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Why Your Business Needs a Localized Social Marketing Strategy

Why Your Business Needs a Localized Social Marketing Strategy

Today’s successful businesses are meticulous at maximizing their brands’ awareness – both offline AND online.

In the traditional space, brands ensure the presentation of their products is as consistent on TV, radio, and print as it would be in their physical storefronts. Online, marketers spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on campaigns and other efforts across the web and social media.

Lately, the search for information has shifted towards social media; The spread of COVID-19 and subsequent social distancing efforts have turned many users to social media for news on the crisis and updates from reputable sources. As more and more transactions run through social media just as they would in person, there has never been a better time to refine your digital marketing strategy for social.

But if your brand is vast and operates using a retail-to-public business model, then a “one-size-fits-all” social marketing approach may not fit your business and your retail network. While your marketing efforts may drive traffic to your corporate-facing social page, your retailers may not be getting the same traction on their pages.

To remedy this, we recommend incorporating a localized social marketing strategy into your digital marketing efforts to increase its effectiveness among your retailers.

All Eyes on Social

If your retail network has yet to make the switch online, you are losing valuable time to grow your brand – and retail network’s – reach with your potential consumers. With a refined strategy that focuses on delivering content at the local level, you can provide your retailers with content tailored to the products they are selling, while curating a message coming directly from the brand itself.

Outlets like Facebook are the perfect destination to get your brand’s message out to your retailers and assist them in the proper messaging to suit their communities. And with advertising costs lowering on the social platform since the events surrounding COVID-19, there has never been a better time to apply high-quality, branded content to your retailers that is compassionate to current events while promoting the right message from your brand.

Giving Your Retailers the Support They Need

As a franchise, a localized social marketing strategy can give your brand an opportunity to influence the buyer journey for target consumers who can’t physically interact with your local retailers, while driving greater awareness to your brand through your retail network. This in turn can increase brand awareness, build a positive reputation among your retail network, and generate brand loyalty throughout the pandemic and beyond.

localized marketing strategy

At ThumbStopper, we’ve already helped our business partners in increasing traction to their retail network’s social feeds, despite these uncertain times. If you are uncertain of how your brand can reposition its social media strategy to assist your retailers, drop us a line at the link here and we can show you how to start.

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Social Media Content is Key to Your Company’s Success

Social Media Content is Key to Your Company’s Success

As a business owner, online traffic is vital to the growth and success of your entire operation. As consumers shift evermore to digital channels, it’s important to choose a marketing strategy that will give your business the most traction among your target audience. Digital marketing itself can be complicated, time-consuming, and costly, but there is one channel that is still relatively easy and inexpensive to find success: social media. And the path to success on that channel runs through content.

Content is the driver behind many of today’s successful digital marketing strategies, providing a unique opportunity to assist your target audience through the buyer journey with useful, genuine information. Much like your physical storefront requires appealing goods to catch your consumers’ attention, your digital presence–including your website and social pages–requires similar love and care to increase traffic to your business.

As we continue to traverse through a digital-first environment, your business should have a content strategy and social presence operating in tandem to engage with your consumers and keep them up-to-date on the status of your operation. But before you invest money into the content creation process, it’s important to understand what “content” means and how and where to source it to expand your digital presence.

What Is Content, Anyway?

Content, in today’s sense of the word, generally means any piece of information that you’re putting out into the world. That could entail the copy and images in your email campaign, the descriptions and product photography on your website, or the video in your social post. Importantly, content doesn’t always need to be produced by you or your team in order for you to benefit from it, but it does need to be sensibly released to maximize its value. 

As an example, let’s say a brand that you sell in your store posts a great photo of a new product they’ve just released. While you can always just hit the reshare button to share the post with your followers, a more beneficial method for you to repurpose that content would be for you to download the image and post it as a native post on your business’s website. In this scenario, knowing that reshared content gets less visibility than natively posted content, your more sensible option would be to download the video and post it yourself to your business’s social page. The few extra minutes this takes will result in 477% more shares on Facebook than simply re-sharing your brand’s existing YouTube link.

Better in Tune With Your Industry

Producing high-quality, informative social content can be a difference-maker for your business, but it’s not everything.

