By Tim W. Knox

By:

Jim Cory

Until the recession hit, MainStreet Design Build, in Birmingham, Mich., counted on a marketing budget to generate the 20% to 25% of its business that didn’t come through past customers or referrals. That budget included maintaining the company website. But expectations for the site weren’t high. “Every time we looked on Google, it wouldn’t show up,” owner Steve Ramaekers says.Today, after a $12,000 investment in Web design and search engine optimization (SEO), MainStreet Design Build’s rebuilt site generates more business for the company than any other lead source, including repeat and referral.

One reason is that the new website does everything that experts suggest a remodeling site should do: It shows visitors how the company’s design and construction skills and its customer service practices solve clients’ remodeling needs, with lots of friendly communication.

The result: It gets homeowners interested enough to e-mail or pick up the phone. Better still for co-owners Steve and Christine Ramaekers, if you live in the Detroit suburbs and you type in “kitchen remodel” or “bathroom remodel,” their company’s site pops up on the first page of Google’s organic (i.e., non-paid) search results. So whether someone has seen a lawn sign but doesn’t remember much else, or if that homeowner is looking for a remodeling company but never even heard of MainStreet Design Build, the link to that site is the first, second, or third item they see when they search the Internet.

Search Me

With fewer homeowners seeking renovations, and with the jobs they have in mind often being smaller, many remodeling companies are looking for low-cost ways to bring in business. “I’m hearing more and more about companies going to the Web as their primary marketing vehicle,” says Phillipa Gamse, a West Coast–based Web marketing expert. Why? Because that’s where a majority of consumers in search of a product or service go to look.According to “Digital World, Digital Life,” a study released in December and published on eMarketer.com, 63% of Web users research a product or service before buying it. Even if they’re a strong, solid referral, there’s an excellent chance they’ll check out your site before picking up the phone. For remodeling contractors, the site is a “virtual showroom,” says Tom Audette, of Three Deep Marketing, in St. Paul, Minn., which includes many home improvement companies among its clients.

Of course, first consumers have to find your site. Since most traffic today is search-engine driven, they probably won’t if your site is not optimized. That means its text needs to be written in such a way that it’s heavy with links and keywords or phrases (“bath remodeling,” “kitchen design,” and so on), which Google search engines seek out and tabulate to return relevant results to users. Companies that specialize in search engine optimization “optimize” the chance that your site will be discovered, by embedding that data. There are a lot of companies that sell SEO services, which are less expensive today than they were just a few years ago.

“Companies can get optimized for less than $2,500,” says Martin Gould, of marketing and communications company Focalize Consulting, in Cooper City, Fla. “But you can also literally spend nothing, since most high school juniors can do this.”

Looking to wow prospects once they arrive at your site? Don’t go overboard, experts advise. In the current economic climate, conspicuous consumption is out, value for money is in. And sizzle doesn’t sell; it sends your prospect elsewhere. “Creative, high-end people want their websites to reflect their creativity,” Gould says. “So they overdesign it. Lots of Flash animation, pictures, slide shows.”None of that means much to the website visitor looking to put an addition on his or her home or to add an attic bedroom. If someone has arrived at your site, Gould says, the reason they’re there is because they have a problem and want to know if you’re the one who can solve it.

David Alpert, of Continuum Marketing, in Great Falls, Va., which markets and builds websites for remodeling companies, agrees that remodeling sites don’t need to be extravagant to attract prospects and hold their interest. What a site should do, he says, is to create a “brand understanding” for the prospect and a lead that’s a good match for the remodeler.

Organized And Waiting

Here’s the problem: Your brand is not only what you do best but all the things you do. That might include projects you specialize in, additional services you offer (handyman, for instance), the people who work for your company, and the steps that you and your clients will move through as the project is designed and built. It might also, one expert suggests, include feedback from your delighted customers.“Too often, when I go to remodeling sites, I see things and not people,” Gould says. His suggestion: Put testimonials up-front. “What customers identify with are the people who have done business with you and how their lives have benefited from that.”

But pile all that on your home page and you risk overwhelming visitors. On the other hand, if you streamline it into a few crisp paragraphs framing endless before-and-after photos, you lose the keywords and links that push you to the forefront of organic search.

