At the corporate level, the brand was doing a great job leveraging their high-quality marketing assets on their own social pages, however, they faced several challenges in distributing their content across their network of independent dealers’ social media pages.
For starters, creating a central hub where dealers could access the marketing resources was possible, but like many brands, they faced a challenge in getting their independent dealers to comply with their marketing request. The primary aspect of their challenge lay in the fact that many of their independent dealerships had either no marketing department, an agency that handled their marketing on their behalf–with tight budgets and marketing plans already in place–or a single staff member who “moonlighted” as their marketing department, in concert with their primary job functions. The barrier of connectivity to their dealers’ social pages meant that they had to rely on their dealers finding time to log in, download the assets, and post on their social pages.
With an overall goal of increasing brand awareness during their milestone anniversary, the brand looked to build a dealer portal to store and provide to their dealers the curated user generated content. The content was curated and stored in a portal, with the hope that their dealers would actively navigate to the portal, log in, search for appropriate content, and share it on their social pages on a regular cadence.
Though the brand tried to simplify the process for their dealers as much as they could, because dealers had to initiate the process, poor results from the campaign were seen. Out of their 173 North American dealers, only 43 of their dealers followed the process and posted the anniversary UGC. Moreover, of the 43 who posted content, many only posted once. There was very little posting frequency which led to many marketing assets never being posted.
With ThumbStopper, 100% of participating dealers have content posted to their social media pages on a regular frequency, often times twice per week. Our patented automation software ensures every dealer receives high-quality brand-created content, with frequency and timing controlled at the brand level.
What’s more, content is easily segmented so that dealers only receive content and promotions for the products they sell. Brands on the ThumbStopper platform simply tag the content with the appropriate region, product, or language. Dealers with matching tags receive the content automatically.
In line with social platform algorithm best practices, the same piece of content is never syndicated to dealers at the same time on the same day. Using ThumbStopper’s patented AI solution in our Brand Manager™ software, brand-approved content is disseminated so that no two dealers receive the same content on the same day at the same time. This ensures that social media algorithms don’t view the content as “spammy” or “automated”, which affects the organic reach platforms like Instagram and Facebook are willing to give to the content. Higher reach means more eyes on brand content that is pushed natively through to the local dealers’ social pages.
To ensure brand-to-dealer connectivity, ThumbStopper proactively reaches out to a brand’s entire retail network, handling the connection process. Our team of Brand Concierges request access to each dealer’s social page, and walk them through the easy process of accepting our request. Once the connection is complete, content automatically flows from the brand to the dealer’s’ social pages via the ThumbStopper Brand Manager. Dealers never have to learn any new software, remember a log in, or choose, schedule, edit, or post content from the brand again.