The content marketing process involves becoming an active member of your community, asking questions and providing moments of education for your consumers. And while many of your consumers are practicing stay-at-home and social distancing techniques, it’s important to be mindful of the content you produce and share to best inform your audience moving forward.

Invest time in better understanding your industry – its status during COVID-19, current trends, etc. – and following industry-centric resources to stay up-to-date with what’s pertinent for your business and your consumers. You’ll see a return on investment in the form of brand awareness, consumer engagement, and customer loyalty.

Curation is Critical

A strong social content strategy is more than just churning out new social content. If you curate your digital assets to address specific problems and provide useful information to your audience, you can position yourself as a thought leader for your consumers and your industry.

Even if you think anyone can benefit from your content, focus on tailoring it to reach consumers that will most likely engage with your content in a beneficial way. Your interest in providing genuine content on your social pages will reflect with a higher retention rate towards your social page and greater awareness for your business.

Your consumers will also build a better impression of your business as they engage with your content. If they find what they read to be helpful, informative, or enlightening, your business’s reputation and followers will increase.

Paid or Organic Social Content?

Lastly, your plan of attack is vital to your social content’s success with your target audience. It’s imperative to choose a method (or two) that best fits your company’s budget while being perceived as genuine towards that audience.

Paid social advertising or paid social media refers to social content that is influenced by advertising dollars – such as boosting, targeting, etc. This form of media enables businesses to display content beyond their followers in areas where it otherwise wouldn’t show up.  In fact, marketers spent more than $89 billion last year on social media advertising efforts alone.

With thousands of posts vying for your potential customer’s attention on social media, paid media is necessary to break through the noise and gain traction toward your business. However, you should not overlook the impact that organic media can have on your business too. As a cost-effective marketing tactic, organic media can help develop authentic interactions with your consumers and promote your value propositions without using paid promotion–gaining you more engaged and loyal followers.

We recommend utilizing both paid and organic tactics in tandem to maximize your ability to reach a broader audience while crafting authentic, compassionate content that doesn’t bombard their feed. By finding a balance between paid and social, you can supplement your social feed with brand-safe messaging that is promotional but also sensitive to the present climate.

Be Mindful of the Moment

We understand that today’s environment presents challenges to promoting your business and generating sales. But If your business has yet to incorporate a content strategy that is promotional while being mindful of these uncertain times, you may miss out on an opportunity to genuinely connect with your consumers and provide useful knowledge – now and in the future.

If you’re still having some trouble cultivating the right strategy for your business, it always helps to get a few pointers from someone who’s helped with messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do not hesitate to reach out to us and inquire about how we can help navigate your business’s social content strategy during these trying times.

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Give Your Premium Content the VIP Treatment

Premium Content

With thousands of pieces of content vying for your target audience’s attention on a given day, each piece of content your brand deploys is its own elevator pitch, which can win (or lose) the hearts, minds, and pockets of your next customer. But if you have a product to sell or a story to tell, your run-of-the-mill elevator pitch may not be enough to cut through the noise and gain traction with your audience.

Instead, it’s imperative to supplement your top-of-funnel digital content with more information that educates and eases your customer through their buyer journey while maximizing the reach of your premium content beyond your normal marketing efforts. 

You Put Time Into Your Content – Value It!

Not all content is created equal. By creating upper-echelon content that informs and influences your target audience, you can cast a wider net to reach your next customer.

From case studies and infographics, to webinars and white papers, premium content offers significantly higher value for your audience and can be leveraged to attract greater engagement between you and your consumers. This can encourage more customers to follow your brand when your content reflects a higher level of thought and care towards guiding them through their journey.

Additionally, the quality of work placed in creating premium content is rich in SEO value for your brand’s digital channels, which rank higher in Google searches and contribute to a greater chance for traffic towards your digital channels. It’s important to get creative with whether you want your content to be gated or ungated for your target audience.

Position Your Premium Content for Success

The “Gated” vs. “Ungated” argument is constantly changing. Common practice among digital circles is to position content in a gated model, which encourages interested readers to offer information – i.e. an email or phone number – in exchange for the gated content.

But as more sites pursue a higher ranking on Google, those same brands must strike a balance between asking for pertinent information and making their content accessible by Google to improve its SEO value. We recommend finding common ground between the two, offering your premium content in an open capacity to satisfy SEO metrics, while enabling individuals to download your content online in exchange for information that crafts future conversations between brand and consumer.

