platinum Supporters
We are honored to have you as part of the Home Technology Association’s family of industry-leading brands that uphold and magnify the HTA’s mission of home technology excellence and delivering exceptional technology experiences.
The following are recommended practices to maximize your investment with the Home Technology Association’s Supporting Brands program. If your goal is to attract more dealers, more specifiers (architects, interior designers, builders), or more homeowners, see the following below for advice.
If you are looking to add new dealers, give them an incentive to try your product or service and let us help you promote it to HTA Certified dealers. This is a great way to get a dealer’s attention. Especially now with dealers so busy, it often takes something special to make them invest in a new brand, product category, or service.
Likewise, if you are looking to drive additional engagement from existing dealers, create a program that incentivizes dealers to sell into additional categories, to go deeper with your product line, add new services, or sell in larger quantities.
See current programs for newly certified dealers here and existing dealers here. Create your own unique dealer incentive program and email Josh Christian at jc@htacertified.org with the details and we will promote it.
HTA staff is happy to send you a list of all certified integrators in a spreadsheet (you can instantly view our column-sortable dealer list at this link). Have your staff or rep firms reach out and introduce your brand to HTA Certified integrators via phone introductions. Leverage the fact that you are part of the HTA family as they are. It will make a cold call much warmer.
If you have created an incentive program for them, your call is a perfect opportunity to draw special attention to it.
If you are a Gold or Platinum sponsor, we recommend giving us your dealer-facing article first (see tips below to create an effective article) so you can reference the article during the call or email them the article link after the call. Email Jeff Bassetti at jeff.bassetti@htacertified.org for a current HTA dealer list.
You have a unique chance to share your brand story with HTA Certified dealers through an article focused squarely on them. Here is your chance to share what makes your company unique and how doing business with you will help the dealer become more profitable, unique, efficient, design-friendly, etc. Our dealers are already product savvy; they will mainly benefit from any specific help you can provide in showing your brand as a solution to a problem they, homeowners, or the design and build trades are facing. Dealers are always looking for great sales tips and strategies to create lasting relationships with specifiers, is there something you can help them with?
An effective strategy some have used is to interview an HTA Certified integrator who uses your product or service and have them explain why they use it (you can view a column-sortable HTA Certified dealer list at this link). See existing dealer articles at this private URL: https://htacertified.org/app/resources/.
We recommend giving us your dealer-facing article as soon as possible, within a few weeks of becoming a supporting brand. If you need help creating an article, email Jeff Bassetti at jeff.bassetti@htacertified.org and he will connect you directly with professional writing resources who can create the article for you.
The HTA has assembled a collection of great integrators that represent the best-of-the-best, though we don’t have relationships with all of them. Yet. We need your help to be introduced to your best dealers that are not yet certified. As an HTA supporter, you have several $400 value HTA application fee waivers to give these dealers that cost you nothing (four waivers for Silver supporters, eight for Gold supporters, and twelve for Platinum supporters). You can view our column-sortable HTA Certified dealer list at this link to see who should be certified that isn’t yet, or alternatively, we can email you a spreadsheet of all HTA Certified dealers.
We all win when your best dealers become HTA Certified. They will increase their sales closing ratio and this will lead to more business from them. You and your dealer become more profitable, and the HTA gains a new top-notch integrator. We all win! Reach out to Josh at jc@htacertified.org for a sample email already created for you to introduce HTA Certification to your best dealers.
Webinars are a great way to get the word out about your company. We suggest creating a webinar focused on your brand’s unique benefits (see suggested ideas in the point above about dealer-facing articles). Once your webinar is created, give us at least one month’s advance notice and we will share it on HTA’s social media channels and in our dealer-facing newsletter to help drive awareness. When we share your webinar on our social media channels, it does not count against your included social media posts that comes with the Silver, Gold, or Platinum sponsorship packages. In actuality, you get a free extra social media shout out.
It’s a great idea to make a quarterly reminder to make sure your HTA profile pages are up to date. If you launch new products or services, be sure they are listed on your HTA profiles pages. The quickest shortcut to see your profile page(s) is to click on your logo on this page.
If you have opted to provide the HTA with social media post verbiage and graphics (instead of the option to have us create the posts for you), we recommend making your posts lifestyle-focused, especially if you would like to attract homeowners and architects, interior designers, and builders. See a good example at this link. Make the post engaging and ‘clickable’.
We work hard to continually expand our social reach to dealers, industry trade partners, and the public alike. Please follow the HTA on our social media accounts. All of them are linked in the footer at htacertified.org. Please share / repost relevant HTA posts to your social media audience. All of us working together will further spread the word of industry excellence to relevant companies and individuals.
As a supporter of the Home Technology Association, you are putting your hard-earned resources behind an association that stands for quality and consumer satisfaction. Show that pride to the world! We created special logos for you to show your commitment to excellence. Display the HTA Supporting Brand logo on your website and hyperlink the logo back to your company profile page, the HTA homepage, or the ‘What’ page. There are two logo versions, a general version shown here and a tier-specific version. Logos may be downloaded at this link.
