.On the home page of SupplyHouse.com, a distributor of plumbing, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning supplies, there’s no doubt about who its main customers are. They’re tradesmen like Pat of Karl’s Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, who was featured recently in a home-page video about what he does for Karl’s, a family-owned provider of plumbing and HVAC services.

The YouTube-hosted video—in which Pat talks about his work as a plumber and his family life before he arrives at the SupplyHouse headquarters to receive an unexpected free Carnival Cruise for his family—serves multiple purposes, SupplyHouse head of marketing Lauren O’Toole says. One of an ongoing series of videos the distributor posts online about its customers and staff, it says in a big and unabashed way that the distributor appreciates its regular customers, gains SupplyHouse exposure through social media, and helps it increase online traffic and sales, she says.

This particular video is also helping SupplyHouse to promote its own version of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the key shopping days after Thanksgiving when retailers kick off the holiday shopping season in stores and online. For SupplyHouse, whose fortunes aren’t directly tied to retail shopping trends, its big holiday season day is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving—or what it calls Trade Tuesday, a day when many of its contractor clients may be looking for supplies as they get called to tend to kitchens and heating systems amid the commotion of holiday-filled households.

“We don’t focus on Black Friday” or Cyber Monday, O’Toole says. But this year’s holiday season marks the fourth time it has recognized Trade Tuesday—an annual event that has helped it build customer loyalty, traffic and sales, she adds. SupplyHouse, which is privately owned and doesn’t release its revenue figures, sells only online and through a customer contact center, though most sales are through its e-commerce site, O’Toole says. It ships from two warehouses, one at its base in the Long Island community of Farmingdale, N.Y., and one in Columbus, Ohio. It sells more than 80,000 SKUs from brands including Honeywell, Bosch, Zoeller and Goodman, with per-item prices of up to several thousand dollars.

With support from senior executives at SupplyHouse, O’Toole and her marketing team started to experiment a few years ago with ways to build the distributor’s reputation through social media and other forms of marketing. The company decided to jump into social media marketing early, O’Toole says, without getting overly concerned from the start on producing tangible results right away, like increased web traffic.

It  has since then developed multiple ways of developing and spreading content, including photos and videos of male staffers sporting “crazy beards,” selfie photos submitted by Facebook followers with products, including ones shaded in red, white and blue on Veteran’s Day; and lists of True or False questions related to how a particular plumbing project was done. It distributes collections of such content in photo and video formats through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, but has been careful not to overdo it with mentions of its products, O’Toole says.

“People don’t want to see a lot of promotions on Facebook” or other social sites, she says. About 75% of the content SupplyHouse posts in social media is about fun and cultural topics, helping to keep the company top of mind among its followers, she adds.

That emphasis on non-product-related content earns the distributor social media followers, including more than 3,800 followers on Twitter and more than 94,000 Likes on Facebook. It also opens the door for it to run subtle and occasional promotions without alienating those followers, O’Toole says.

It routinely mixes in content into its social media posts about its most generous promotions or “cool new products like a hot new thermostat seen on TV,” she adds. In the home page video about Pat at Karl’s Plumbing, Heating & Cooling—which has been viewed on YouTube more than 1,400 times—for example, a note appears for a few seconds at the end of the video, under a “Happy Holidays” greeting, that informs viewers they can get 5% off everything on SupplyHouse.com on Trade Tuesday.

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