Do Strong Offline Home Improvement Brands Have an Advantage Online?

As a home improvement company, your marketing efforts have likely been primarily offline. All of the home improvement veterans I know built their businesses with traditional advertising media, such as TV, radio, newspaper and direct mail.

While these veterans were obviously looking for leads, offline media served an additional purpose – to help build their brand, which over time would compound in value and generate even more leads. Thousands of successful home improvement companies were built this way – and many are still successful with that approach.

But do all those years of offline brand building mean anything as homeowners increasingly go online? The answer is: sort of.

Online, great home improvement brands ‘win some and lose some’. While they may be on the tip of a consumer’s tongue during a casual conversation, there’s a new step in the process that might eventually lead to a sale. Rather than contact the company directly, that consumer will typically head online next.

That’s where the winning and losing starts. If a strong brand carries over to a strong online position, the brand will have a definite advantage over its competitors.

I know, don’t be coy. What’s a “strong online position”? It’s the new part of the consumer’s brand experience when the Internet is used to research a brand. Online, your brand is strongest when your Web site is:

• Easy to find right at the top of the Google search pages
• Simple for the user to navigate
• And offers a solid value proposition

Solid offline brands only grow stronger when a homeowner finds it simple to find your Web site and to use it. The end result is that the rate at which you can covert Web site visitors into leads will be higher.

Let’s turn the scenario around. Many, many, many, many, many home improvement companies have strong offline brands. Unfortunately that brand just doesn’t happen online. Why? Many companies spend their time and money building their brand offline, only to frustrate homeowners by building Web sites that are:

• Difficult for even their biggest fans to find
• Hard to navigate
• And obviously out-of-date with your current promotions

In these cases like this, home improvement companies not only lower their conversion rates, they actually hurt the offline brand image they have worked so hard to cultivate. As such, conversion rates aren’t really the point. The harder homeowners have to work to find and use your Web site, the less likely they are to actually connect with your brand – no matter how solid your brand is offline.

The bottom line: a strong offline brand can give you a real boost in online conversion – but ONLY if you also create a strong online presence.

Next time around, I will write about the opposite effect: how home improvement companies with little or no brand equity are still winning online.