How to Build a Digital Strategy That Drives Retail Opportunities

Your brand may be executing impressive content, campaigns, and overall strategy on a national level, but are you extending this wealth down to the local retail level?

Mollie Surratt, Senior Director of PR, Social Media, and Content at Mohawk Flooring, knows a thing or two about “sharing the love.” As part of her recent session at the 2016 Aligned Conference, she gave us the inside scoop on Mohawk’s national digital and social strategy and how they scale it to drive opportunity to their local retailers.

mollie surratt mohawk flooring at aligned conference

Mollie Surratt of Mohawk Flooring speaks at the 2016 Aligned Conference

Here are four takeaways on how to build a digital strategy that drives retail opportunities:

Seek out creative partnerships
Get involved in cause marketing and local communities
Adopt an “always-on” campaign strategy
Create a deep bench of content

1. Seek out creative partnerships.

A majority of consumers now rely on consumer reviews before making a purchase, and it can be time-consuming for a local retailer to crawl the Internet to try and determine what their digital reputation looks like.

In order to help their local retailers with this challenge of reputation management and improve their overall reviews on a local level, Mohawk got creative and introduced a program with Yelp in early July 2016 (the first marketing partnership between Yelp and a flooring manufacturer).

Why partner with Yelp? Here are just a few reasons:

Mohawk’s retailers were telling them about the tremendous impact Yelp was having on their foot traffic and business overall.
Yelp is the true “word-of-mouth” platform. Whether going to a restaurant, a car dealership, or a flooring retailer, chances are that consumers are now checking them out on Yelp first.
Yelp’s target demographics were very in line with Mohawk’s target demographics. Over 161 million consumers are using Yelp, and the majority of them are going on with the intent to make a purchase. In other words: a very qualified consumer in terms of being ready to purchase.

Since the Yelp program launched in July 2016, Mohawk has seen a 20% increase in the number of leads they have driven to their local retailers.

2. Get involved in cause marketing and local communities.

Mollie’s team also handles all cause marketing for Mohawk Flooring, a crucial part of who they are as a company. They work with great care and consideration for the local communities of their retailers, employees, and beyond.

Example Mohawk retailer Facebook share

One of their main cause marketing partnerships has been with Komen, the world’s largest nonprofit source of funding for the fight against breast cancer. Working together for over ten years, a portion of the sales of certain Mohawk products on the commercial and residential sides of the business go directly to Komen.

Mohawk’s retailers love this program because it’s a great cause, but also because Mohawk does a lot of program activations at a local grassroots level and helps retailers to spread the word about fundraising walks around the country.

3. Adopt an “always-on” campaign strategy.

Mohawk has been executing what they refer to as an “always-on” digital and social campaign strategy to consistently deliver leads to retailers year-round.

If you go to Mohawk’s social channels, they are nearly always running some type of sweepstakes, contest, or activity to drive consumer engagement and leads to their local retailers. To push these lead opportunities even further, Mohawk enters contest and sweepstakes entrants into a drip email marketing campaign.

While strategies like this certainly help Mohawk on a national brand level (allowing them to see a 25% increase in organic social followers and become a social media leader in the flooring industry), they also allow them to capitalize on local retail opportunities and deliver a steady flow of leads.

4. Create a deep bench of content.

Mohawk is a content machine, constantly creating a variety of content to keep consumers reading and engaging on digital channels.

How does Mohawk create so much content, though? They look outside the company. For their blog, they work with leading lifestyle and interior design bloggers to contribute content. They also work with an overall network of 250 bloggers and counting that they’ve built over the past few years. This network is utilized to create content around key events and campaigns.

Another content opportunity came about in spring 2016 when Mohawk partnered with Fox on an integrated, under-contract agreement to donate the flooring for a new home improvement TV show by the creators of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. This provided them with an entire summer of amazing content, photography, videos, and other digital activations.

While all of this brand content is great for Mohawk and its national social channels, it also provides their local retailers with a great deal of opportunities for social promotion and local customer engagement. By providing retailers with a varied array of content, Mohawk helps them to remain active on social, continually engage local customers, and keep both Mohawk and the storefront top of mind.

This great session comes from our third annual Aligned Conference (September 2016, Boston). It’s the only conference that brings together digital trade and retail marketers across all industries to share marketing strategies that empower their local retailers.

Promoboxx Helps Mohawk Flooring “Share the Love”

How does Mohawk extend the wealth and opportunity of their national digital brand content and campaigns down to the local retail level? Promoboxx helps them get there.

With Promoboxx, Mohawk promotes national digital marketing campaigns with their local retailers across digital channels, amplifying brand awareness and driving in-store traffic.

Hear why Mohawk Flooring’s Mollie Surratt loves using Promoboxx to support their local retailers:

Want to learn more? Check out the case study for Mohawk’s award-winning Love Your Floor Sale campaign, which led to 300 lead form submissions and resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in directly-attributed sales.