looking to buy in a year, six months, immediately?’ If they put anything in terms of a timeline, I look at that as a qualified lead, and we pursue them.”

Jabara agrees, explaining that while the coupon on his website generates roughly half of his 30 to 40 leads each week, the higher quality ones come from visitors who fill out the installation or shop-at-home requests.

“Generally, the more quality leads are the people on our site who have an idea of what they want done and not just the money flashing in front of them,” he says, adding, “The more data you can get, the easier it is to turn into a purchase. Simply putting out Facebook posts with a link to your website doesn’t generate leads.”

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