If you’re in home improvement, you’ve no doubt noticed that Sears is everywhere online. And they’re especially strong in some key categories: replacement windows, siding and cabinet refacing. You’ll see their ads in the paid search listings, some organic listings, e-mails and a host of other online advertising channels.
The folks at Sears are undoubtedly smart, so you can assume that if they’re advertising, they must be doing so because it’s profitable for them. Here’s the question you should be asking yourself: “Why them and not me?” Said another way, how can Sears find it cost-effective to advertise across so many channels, while local home improvement companies seem to have so few profitable online advertising options?
Want to turn more leads into appointments? More appointments into sales? You may not be able to have it both ways.
Whether you know it or not, there’s a tug of war going on in your company right now. And the folks who set your appointments are right in the middle.
On one side is your marketing team. That includes your homeshow reps, SFI teams, canvassers and the like. They work feverishly to generate connections with homeowners interested in what you sell. You pay many for each appointment they produce, and as far as these folks are concerned,every lead they generate should turn into an appointment. And they naturally want to be paid for all of them.
With the 2010 Census still fresh in your mind, consider how customer surveys can help you run a more profitable home improvement business.
Surveying your customers used to be a huge hassle. Writing up your survey questions. Finding the right addresses to which to send them. Stuffing envelopes with stamped return envelopes. And then hoping that you get enough surveys back to make your results statistically significant.
Fortunately, you can now take advantage of a number of simple and inexpensive online services that ease the process of surveying your customers.
Does your location have anything to do with how many online leads you get? Absolutely.
I had lunch last year with a couple who ran a good-sized home improvement company in Northern Michigan. I’m talking the deep north. Lots of ice fishing, but not a lot of people.
They asked me a good question: Does our location have anything to do with how many leads we’re supposed to get from the Internet?
My answer was “Absolutely.” And then they asked: “Why?”
From our perspective, the areas of the country that produce the most leads online share three traits:
For over four years, our company has connected dealers to homeowners searching the Internet for solutions to their home improvement challenges. We’ve loved every minute of it, as we have enjoyed the opportunity to work with many of you.
As both the Internet and the home improvement market evolve, so will our company. After a three-year debate inside our company, we’re changing our name to Keyword Connects.
Many home improvement brands spend great sums of money buying national media to generate leads for their dealers. A great strategy…or a big waste? Read on.
As we’ve worked with home improvement brands and manufacturers, we’ve learned a lot about their challenges of running national media campaigns. Turns out that brands that run campaigns on behalf of their dealers take on key challenges…not just to develop programs that work, but to also track the results.
Want to get your 2010 off to a great start? A little preparation now will go a long way come January 2.
It’s December, and homeowners across the continent are looking forward to a joyous holiday season. As they do, you need to set your sights out just a little further: the upcoming home show season.
What should you be doing? Get prepared to follow up on your home show leads. How? One step is to plan how you best stay connected to those homeowners who inevitably tell you during your follow up, “I’m just not ready to meet with you yet.”
I’ve written a lot about how home improvement dealers can produce more value from their Internet leads. Now I’m turning the tables, to suggest how the online lead companies can serve them better.
Here goes:
Limit the number of times they sell each lead. Home improvement companies really don’t want their leads shared with anyone, let alone their competitors. Yet most lead generation companies sell their leads as many times as they can (2X? 3X? 5X? I’ve even heard as many as 12X).But every time they sell a lead more than once, that lead loses value. A lead sold 6X has a significantly smaller chance of closing than a lead sold only twice. To make their customers happiest, they should deliver leads that have the best possible chance of closing. And that means limiting the number of times they sell their leads.
The article’s “Instant Improvement Idea #1” was “Get a Better Follow-Up System”. In other words, learn to make re-hashing really work for you. Being an Internet guy, I naturally began wondering what that meant for online-leads-gone-cold.
In short, it’s a big opportunity. Re-hashing Internet leads is as valuable as re-hashing your leads from other media. You’d think that would be an obvious point, but for too many home improvement companies, Internet leads still fall to the bottom of the follow-up pile.
Last week we considered search engine rankings—and why it’s so hard to get (and stay) on top. It seems that Web sites run by online lead brokers and national brands dominate the search engine results. You’d simply like to get your own Web site to rank highly for common terms like “replacement windows” and “vinyl siding”, the ones you know homeowners in your territory are searching for.
Those Web sites that do get the high ranks certainly look authoritative. But the frustrating part is that you know that their owners have probably never swung a hammer for a customer in their lives.
Every week, Todd Bairstow—our online expert—shares his wisdom on an aspect of Internet marketing for home improvement companies. You can read his thoughts here on his blog or you can subscribe, and we'll send you his latest posts each week.