Lastly, your brand should approach premium content with a higher degree of care in your advertising campaigns, utilizing paid media spend to reach a broader, more tailored audience interested in reading your content. With high-quality content performing in tandem with a synchronized ad push on social and digital channels, your brand can ensure your next customer has their eyes on content that assists them.

Crafting Your Roadmap for Success

High-quality content you’ve created should receive love and care that matches the effort you placed in its development. With a tailored approach to positioning your premium content and paid ad spend to pair, you’ll be offering the VIP treatment to get that next lead in your inbox.
But if you’re having trouble positioning your content with the right message and paid advertising, drop us a line and let us show your brand how we’ve helped plenty of business partners amplify their content’s thumbprint with ThumbStopper.

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The ThumbStopper Effect: As Refined As Your Brand’s Digital Targeting Can Get

The ThumbStopper Effect: As Refined As Your Brand’s Digital Targeting Can Get

Chances are, as a sophisticated marketer you are already well aware of the benefits of social media for your brand. You’re likely spending a fair amount of money on photo shoots and copywriting for your social content, and you may employ an agency partner to help with some of the social media duties on your plate. Maybe you even have a marketing staff member who is focused on your brand’s social presence and engaging your followers and fans. You may even have the capability to spend time or effort encouraging your retailers to re-share your content or post more about your brand. 

If you happen to represent multiple brands across your business’s portfolio, your costs likely increase by carrying the banner for the multiple brands (and fans) under your purview.

Additionally, you are likely spending resources and real dollars in paid digital media, whether that’s on PPC, display advertising, email campaigns, or paid social. Organizing and funding those efforts is costly and time-consuming, but you’re likely able to re-utilize a lot of those valuable assets across radio, television, magazines, mailers, trade shows, emails, blogs, social posts, and more. Reusability, though, doesn’t help the real costs that you pay for placement to platforms like Google and Facebook.

For a small portion of what is probably the largest part of your budget—paid media—you can allocate to a channel that you know works and that is hyper-targeted like no other: organic social on your retailers’ social pages.

Think about this: how much do you have to spend on CPM upcharges to find your target audience? Depending on how niche your products or services are or where you offer them, you likely have to layer in several targeting components to get to the right audience. Layers for things like geographic targeting, affinity targeting, in-market targeting, interest-based targeting, and demographic targeting typically come with premiums across various ad placement platforms, and oftentimes if your targeting is too niche, even if you are willing to pay for the upcharge, you may not have the option if the audience is too small.

All of these various layers of targeting can drive your CPM up quickly, and they still may not be right for finding your next brand advocate. Now imagine if you could target your audience down to the people who not only follow your brand, but the people who follow your competitors’ brands too, and at the local level? That is the audience that you get when you are pushing your content through to your local retailer’s social page. Not only are they heavily invested in the vertical you serve, but they are so invested that they are a fan of your local retailer’s social page. There is no better, more likely audience to find your next customer than these die-hard fans. 

For a fraction of what you would pay to target this audience across any digital channel, you can tap into the audience of your local retailers to push your message to your most likely next customer. Consider footing the costs for your retailers completely, since you have complete control over the messaging, the timing, and the frequency. By gaining access to your retailer’s social page, you can effectively own their digital shelf space for your industry and all of the fans that come with it.

On average, the total number of fans of retailers’ social pages equates to more than three times the number of fans of the brand’s existing social pages. While you will no doubt have crossover fans between your brand page and your retailers’ pages, you’re also going to have fans of that local retailer that love them because of your competitors they carry or the symbiotic brands they carry that are tangentially related to your brand. 

You already know the potential your retailers have for your brand with the physical shelf-space your team works so hard to expand; don’t forget the untapped potential of your retailer’s digital shelf space too.

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Content is Key to Your Company’s Success

Content is Key to Your Company's Success

As a business owner, online traffic is vital to the growth and success of your entire operation. But in these trying times, it’s important to choose a marketing strategy that will give your business the most traction among your target audience.

Luckily, the road to success runs through content.

