The team at Groton, Massachusetts-based manufacturer DFS often begins with this thought: Distributors are busy, and they don't want to waste time. How can we make life easier for them, and give them tools to help them succeed?
That's an important question for a company that provides more than 2,000 business products to distributors, including labels, full-color printing, checks and banking supplies, promotional products, tax forms and more.
"We did some research among our dealers and wanted to see what kept them up at night," says Fred Collins, president of DFS. "One of their biggest pain points was business development and marketing — getting new customers and consistently winning more business. We wanted to give them more tools at their fingertips to do just that."
As a solution, the DFS team created a marketing portal at myDFShub.com. Distributors can visit the site and access three categories of material:
- Professionally designed banner ads in multiple sizes that distributors can download and place on their own sites to build their digital marketing presence — end users who click on the ads are directed to a microsite where they can view more product information, enter lead-generation data and place orders
- Marketing materials (sales sheets, brochures, etc.) that distributors can personalize and quickly print or email to clients and prospects
- An email marketing tool with predesigned templates, powered by third-party firm Vertical Response, that distributors can customize and send to their client and prospect lists
"Our goal for myDFShub.com was not to make it self-serving for DFS, but rather to push out great content that’s valuable to distributors," Collins says. "The goal is to drive growth and revenue for dealers. We want to help our dealers say 'yes' to more customers. myDFS hub is free for our partners."
This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of PS Magazine.