We have two great resources for you to share that will add value to your website. They are the technology budget estimator and the project technology assessment forms.
1 – The HTA’s technology budget estimator
You may embed the HTA’s famous technology budget estimator in your own website. And, you can have all the data calculated from it!
Your dealers benefit when the potential clients who reach them from your site have already learned what realistic technology budgets are. This takes the sticker shock away from the dealer and puts it on the HTA’s industry standard, brand neutral budget calculator. When clients learn realistic budgets from this tool, feedback shows these educated clients are less likely to shop around. This will help keep homeowners away from the low-ballers and trunkslammers that wreck our industry’s reputation!
See an example of an embedded calculator at this Residential Systems link or see how Crestron has shared it at www.crestronhome.com (it’s in the footer section). CEPro.com and ConnectedDesign.com have embedded it as well.
2 – Project Technology Assessment forms
If your website appeals to the design and build communities, share the HTA Project Technology Assessment forms. These have proven to be a huge hit with builders, interior designers, and architects. It helps them understand: 1 - the breadth of technology systems integrators install, and vitally, 2 - it helps them think of their project’s technology needs early in their process. It also points them to your most qualified dealers.
Share the links or the PDF’s themselves at the following two links. Note that the forms are identical between on the two pages except for one word. One page is focused on the design team (covering architects & interior designers) and the other is focused on the build team.
Baker International Group’s website has all the above on their website, see it at this link.
If your website has a dealer finder, we recommend adding an ‘HTA Certified’ designation to dealer search results, like Savant has done at this link. To see it in action, search for dealers in 90210 zip code to see how Savant calls out HTA Certification.
The ‘HTA Certified’ text is a clickable link and explains to the consumer what it means and why the dealer is especially qualified. Calling out HTA Certification is a way to reward your best dealers, to help them win the business they deserve. These are the dealers that routinely perform the best quality installations and enhance your brand’s reputation. This will help raise the bar in the industry.
The goal of your public-facing article is to inform specifiers (architects, interior designers & builders) and luxury homeowners about your product or service. The article should follow the advertorial format of providing a broad education about your product or service initially, though leading to your product or service being the logical solution.
A suggested strategy is to interview an architect, interior designer, builder, homeowner, or HTA Certified integrator who uses your product or service and have them explain why they use it. Videos may be embedded in the article, too. Put a strong call to action in your article to get them to engage with you.
We recommend giving us your public-facing article as soon as possible, within a few weeks of becoming a supporting brand. If you need help creating an article, email Jeff Bassetti at jeff.bassetti@htacertified.org and he will connect you directly with professional writing resources who can create the article for you.
If your website appeals to the design and build communities, share the HTA Project Technology Assessment forms. These have proven to be a huge hit with builders, interior designers, and architects. It helps them understand: 1 - the breadth of technology systems integrators install, and vitally, 2 - it helps them think of their project’s technology needs early in their process. It also points them to your most qualified dealers.
Share the links or the PDF’s themselves at the following two links. Note that the forms are identical between on the two pages except for one word. One page is focused on the design team (covering architects & interior designers) and the other is focused on the build team.
Architects, interior designers, and other key specifiers need CEUs (Continuing Education Units) to maintain certain industry designations. Many brands in the CI space have created 1-hour CEU courses designed to educate specifiers about a certain aspect of home technology relevant to their brand. Have you?
If you want to create brand awareness and thought leadership with specifiers, creating a CEU course is a great way to establish both. Your CEU course may be given by your staff, rep firms, and even your dealers. We list each company’s CEU classes on each brand’s HTA category page(s). See this Lutron page for example. Notice the three classes listed in the right-hand margin.
Visit this AIA page and this IDCEC page for instructions on how to create such a program. Josh Christian knows some resources you can hire to create courses for you if desired. Reach out to Josh at jc@htacertified.org
Soon, the HTA will have a dedicated CEU sign-up page that a specifier can go to sign up for multiple courses
Architects, interior designers, builders, remodelers, etc. each have their own industry trade associations. If you want to create more awareness with specifiers, investigate becoming a member or sponsor of one or more of these related trade associations. We have a resource page here to all the major trade associations.
Each association has a way to get your brand in front of their members. Good news…from the outreach we have done with these associations, they realize that technology is an increasingly vital aspect of their member’s projects and are hungry for solutions! Most of these associations have their own expos you can exhibit at, too.
If you have a dealer newsletter, please encourage your dealers to join and be active with their local trade association chapters. Each association’s local chapter finder is at the above link.
It’s a great idea to make a quarterly reminder to make sure your HTA profile pages are up to date. If you launch new products or services, be sure they are listed on your HTA profiles pages. The quickest shortcut to see your profile page(s) is to click on your logo on this page.
gold Supporters
