Case Study: The Dorman Virtual Tour
The Challenge
Whenever Dorman invited customers to tour our headquarters in Colmar, Pennsylvania, the universal response was, “Wow, I never knew you did all of this!”
That was both good and bad news. Good, of course, because executive contacts always left impressed and eager to partner with us more. Bad, because it meant something was sorely missing from our communications for so much of our core audience to be completely unaware of our story and capabilities.
Unfortunately, it also wasn’t feasible to invite all our target decision-makers to fly to Philadelphia, drive an hour north, and spend a day in our facility. Like most B2B businesses, there are lots of different people involved in buying decisions, adding up to thousands of people across hundreds of customers.
Furthermore, Dorman was really B2B2C, so job #1 was getting our products into distribution, while job #2 was telling our story to the hundreds of thousands of professional mechanics and DIY vehicle owners across North America who actually use our products. If the people we did business with directly didn’t know our story, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
For years, leadership had struggled with the question of how to solve this problem, often phrased as, “how to bring the tour to our all customers.” Soon after I started at Dorman, I too was asked to tackle this, so my team and I set to work finding a solution.
The Strategy
At first we brainstormed a number of different ideas, starting with the most literal: filming an actual facility tour. We actually had a member of our video team strap on a GoPro and follow a tour. Needless to say, this did not prove very compelling.
We also looked at a number of software options that many universities and museums use to provide prospective students with a virtual tour experience. We found these options to be a bit clunky and expensive, plus the reality was that our former industrial building was not designed to be picturesque. We could see why someone would want to click through an interactive visit to the Louvre or the Harvard campus, but not an office building with auto parts littered about. Not to mention, these experiences are not easy to update and came with hefty annual licensing fees.
We soon re-framed the question. If the goal was to bring our full story to our audience, was just capturing the physical walk around our headquarters even the best way to do that? After all, we had several other facilities in other states and countries with impressive features to showcase. A multimedia digital experience could actually provide an even more comprehensive overview of everything we do than an in-person visit to one location could.
So, we mapped out a more creative solution that would fully capture the Dorman story for the first time ever. We brought together an array of different elements that utilized our entire team’s talents, including text, photography, video, and web design. We spent three months filming and refining, researching and interviewing, learning and implementing new techniques. And rather than just plopping it all onto our About Us page, we built an entirely new microsite that made it feel like an immersive experience, removing distractions and pulling visitors through from top to bottom.
On top of just building the site, my team also built the communications strategy to get the word out. We leveraged a newly implemented Salesforce platform to activate our sales team to get the Virtual Tour in front of all our existing and prospective customers. We integrated it across our owned channels, including email newsletters and social media. We even put the vanity URL, DormanProducts.com/tour, on tens of thousands of tags that came attached to our parts.
Here’s how we described it in the press release when we unveiled it in early 2020:
The tour is designed to allow users to explore Dorman’s story however they choose and is filled with videos and interactive multimedia.
For instance, you can watch a quick video highlighting Dorman’s engineering and manufacturing capability or view a half-dozen videos and interactive elements, including a 360-degree visit to Dorman’s garage used to perform product validation. You could also browse the hundreds of part categories that make up Dorman’s catalog, or learn about some of the new technologies Dorman is developing.
Because Dorman also has a culture of empowerment, every part of the Virtual Tour was created by Dorman’s employees – no agencies or actors – from all the people speaking and seen on-screen in the videos, to all the people involved in designing and developing the experience.
The Results
The Dorman Virtual Tour completely changed the way Dorman went to market.
The sales team presented it to thousands of customer contacts to nurture and grow our relationships, and it was the first thing we showed to new customers, especially as we branched out to new international and e-commerce distributors. Always-on search and display advertising campaigns pointed hundreds of thousands of consumers to the site. It even became the first place we directed new and potential employees to get to know us as quickly as possible.
We set an initial goal for the first year at 50,000 pageviews, which we felt was ambitious given that it was already triple the traffic of our site’s existing About Us page. We blew that number away, exceeding 200,000 pageviews by the end of 2020. By the time I left in early 2024 the page had well over a million sessions. It was such a content-rich and engaging experience that we heard from many people who came back multiple times to see it all.
Of course, only a few months after we launched the site in 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, shutting down in-person visits to our facilities. We had fortuitously rolled out the site at a time when the whole world was forced to go online-only, underscoring the wisdom of the strategy in ways no one could have imagined.
Having this asset at that time played a part in helping the company grow its business to record highs in a couple ways. Our sales team was able to confidently approach new customers looking for new ways to get what they needed when their normal supply chains were severed. Meanwhile, with a surge in DIY enthusiasm during the lockdowns, more vehicles owners were finally able to find and learn our story in full, giving them greater confidence to purchase Dorman parts online.
In early 2021, the Virtual Tour won an In-House Excellence Award for Best Branded Content from the Association of National Advertisers. The ANA also published a case study (registration wall) for its members detailing the creative strategy and insights from the project.
The microsite was also a key component in Dorman later winning back-to-back awards from the Auto Care Association, the leading trade organization for the automotive aftermarket, for the best website in the industry.