STIHL produces the best-selling brand of chainsaws and a full line of outdoor power tools including blowers, trimmers, brush cutters, and construction tools. STIHL Limited, their Canadian subsidiary, is supported by more than 1,000 authorized, full-service dealers coast to coast.
When ThumbStopper® reached out to STIHL Ltd., they were running a co-op marketing program with minimal success. They found very few dealers taking advantage of their program and many using their co-op marketing funds inefficiently on one-off ads and branded merchandise.
At the time, STIHL Ltd. used a marketing library to house their content assets, but they discovered their dealers had trouble accessing assets, often forgot their passwords, and neglected to ask for help.
STIHL Ltd. knew that the best way to maximize the return of their co-op marketing program was through a more targeted and coordinated approach that was also convenient for their dealers.
STIHL Ltd. needed a simple and automated solution that wouldn’t require dealers to invest a lot of time and energy into the program. The ThumbStopper team presented them with the ultimate solution: An intuitive platform designed to bridge the content gap between brands and their retailers.
Maintaining social media platforms is a critical element of a business’s marketing plan. STIHL dealers are independently owned organizations and we recognized that a solution to build both the STIHL brand in conjunction with a dealer’s brand was needed. The Thumbstopper platform provides this solution. Locally owned dealers participate in their social communities, informing their customers with relevant and updated content created and maintained by STIHL thereby building both their brand and ours.
Dave Warren, President, STIHL Ltd.
The results speak for themselves, we doubled our targets in the first 3 months and achieved our secondary goal a year ahead of schedule!
Jeff Loosemore – Marketing Manager
After receiving a demo of ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager, the team at STIHL Ltd. was impressed by seeing the organic reach they could achieve. Not only could Brand Manager™ streamline their co-op marketing program, but it could also increase dealer participation and ensure their branded assets are used and shared on social media.
The team at ThumbStopper worked with STIHL Ltd. to create educational and promotional collateral, smartly distributed to their territory managers and dealers. The white-labeled experience made it clear that this program was an extension of STIHL, the brand the dealers already knew and trusted. Informational one-pagers and webinars complemented a proven series of emails that were sent to the dealers. A simple sign up page allowed dealers to customize the content they wanted to showcase on their social properties. Most importantly, the Account Growth team at ThumbStopper was fully briefed on the program details and called on dealers to explain the program, get them comfortable, and get them enrolled.
While STIHL Ltd. anticipated 250 dealer enrollments in the first 90 days, the actual enrollment count was 594. A staggering 138% more dealers enrolled than originally anticipated.
With all of those dealers connected, STIHL Ltd. began syndicating content out to their dealers immediately. Using ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager, STIHL Ltd.’s social media manager can store and manage all of their social media assets in one place while automating their content distribution across their dealers’ social media pages. By leveraging ThumbStopper’s automation, within the first six months of implementation, for every one post that STIHL Ltd. made to their own brand’s Facebook page, STIHL Ltd. made an additional 145 posts on average through their dealers’ pages. With all of their dealers’ posts combined, STIHL Ltd. reached an average of 28,574 fans per post. This is a whopping 364% increase in Organic Reach for the “dealers” and the brand.