Content is the driver behind many of today’s successful digital marketing strategies, providing a unique opportunity to assist your target audience through the buyer journey with useful, genuine information. Much like your physical storefront requires appealing goods to catch your consumers’ attention, your digital presence requires similar love and care to increase traffic to your business.

As we continue to traverse through a digital-first environment, your business should have a content strategy and social presence operating in tandem to engage with your consumers and keep them up-to-date on the status of your operation. But before you invest money into the content creation process, it’s important to understand the ins-and-outs behind a strong content strategy during COVID-19.

Staying Attuned With Your Industry

Producing high-quality, informative content can be a difference maker for your business, but it’s not everything.

The content marketing process involves becoming an active member of your community, asking questions and providing moments of education for your consumers. And while many of your consumers are practicing stay-at-home and social distancing techniques, it’s important to be mindful of the content you produce and share to best inform your audience moving forward.

Invest time in better understanding your industry – its status during COVID-19, current trends, etc. – and following industry-centric resources to stay up-to-date with what’s pertinent for your business and its consumers. You’ll see a return on investment in the form of brand awareness, consumer engagement, and customer loyalty.

Curation is Critical

A strong content strategy is more than just churning out content. If you curate content to address specific problems and provide useful information to your audience, you can position yourself as a thought leader for your consumers and your industry.

Even if you think anyone can benefit from your content, focus on tailoring your content to reach consumers that will most likely engage with your content in a beneficial way. Your interest in providing genuine content will reflect with a higher retention rate towards your social page and greater awareness toward your business.

Your consumers will also build a better impression of your business as they engage with your content. If they find what they read to be helpful, informative, or enlightening, your business’s reputation can increase.

Paid or Organic

Lastly, your plan of attack is vital to your content’s success with your target audience. It’s imperative to choose a method (or two) that fits your company’s budget while being perceived as genuine towards that audience.

Paid media refers to content that is influenced by advertising dollars – such as boosting, targeting, etc. This form of media enables businesses to display content beyond their followers in areas where it otherwise wouldn’t show up.  In fact, marketers spent more than $89 billion last year on social media advertising efforts alone.

With thousands of pieces of content vying for your potential customer’s attention on social media, paid media is sometimes necessary to break through the noise and gain traction toward your business. However, you should not overlook the impact that organic media can have on your business. As a cost-effective marketing tactic, organic media can help develop authentic interactions with your consumers and promote your value propositions without using paid promotion.

We recommend utilizing both paid and organic media in tandem to maximize on reaching a broader audience while crafting authentic, compassionate content that doesn’t bombard their news feed. By finding a balance between paid and social, you can supplement your social feed with brand-safe messaging that is promotional but also sensitive to the present climate.

Be Mindful of the Moment

We understand that today’s environment presents challenges to promoting your business and generating sales. But If your business has yet to incorporate a content strategy that is promotional while being mindful of these uncertain times, you may miss out on an opportunity to genuinely connect with your consumers to provide useful knowledge, now and in the future.

If you’re still having some trouble cultivating the right strategy for your business, it always helps to get a few pointers from someone who’s helped with messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do not hesitate to reach out to us and inquire about how we can help navigate your business’s content strategy during these trying times.

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Keep Your “Work-From-Home” Flow on Track

Work From Home

Original post by Kelcey Morgan, Chief Product Officer with ThumbStopper®, located here.

Suddenly find yourself working from home? Cabin fever already setting in? Struggling with how to stay on track when you’re not motivated by peers and in-office routines?

Same. So, how can we all cope and help one another out?

Here’s my top recommendations for creating a remote work environment to keep yourself, your team, and your company focused and motivated during these uncertain times:

Create a Dedicated Workspace

Setting a laptop on your lap while binge-watching The Office may seem like a great way to spend a day “working” remote. However, I guarantee you don’t really get the “working” part done. Ensure you have a space in your home that reflects your normal office setting.

If you normally use a desk, sit at a desk. I personally need 2-3 screens to function, so I have brought monitors home for my new office space to keep my productivity consistent. If your office usually has light music playing in the background, add that to your home ambiance!

You probably don’t have The Office playing in the background, but as tempting as it may be, it’ll probably hinder your ability to separate work from play.

