Fun, engaging, and exciting is how I would describe the session 10 class – Sales And Marketing! My mind was soaring with ideas and things to do to enhance our business development tactics. We all know that growing a business is tough; each business is so different and unique, there is no straight forward formula to follow. That’s where ISA really opened my mind. It was there as I was listening to the speakers and talking with others at my table, that I came to a conclusion. I believed that we needed to strengthen our brand by improving our company’s message. “We have to do a better job on educating our customers on how we are different from our competition,” I said to myself.
“If you’re not different than you are just a commodity” –Mark Riffey, RFP
As I began to find out what other people knew about our company, I was shocked to hear how little our fellow contractors and customers knew about our company…
People will leave us reviews saying things such as, “DECO has a great reputation for being professional and timely, so we chose them over the competitor”. And often I will get calls to the office from a current customer saying “I had no idea you had a 24/7 drive thru and drop—our new project requires one!” And we almost would have lost that major job had the customer not overheard their manager talking our drive thru and drop, or whatever the situation was. (And we gained a major job simply because an owner heard his manager talking about our drive thru and drop!) My point is that businesses lose possible work simply because customers do not know all of the services you have to offer. I saw this happening to DECO Coatings.
Here’s what really got me—in speaking with our current customers about why they chose us, no one mentioned that we are QP3 certified, or that we have a 40T crane…so we began working with our social media and marketing company on a campaign called “Did You Know…”.
This campaign which we began to create in the fall of 2017 suddenly became the focus of our entire marketing plan for 2018. Yes, we specialize in coatings. We have a passionate team and remarkable services to deliver to our customers. But how do we reach more potential customers that don’t know the extent of our services that are useful to them? The answer began to take form when we stopped focusing on “how can we better our closing rates?” and started turning focus to “are we effectively communicating with and educating our customers?” and “what are we learning from our customers?” The fact is, increasing marketing efforts and dollars is only as helpful as our knowledge of our customers’ needs, desires, and knowledge of our services.
By taking the main services we wanted to highlight, we were able to create questions that we want our customers to be asking themselves and then calling us. Here are some of the ways we framed questions, that will be taken and used in our social media and marketing campaign for 2018:
· Did you know we have the capacity to take in emergency blast and coat services?
· Did someone forget to coat something or have the wrong product on?
· Is your project delayed because of “blame-game” issues?
Obviously the questions and points that I’ve provided will not work for your individual business, but it can help guide you as you try to reframe your own marketing and social media for the new year. I will be reporting back by springtime to update on how well our marketing strategy worked and in what ways it could have been improved. As they say, it is a learning process, and that process has got to start somewhere…no better time than right now.
For a consultation or estimate, call DECO Coatings at 317.889.9290
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