The glue that holds it all together
Ellie Pool, DoorCo’s, marketing manager, discusses why marketing is now viewed as a central investment that supports all areas of the business, from sales to developing greener credentials.
As marketers, we’ve worked our way through decades of being seen as a business cost, as opposed to an investment. It’s positive to see and feel the change in perception towards marketing in recent years, with many businesses, including DoorCo, identifying the benefits to investing in marketing across all areas of the business.
A central operation, marketing has the ability to positively impact all key areas of the business including sales, manufacturing, health & safety, employee engagement and satisfaction, and of course, finance.
Awareness sits at the very start of any customer journey, and awareness is the very job of a marketing department.
At DoorCo, as well as supporting internally, our priority as marketers is to support our customer network with increasing their awareness amongst their end users. We commit to this by creating a bank of assets that they can access digitally and in print.
We have taken a lot of time to develop B2C brands for our product ranges, such as Original and Gripcore, which hold identities that are strong enough to put in front of homeowners and decision makers. This allows our customers to utilise a full suite of ready-made marketing assets, saving them time and investment.
Futureproofed marketing
Another choice we offer our customers is print or digital versions of all our brochures.
For many, digital brochures don’t really cut the mustard with homeowners. They would rather have something tangible. This is why print marketing is still sitting heavily at the forefront of many sales portfolios.
However, it is becoming more and more important to make sustainability a focus and we regularly hear from many of our customers about how significant it is becoming to them that they are reducing their carbon footprint, especially in marketing.
This is why DoorCo has chosen to invest in a Web to Print portal which aims to minimise mass print runs.
The Web to Print portal will contain our full suite of printed assets, with the ability to personalise many of them. These can then be sent to print via our nominated print partner, which has also made an official commitment to become carbon balanced.
Via the Web to Print portal, customers can order their tailored (or standard) marketing assets in smaller quantities on sustainable materials, and then re-order with ease as and when the stock is actually needed.
Knowledge sharing
As a B2B business, our success comes from the wins our customer network achieves, and it’s our job to support in any way we can to make these wins happen.
We’re passionate about knowledge-sharing with our customers, collaborating when and wherever we can on web, social media, PR, and design projects, and we hope to expand this support out to as much of our network as possible this year.
The DoorCo marketing team has doubled in size in the last year with the appointment of myself as marketing manager and our in-house graphic designer, Leah, meaning we now have more skill and experience than ever to share.
Being able to have these close partnerships with our customer network’s marketing departments allows us to grow as marketers too, so it really is a never-ending positive cycle that benefits all the teams involved.
When we say to customers ‘your success is our priority’, we mean it, and the Web to Print portal and wider marketing services we offer are a great example of this commitment.