“Show Up” for Work Every Day

Stay consistent with your wake/sleep schedules, get your workout in as you would normally. Shower. Put pants on. The usual things you would do to go into the office and socialize with your peers. Get to your “office” at your regular time. More importantly, clock out as you normally would.

Two of the biggest challenges when working remote are “working” and “stopping work.” Figure out which category you fall into and make sure to pay attention daily that you don’t fall into bad habits.

Maintain Regularly Scheduled Meetings

My team just held our first remote Scrum. We have these regularly in the office three days a week at 9:30 a.m. This is not going to change during our remote time.

We know that this constant team check-in to our development processes and active sprints are vital to keeping us on our company roadmap. Did we have to adjust and use Slack team calls instead of in person? Yes. Are there plenty of tools available to do the same thing for your company? Also yes. (i.e. Zoom or GoToMeeting). Start a shared document for meeting minutes and designate an appointed recorder if you don’t already have this process in place.

This same rule applies to client meetings. Our account management team has monthly regularly scheduled calls with our clients, already set up with GoToMeeting. There is no reason for these to be cancelled/changed, and we encourage additional check-ins to touch base and show empathy to their company adjustments during this time.

Evaluate Existing Processes – Improve Where Needed

A major benefit of working remote is that the likelihood of someone stepping into your office and distracting you with a side task is greatly reduced – unless you’re one of the lucky ones like me home with your kids for an undetermined amount of time!

If you find you have some down-time, use it to evaluate existing processes and communications. Our team recently cleaned up our entire project management software, making things easier to read from home that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to clarify face-to-face. We have also started making better mock-ups instead of drawing on shared white boards to gather around.

The opportunities for improved change now can help instill habits that’ll improve workplace productivity when back in the office.

Hold Your Teammates Accountable

Your office is still your team. We are all still striving for company success. If you normally would address “bad” culture or attitudes privately with your colleague, keep doing so! If you notice someone’s hours of work change, their productivity and attendance to “meetings” starts to decrease – reach out directly with your preferred messaging app.

Remember, this is a challenging time; Some people may need a reminder they aren’t alone and that their presence is important. Hold each other accountable, but couple that with holding each other up.

Everything we learn through these next few weeks about our out-of-office cultures will only strengthen our in-office cultures when we resume normality. Stay safe – stay focused – stay connected.

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Using Organic Reach to Your Advantage

Organic Reach TS

As a business owner, traffic is vital to your company’s success. But recent events are already bringing entire operations to a screeching halt.

As a business owner, traffic is vital to your company’s success. But recent events are already bringing entire operations to a screeching halt.

While the COVID-19 crisis continues, many owners are struggling to cope with the virus’s impact on their business and their employees’ livelihoods. And for those not bearing the brunt of the impact just yet, it’s become difficult for businesses to bring traffic to their cause.

If you are cutting back on your business’s operation while adjusting to the ramifications of the new normal, you may be stressed trying to generate buzz for your products or services. But with more eyes on social media, there isn’t a better time to start crafting organic relationships with your consumers at a fraction of the cost.

It’s time to use organic reach to your advantage.

Finding a Better (Cost-Effective) Way

Organic reach is a common metric used in social media marketing to track the number of unique individuals viewing your content without paid advertising. A strong organic reach can directly benefit your sales funnel by generating leads via authentic individuals who view your content without utilizing paid media strategies like boosting.

Unfortunately, organic reach on Facebook and Instagram has declined in drastic fashion over the past few years, due in part to greater competition for ad space on users’ news feeds and changes to their respective algorithms. As a result, many companies have turned to paid media out of necessity to build their social presence.

But there’s still hope! Organic reach is still a fundamental metric on social media that can generate traffic and engagement with the right approach. With a bit of strategy and creativity in your content strategy, your business can stand out and create unique connections with your target audience.

Whether your business is on Facebook, Instagram, or another social platform, here are some tips on mastering organic reach and maximizing your content’s thumbprint on a budget:

Understand the Algorithms

Each social platform has undergone changes to its respective algorithms, tailoring content to specific users based on the platform’s specifications. To ensure you’re achieving strong organic reach from your content, make sure to understand the ins-and-outs of each social platform’s algorithms to effectively reach your target audience.

For instance, Facebook’s algorithms have adjusted in the past few months to correspond with its paid advertising measurements. Ranking well with these algorithms is also dependent on various factors, including who a user typically interacts with, the post type, and the popularity of the post itself.

