A common theme that comes up in conversations with dealers is that marketing your own businesses locally can be challenging. How many companies have access to a dedicated marketing team? How many have all the marketing resources they can use?
As a DMP dealer, you do have access to a dedicated marketing team. They just happen to reside in Springfield, Missouri. And you do have access to all the marketing resources you can use. I’m going to show you how to get to some of them.
You’re probably already familiar with Marketing Central. It’s a great repository of resources and tools you can use to market your own business. But it’s only part of a larger program we call the Dealer Marketing Program. That consists of several things: the Private Label Program, a Custom Video Library, of course Marketing Central, and Dealer Admin — which has marketing tools you may not even be aware of.
Private Label Program
The Private Label Program lets you put your name in front of your customers every time they pass by or use their system’s keypad. No matter what kind of keypad you have, there is a customization feature for it. For physical keypads, there are custom keypad inserts that we will brand with your logo. They’re back-illuminated, so they stand out nicely, creating a constant, professional branding opportunity for you.
For touchscreen keypads, there are two different programs. For 5- and 7-inch keypads, we can do basic customization, which keeps your contact information and your logo in front of your customers. For the 5-inch keypads, we do that through SD cards, loaded with your logo and contact information. We’ll get those SD cards to you and you can install them directly into the keypads. For 7-inch keypads, you can do it for free by yourself right through Dealer Admin.
There’s also a fully customized option for 5- and 7-inch touchscreen keypads, where we’ll work with you and our development team to make dynamic, polished animated screens. In all cases, the contact information on display is editable and updatable through Dealer Admin. If your phone number changes, if your email address changes, if you expand or move your office, that information can be updated immediately into those custom keypads, so your customers always know how to reach you.
We also offer custom branded credentials through our friends at Farpointe. They are laser etched, high quality, durable and make a great presentation for your brand. That way your logo is always literally in your customer’s pocket all the time. All these options reflect our belief that it’s your brand that should be promoted — not ours. We believe the best way for DMP to succeed is to help our dealers succeed. You’ll see that approach in everything we do — in all the ways we support you.
Custom Videos
Our Custom Video Library consists of dozens of high quality videos (59 as of this writing), all of which can be customized with your logo, your contact information and even your brand colors. They’re on a variety of topics in a variety of styles, including a brand new animated video series — how-to videos targeted to end users. There are also some market-specific videos for residential, commercial and small business.
These videos are ready to go as is. You can use them on your websites, your social media, in office, during sales visits with prospective clients — any way you choose. The way we embed your logo in them is seamless, making it look like they were built for you from the start. They’re branded with not only your logo and your contact information, but your brand colors as well. We can provide all 59 or any that you choose. Turnaround is two to five business days. But right now we’re currently tracking at under two days. If you’re interested, I would love to see you flood us with requests. Put us to the test and see how quickly we can turn those around for you.
Marketing Central
Marketing Central is your repository for high quality marketing resources across a wide variety of items, including stock and product photography, ready-to-go social media content, email content and lots of quality marketing literature. Much of it is customizable with your name, your logo and your contact information.
Think of Marketing Central as sort of a storefront for all these resources. If you go to Photography, we break it down by category for you so we can provide whatever you’re looking for. High quality product photos, lifestyle photos, installation photos that you can use in your own collateral, on your own website, any way you choose.
Let’s look at social media content. Do you struggle to find content for your social media accounts? We know it can be a full-time job to do properly. So we provide you with lots of evergreen content you can use on a variety of topics. All you need to do is copy and paste the text and the photo into your own social media account and you’re ready to go. You can edit them as you see fit, drastically cutting the time it takes to create that content.
Similarly, we provide a wide selection of email content along a variety of topics as well. Again, it’s as simple as copying and pasting into your own email and sending it out. It comes from you to your customers in your email lists.
Marketing Central also makes it easy to create your own customized versions of literature like brochures, sell sheets, door hangers and more. When you create a login in Marketing Central, you will upload your logo and your contact information. We store and remember that for you. Anytime you find a piece of literature you think would be helpful, you can have your logo and your contact information added instantly. All that material is free to download. You can use it digitally or print it at your local print shop. If you prefer, we will print it for you in our own onpremises print shop. We’ll print it and ship it to you quickly, and we do it at our cost — there’s no markup. This is very popular with dealers and we’re continually expanding our offerings with new material.
Dealer Admin
You already use Dealer Admin for configuring panels, setting user groups and administering accounts. But Dealer Admin has some marketing capabilities as well, which you may not be aware of. First are email campaigns similar to what you see on Marketing Central. We have pre-configured, pre-written email campaigns ready to go for you, featuring your logo and contact information. But because it’s within Dealer Admin, you can use your customer information to do smart selections to send relevant messages to specific customer groups.
For instance, if you have somebody who hasn’t logged into Virtual Keypad for a while, you can send them an email that reminds them of the availability of that product. If you have customers who aren’t using your video monitoring, you can send a message directly to that group to offer that feature.
The emails are sent right from Dealer Admin. To get to them, start in the Settings section. Choose Dealer, and you’ll see a tab called Email Campaigns. There you’ll find the pre-configured campaigns available to you. There are descriptions that tell you the purpose of the campaign and who the audience will be. The emails are pre-configured for you with your logo and contact information. It’s as easy as choosing one and sending it out.
The second marketing feature of Dealer Admin is our Referral Program. It’s a tell-a-friend promotion that lets your existing customers provide you with new leads. You control the message, you control the offer, so you can make it whatever you want — a free month of monitoring or a free camera, for example. That offer then appears within the Virtual Keypad app.
To get started, go to Settings, then Dealer. Go to the Customer Referral tab and set your offer. You can change it as frequently as you like.
We are constantly making improvements to all the platforms within the Dealer Marketing Program. We’re working on enhancements to the Dealer Admin program and adding new emails even as we speak. We’re always looking for your feedback on ways to improve the programs and would love to hear from you. Are you using these resources? If you try some of them, how are they working out for you? How can our team help make things even better for you? We rely on you to help us provide you with better support.
The Dealer Marketing Program consists of Private Label, Dealer Admin, Marketing Central and Custom Videos. Contact us if you’d like help utilizing more of these services. We have an entire team here that’s committed to your success. Because when you succeed, we succeed.