About The Magnet Group
The Magnet Group is one of the perennial suppliers in the promotional products industry with a long track record of excellent service, prices, and a diverse product line to suit any budget. Their main products are magnets and office products, drinkware, journals, coolers, tote bags, and chairs. The Magnet Group joined OMG (formerly known as DistributorCentral) in 2012.
Washington, MO |
1986 |
13+ |
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Location |
Year Founded |
Years Partnering with OMG |
Remaining Competitive in a Crowded Supplier Market
If there’s one thing that suppliers know it’s this: the branded merchandise industry is jam-packed with competition. And to remain competitive in a crowded market, suppliers must make their products available in countless channels and marketplaces to provide distributors access and opportunities to purchase their merchandise and engage with their brand.
So, when The Magnet Group decided to join OMG (previously known as DistributorCentral) in 2012, they had a clear mission in mind: get their products in front of more promotional product distributors.
But, when playing in so many digital sandboxes, it’s easy for product data to become an unintelligible mess, which ultimately makes it more difficult to sell products and scale the business.
The Common Supplier Challenge: Data Accuracy Across Channels
Manually updating and managing data can be a nightmare. It can be a downright terrifying-no-good-awful time when your business relies on accurate product data across multiple channels, all of which have different data format requirements.
This is a common – and costly – challenge that suppliers face every single day, and The Magnet Group was no different. Prior to joining the OMG platform, the company faced some data-accuracy hurdles that were impacting sales on some of their most popular products.
OMG’s OneSource: Unmatched Data Visibility and Error Identification
The Magnet Group’s charge for data accuracy led them to OMG’s OneSource solution, which provides suppliers with a resource to transform their product data into the industry standard format, PromoStandards, and make it available to third-party technology platforms and large distributors through a single API.
In addition, OneSource is the only tool that validates data with a 400-point check to ensure high quality data, and provides suppliers unmatched data visibility to automatically identify errors – like missing images or incomplete pricing and configuration details – so they know what to fix.
OMG’s OneSource solution analyzed their product data, and provided a comprehensive dashboard report identifying where the data inaccuracies existed. According to Nathan Baine, Director of Marketing at The Magnet Group, this was a true game-changer.
“OMG’s OneSource data tool helped us to identify problems with our PromoStandards product data. Once we fixed those, sales for those products have gone up.”
Streamlining Data Correction with OneSource
One massive challenge facing suppliers today is identifying unknown data errors, especially with PromoStandards data feeds. Short of big red flags, or complaints from distributors or service providers, it’s easy to overlook data inconsistencies or gaps when managing swaths of data across multiple platforms.
Luckily, OMG’s OneSource solution can identify these inconsistencies and point out where broken data sits, thereby remedying problems that are difficult to locate, which is exactly how OneSource helped The Magnet Group team.
Key Benefits
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Enhanced market visibilityand distributor traffic to key products |
Increased salesdue to improved product data |
Boosted distributor trafficand sales volume through OMG’s paid ad program |
“The OneSource platform helped us figure out where the bugs were in the code, where we needed to fix stuff. I’m a fan of OneSource for that, for sure. It helps us easily identify and correct issues across product groupings ” said Nathan.
Identifying latent data issues is one thing, but OneSource by OMG can also help streamline the data correction process, which can take numerous working days to do by hand.
According to June Edwards, Director of Sales Operations at The Magnet Group, OMG saved their team a lot of time on remedying data inconsistencies, “As soon as we figured out what the report was, where the errors were, it got straightened out pretty quickly.”
The Importance of a Dedicated Technology Partner for Suppliers
Even with the right tools in place, it can be difficult to manage and maintain accurate product data across platforms. This challenge can be made much easier with the right technology partner in place, just ask The Magnet Group.
“ It helps to work with OMG, especially because PromoStandards is hooked up with so many different buying groups and selling platforms that, if there’s an issue with one of them, it’s nice to know that I can just go straight to OMG or to our Client Success Manager Aubrey and ask for help. That saves quite a bit of time. Instead of fishing through each different platform for errors, I can just go to one place,” said Nathan.
With a dedicated Client Success Manager, The Magnet Group has an extra set of hands to help the team get their products in front of more customers in more places. Aubrey is the go-to for The Magnet Group, where she:
- Provides tips and tricks for how to use the platform
- Assists with managing product placement and make recommendations on spend to ensure their products are visible in the search results for distributors, decorators, and dealers
- Regularly provides marketing recommendations based on their strategy and desire to expand their customer base to include team dealers
The Future with OMG: Access and Exposure to Thousands of Distributors and Dealers
By partnering with OMG, The Magnet Group now has full visibility to their PromoStandards data feeds and the ability to share that data with the industry from a single API, including more than 10 service providers and large distributors.
They’re also looking forward to continuing the partnership with OMG as the solutions continue to evolve and expand.
Now that DistributorCentral is part of OMG, The Magnet Group’s products are available across the entire OMG ecosystem of solutions, giving them access to thousands of distributors, decorators, and dealers actively searching for and selling products every day through:
- Product Search
- Distributor Websites
- Online Stores: Pop-up, Company, and Redemption
- Presentations and Order Management
- OneSource API for service providers and distributors
“We think the integration of OMG and DistributorCentral is going to be something that would just to get us some extra visibility for our products across all the online stores that OMG does. So I would say that we were excited once we found out really what OMG does because we see that as an extra kind of opportunity and promotion for our items,” said June.