By understanding each platform’s intricacies in greater detail, you can equip your business with vital knowledge on how to best position your future content.

Post Consistently

Consistent posting is key to growing your business’s organic reach. Businesses that post consistently see higher engagement rates, which in turn leads to higher organic reach.

Posting once or twice a month is like being open for business once or twice a month, and then wondering why customers are flocking through your doors. If you post infrequently, your potential customer will begin to form an opinion about your business. Think of restaurants with little or no patrons… Do you want to eat at a restaurant when you’re the only customer there? 

Quality and Timeliness Matter for Content

Using Organic Reach to Your Advantage

Consider the type of content you’re posting on social media, and consider the trending topics of the day and how your business can ride the wave of increased engagement. 

As an example, author Jeff Goins loosely incorporated ‘The Walking Dead’ into his social post while the topic was trending to benefit from the trending topic for his book launch.

Resist the Bait

Don’t get caught using deceptive social practices. Social platforms have begun cracking down on baiting tactics, ensuring that users follow the platform’s rules or pay the price.

Using paid followers, spamming irrelevant content, and using engagement bait are just a few instances of practices that can be detrimental to your business’ social media strategy and reputation among your followers.

Automate and Elevate Your Content Flow

Sometimes, you can also leave your social media content flow to the pros. Enter ThumbStopper.

At ThumbStopper, we work with thousands of business partners to automatically post high-quality, brand-curated digital content for the retailers that sell their products. This, in turn, has contributed to a 22% average organic reach among our retailer subscribers.

If your company is looking for digital content that makes an impact on a budget, we’ve figured out the ins-and-outs of maximizing our partners’ social thumbprint and helping them focus on engaging with their consumers.

Whether your business has or hasn’t been affected by recent events, it may be time to pivot your social media strategy to address organic reach. With a mix of strategy and creativity, you can cut back on costly techniques that don’t secure the right audience and focus on building authentic, organic relationships with your consumers through organic reach.


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ThumbStopper Spotlight: CABDA

CABDA West Background

What you need to know to be “in the know” about CABDA Expo

Next week, ThumbStopper® is heading to San Diego to exhibit at the inaugural CABDA West expo. In light of the upcoming event, let us introduce you to the folks behind North America’s fastest-growing bicycle trade show.

The Chicagoland Area Bicycle Dealers’ Association provides events, seminars and best practices for dealers and manufacturers in the bicycle vertical. The association, originally known for its series of trade shows, reemerged onto the scene in 2014 and has grown ever since.

A departure from large-scale conventions, CABDA trade shows offer a smaller, more intimate experience for dealers and manufacturers to interact with new and exciting brands. This centralized focus has allowed the expo to grow year after year.

In addition to CABDA West, the association is hosting three additional shows in 2020:

  • CABDA Midwest (Chicago, Feb. 12-13)
  • CABDA East (New York, March 11-12)
  • CABDA Industry Summit (Lake Buena Vista, Nov. 2-3)

Each trade show brings in hundreds of bicycle vendors from across the country to showcase the latest products and services within the industry. CABDA West will also offer 37 clinics and seminars during the two-day event. From nutrition advice to tech-centric showcases, CABDA West gives you the tools to take your bike shop to the next level.

While at the expo, come schedule a one-on-one with ThumbStopper and find out how we can amplify your bike shop’s social presence.

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ThumbStopper 2019 Year in Review

ThumbStopper 2019 Year in Review

Capping off 2019 with some highlights over the past year

2019 has been a busy year for the ThumbStopper family!

Over the past year, we’ve spent each day building upon our technologies to be better partners for our customers. By expanding our staff, incorporating new features into our brand manager and much more, we’ve evolved into a full-service digital marketing solution for brands and retailers.

As we enter the new year, we want to give a special thanks to all of the partners who have been with us along the way. To cap off 2019, here are five highlights from our eventful year:

Brands. Retailers. Connected

We’ve made sure that connecting to ThumbStopper is seamless for brands and retailers. This year, we added over 3,000 retailers across 20 new brands in the Automotive, Watercraft, Firearm, Farm & Garden and Retail verticals.

