How a Wholesale Grocery Company Creates Digital Product Ads For Their Retailers With FlippingBook

One of our customers is a wholesale grocery company founded around 80 years ago on the East Coast of the United States. In this time, it has grown from a small family business into an enterprise with more than 1,000 employees. The company supplies products as well as print and digital services to over 600 independent retail grocery stores.

Challenge

For over eighty years, the Company has been distributing food and non-food items to independent retailers in the US. Delivering products for the stores to sell had been their main competency for a while until they realized that the end consumers were looking for a wider range of services. Instead of shopping in-store, some of them preferred to have the products shipped to their houses. To advertise the merchandise to consumers, the stores needed ads and product catalogs.

At first, the Company started producing printed ads for their customers: they either sent the designs to a partner company to do a newspaper print or did it in-house. However, as the world was growing more and more digital, the management decided to expand from just print to an online format.

With digital ads and product catalogs, consumers could order goods online and have them shipped to their door on a monthly basis for a certain fee. The Company wanted to create ads that would look realistic online, so they were searching for a tool that could help them do that.

Search for Solution

Simple PDFs didn’t work well for the ads the Company created, because they failed to provide a good print-like feel online. The ads had to resemble actual interactive brochures. As the Company started the search for a solution, they looked for a well-supported tool that could deliver that powerful digital experience with their ads.

What the Company offered to their retailers was embedding ads in their web pages or even designing and managing websites for them. So apart from high publication quality and good product support, the new tool had to be easy to use—especially when it came to website embedding.

Solution

When the Company came across FlippingBook Online, they appreciated the ease of uploading publications with the tool and embedding them to their customers’ websites. Intuitive and user-friendly, the tool required no special coding skills. Plus, it allowed the Company to share ads on social media, which gave a wider audience reach to their retailers.

Another thing the Company valued was the support team behind the tool. With FlippingBook, the digital ads created for retailers always functioned well, with any issues resolved efficiently.

Results

Today, a group of at least twelve professionals works on the Company’s digital ads. Once a publication is created and embedded, the team notifies their client via email, and they can start using the ad right away. Some of the ads are under the same brand, but they offer different items, depending on the region, so each ad has to be carefully drafted and priced.

The Company also uses FlippingBook for their internal communications. When their salesforce are out at the annual food shows, they sometimes need to demonstrate catalogs, ads, or other information to the attendees. In this case, the advertising team can share publications with the spokespeople via email or post them on their internal bulletin board resource.

The Company delivers various products to their clients and offers a wide range of digital services to them: from website design and management to digital ads creation and Facebook targeting. They’re having retailers think outside of the traditional operations of their business, so that their orders could go beyond wholesale products for their stores.