Mohawk Flooring has a truly impressive digital strategy for supporting their independent retailers and making them better marketers. They offer a solid mix of co-branded content to their dealers as well as a variety of tools and resources to help make them better businesspeople. 
To find out more, we sat down with Mollie Surratt, Senior Director of Public Relations and Content at Mohawk Flooring. As part of this role, Mollie is responsible for engaging their retailer channel with the latest branded content.
The biggest challenge for our retailers is that in the last 5-10 years the consumer has become more in control of the path to purchase. A majority of today’s consumers shop for flooring online before walking into the store (i.e. manufacturers sites, Pinterest), and they are more knowledgeable about costs, styles, fibers, etc. The industry will change more in the next 5 years than it has in the last 30 years. This transformation is being driven by digital technology and innovation. And Mohawk is positioning its retail partners to lead in this change.
To remove the intimidation retailers feel from this digital shift, Mohawk provides their Aligned Partners (an elite dealer subset) with a suite of strategic digital tools. Mohawk’s goal is to help our retail partners tap into the power of digital marketing, connect with those in-market consumers searching for flooring and guide them in to our partners stores so they can sell more Mohawk and Karastan branded products.
Mohawk University is well-recognized in the industry and offers pro-active, ongoing training sessions to retailers across a breadth of topics. In 2015, Mohawk University will be offering ongoing webinars on Social Media Successes. With Promoboxx, we feel that it fulfills a digital content gap for our retailers, but is also a great awareness and relationship builder tool.
Mohawk’s success is centered around the success of our retailer base. Our Aligned Partners have embraced Promoboxx, and the platform has improved and enhanced our digital offerings by providing a simple, effective content marketing solution. For our digital needs, working with our retailers through Promoboxx has contributed to the overall growth of our online presence.
Over a two-year partnership, we’ve experienced:
Everything we do at Mohawk is designed to drive consumers to our retail partners for a fully integrated shopping experience. Over the past 24 months, we’ve made significant investments to help connect consumers to retail partners through a variety of tools, and Promoboxx has been an integral part of this success.
Mohawk makes listening a priority and keeps our retailers’ local markets in mind. In the past, our retailers expressed the need for more exciting lifestyle images and non-static flooring images. We’ve risen to meet that challenge and have incorporated more of that content style into the mix.
We’ve received extremely positive retailer feedback about offering content through Promoboxx as part of our digital strategy. We feel that the platform eliminates the intimidation that some retailers may have about digital marketing.
At Mohawk, we truly believe content is king. While flooring may not be as exciting of an industry as some others, it’s very important to keep the content fresh, exciting, and new.
Our content includes a mix of overall home and lifestyle content (i.e. cleaning tips, recipes, entertaining tips) and product-focused content. This content variety is important as we want our retailers to build consumer relationships in their respective local markets and retain their social media following. Here are some examples:
It’s easy to see just how passionate Mohawk is about supporting their retailers and helping to make them better marketers. We thank Mollie for her time and sharing her thoughts on retail marketing in the flooring industry!