Afternoons are for Your Content

Over 455,000 pieces of content were published by our partners in 2019 using ThumbStopper’s Brand ManagerTM ! Among those numbers, we found that 94% of the content pushed out was published during the afternoon. 

Adoption Rates are Skyrocketing

We go above and beyond to ensure brands are fully on-board our platform within 30 to 45 days – from contract signing to content deployment. From there, we work with our partners to ensure a brand’s retail network maximizes its adoption rate on our platform.

This year, our staff successfully maintained an 84.6% on-board rate across all our brands within the first 90 days!

Engagement is at an All-Time High

A record 896,436 unique social media users engaged with content deployed through ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager, seeing the highest engagement in Automotive and Watercraft brands!

ThumbStopper For Bikes is Picking Up Speed

We recently launched our “ThumbStopper for Bikes” solution, a new program delivering custom-curated content to bicycle retailers’ social feeds. Since launching our program in September, we’ve on-boarded 13 retailers in the bicycle vertical and plan on switching into high gear next year!

We want to wish all of our brand and retail partners a Happy New Year as we enter 2020 and look towards building upon our success in connecting brands with our retail networks!

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The Vertical Recipe

Vertical Animation

No vertical is too steep a climb for ThumbStopper to amplify your social thumbprint

Understanding an industry is a challenging process. Some industry verticals provide goods and services that would be considered “necessity” goods and services (commodities), while other verticals provide products that would be considered “lifestyle” goods and services. Every niche vertical has its own nuances, and oftentimes we find the culture of the brands in these verticals affect both the development and marketing of those goods and services. Each brand within a vertical is unique unto itself – as are the consumers those brands serve.

ThumbStopper’s® success in connecting brands to their retailers’ digital and social media channels is a “wide net” approach that is influenced by a number of factors including the number of competitive brands, the number of dispensing retailers, consumer market size, consumer market demand, total revenues, average margins, and several other factors which makes up ThumbStopper’s “Vertical Recipe” foundation.

Today, ThumbStopper services over 22,000 retailers in a number of verticals including Auto, Powersports, Marine, Bicycle, Sporting goods, Furniture, Jewelry/Watches, Firearm, and Farm & Garden to name a few. The aggregation and parsing of data from these verticals has established principals that guide our algorithms (our proprietary artificial intelligence), enabling us to confidently assert best practices.

Our software is scalable and based on the premise of being vertically agnostic: through the use of this data aggregated by unique vertical, ThumbStopper enables the retailers that bring that brand to market to most effectively utilize the brand’s digital content and advertising assets. Through automation, segmentation, and our AI, these brand assets are optimally exposed to potential consumers, all done with virtually no effort on the part of the local retailer.

ThumbStopper’s brand playbook enables a brand to deploy content and advertising assets to up to 90% of its retailer network if deployed and endorsed properly within the first 120 days of implementing.

Know Your Vertical

Social media has disrupted traditional advertising models, much like websites did in the early 2000s.

When a consumer Googles a brand, their search will likely bring up both the business’ website and their social media pages.

Sometimes we hear from a brand “we already have a social media presence or a company or agency that handles this for us,” usually they mean just that – they have a corporate presence a little to no influence on how and when their brand is represented socially and digitally at the local level.

Take, for example, the bicycle industry: this is a unique vertical with thousands of passionate retailers who have limited access to the content streams of the brands they sell. Very few retailers have the resources to handle managing a consistent, engaging, high quality social media presence. Through our technology, bicycle shop owners now have a regular, automated flow of brand content fed directly to their Facebook page. These retailers still maintain complete control of modifications, engagements, and reactions their customers may have to or about the product and lifestyle related content posted on their behalf. It’s a win-win for both the retailer and the brand.

With Knowledge Comes Power

By establishing a foundation to amplify their social presence, brands are able to leverage our platform’s data and A.I. to create a brand-to-retailer connection that has not been possible before. Because our platform is “vertically agnostic,” all brands across a vertical are proportionally represented in the most optimal manner on their retailer’s Facebook page.

At the end of the day, ThumbStopper is a utility just like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the Internet itself – we are the conduit connecting brands and retailers. We believe that our vertical recipe lays the foundation for more verticals to leverage the power of social media to amplify their message.

To learn more, please visit www.ThumbStopper.com