How to Build a Dealer Marketing Portal

What is a dealer marketing portal?

A dealer marketing portal is the place a manufacturer's dealers go for marketing. At minimum it holds approved assets. A good one lets dealers personalize co-branded campaigns and launch them, order signage, displays, catalogs and samples, claim co-op and MDF, and see what their marketing produced.

How is a dealer marketing portal different from a dealer portal?

A dealer portal usually runs the business relationship: orders, pricing, inventory, warranty claims, deal registration, training records. A dealer marketing portal runs the marketing. They share the same dealers and often the same login, but they're different jobs, and most manufacturers get further by connecting a marketing portal to the dealer portal they have than by rebuilding either one.

Should you build a dealer marketing portal or buy one?

Building looks simple at the start: a login and a page of downloads. The hard parts come later: templates that personalize themselves, print files a printer will accept, co-op rules and claims, permissions by tier and region, reporting, and keeping all of it working as your products and dealers change. That's a product, not a project.

Most manufacturers are better off buying a platform built for it and spending their own effort on the content and the program. Build the parts that are truly yours (your product data, your dealer data) and integrate.

What should a dealer marketing portal include?

• Co-branded campaigns that fill in the dealer's details automatically, across email, social, search, web and print.
• Templates with the brand, product claims and legal text locked, and the local parts open.
• One catalog for signage, displays, catalogs, samples and merchandise, filtered by dealer tier and region.
• Co-op and MDF balances, eligibility and claims next to the marketing they pay for.
• Single sign-on from your dealer portal or website.
• Dealer profiles: logo, locations, contacts, brands carried, tier.
• Reporting for you (participation and results by dealer) and for each dealer (their own results).
• Approvals and an audit trail where claims or regulation make them necessary.

What dealer data does the portal need?

Enough to personalize and to filter: the dealer's legal and trading names, logo, locations with addresses, phones and hours, websites, brands and product lines carried, tier, region and the people who use the portal. Keep it synced from your CRM or dealer management system rather than asking dealers to maintain a second copy, and let dealers fix their own profile when something's wrong.

How do you launch a dealer marketing portal?

1. Start with a pilot group of dealers who already market, and ask what's missing.
2. Load a small set of excellent campaigns rather than every asset you own.
3. Turn on single sign-on before launch, so the first experience isn't a password reset.
4. Launch with a reason to log in: a new product, a seasonal campaign or a co-op deadline.
5. Train the channel team first. Dealers ask their rep, not the help page.
6. Watch participation weekly for the first months and call the dealers who haven't started.

Why do dealer marketing portals go unused?

In our experience, for a few predictable reasons: too many assets and no direction, templates that still need too much typing, a separate login, funds that are hard to find or claim, and no visible result. Each has a fix: a short monthly list, pre-filled templates, single sign-on, balances next to campaigns, and dealer-level reporting. See how manufacturers can scale dealer marketing for more on participation.

How do you measure whether the portal is working?

Look at active dealers (who launched or ordered something this month), campaigns launched per dealer, co-op and MDF utilization, and the results those campaigns produced: leads, calls, quotes and sales by dealer and region. Adoption comes first; if dealers aren't using it, results can't follow.

Where does OnBrandify fit?

OnBrandify can be your dealer marketing portal, or sit behind the dealer portal you already run with single sign-on. Dealers get co-branded campaigns, a catalog of point-of-sale materials, their co-op and MDF, and their own results, in one place. See dealer marketing software, or request a demo.