Ideally, you want to include lots of information about who you are and what you do. The site, experts say, should be friendly, fun, and interesting. But, more than anything else, it should be easy to navigate.

Many companies organize their website information under five or six broad subject headings. MainStreet Design Build, for instance, breaks its site into: About Us, Gallery, Design, Resource Center, and Contact Us. People who arrive on the home page can quickly find and click through to what interests them. The Resources section is chock-full of Frequently Asked Questions, both useful and loaded with keywords.

Actionable Intelligence

If you’re thinking about having your site redesigned and optimized, remember to do the following:Count clicks. So how do you know that your company’s website is effective? Lead tracking is one way. But a site lives and breathes. It can change when you want it to, in the ways that you want it to, depending on not only how often visitors come but how long they stay and what they look at.

Programs such as Google Analytics or Alexa — both free downloads — tell you how many visitors are coming to your site and how they behave when they get there. They also point to ways in which you can improve site design and content.

Diane Menke, project manager and chief operations officer for Myers Constructs, in Philadelphia, tracks reports weekly, courtesy of host server DCANet. She combines this information with results from Emma Inc., an e-mail newsletter and marketing campaign service that reports on who opens e-mail newsletters. Menke says that she is looking at who’s looking, how often, and how useful the site is to the viewer. Counts go up when the company has had press or has published its e-newsletter. Menke says that she is particularly interested in whether or not viewing the site makes visitors more inclined to sign with the company.

Web marketing expert Gamse suggests that business owners familiarize themselves with analytics programs and manage their sites accordingly. “You have to have someone who can look at those numbers and create actionable intelligence,” she says.

How often do you check the reports? Weekly, monthly, or daily? “Daily, if you’re running a paid search campaign,” Gould suggests. “If you don’t get a response, you need to figure out why, so you can get a response.”

Give your address. Search engines look for geographical terms. That’s why it’s important that your company’s name, address, phone number, and an e-mail address occur not just on the home page but on every page, including the pages under subheadings.

MainStreet Design Build, for instance, includes its address on every page of its website. The phrase, “Birmingham, Michigan,” is small and inconspicuous — you’d have to be looking to notice it — but including it that many times makes it more likely that someone in Birmingham looking for a remodeling company is going to find the Ramaekers’ site.Gehman Custom Remodeling, in Harleysville, Pa., has a darker colored section at the bottom of each Web page that contains not only its hours of operation, contact info, and certifications, but also says, “We service these communities,” and then proceeds to name all 74 of them.

Take names. Building a database that you can reach out to with offers and promotions is a critical part of the Web marketing picture, enabling the site to do more than just passively relay brand information. But to do that you must take names or, in this case, e-mail addresses, from the people who arrive on your website.

Say they’re not ready to call you yet. What can you give them that they’re willing to exchange their e-mail address for, so that you can stay in touch with them? One excellent tradeoff is an e-newsletter that arrives on a regular basis with news items relevant to remodeling, home maintenance, or your company.

Gamse suggests that another way to capture an e-mail address is to add a live chat function — you communicate with visitors to your website using an intuitive instant messenger interface — so that someone from your office can contact a visitor after a certain period of time to ask if he or she has any questions or would like an estimate.

New Tools

If you haven’t updated your website for a few years, you’re going to find a few other useful tools you can install that will make it easier for clients to communicate with you and you with them.Client login. Not so long ago, websites that charted the progress of a construction project and were accessible by password were used pretty much exclusively by commercial construction companies and new-home builders.

Today more residential remodelers are making use of Web-based communication programs such as BuilderTrend or Co-Construct to keep home­owners in the loop. “Software vendors such as ourselves have caught up to the way remodelers need to do business,” BuilderTrend co-founder and executive vice president of operations Steve Dugger says. He notes that since relatively few remodeling companies now offer the service, it can be a potent sales tool.

Accessed by password and discreetly located at the top or bottom of the home page, Web-based communication software programs steer your clients toward a server or Web portal that provides a direct and discreet way to communicate.

Such software programs speed up job progress by getting selections made and change orders approved more rapidly. “It provides clients with progress pictures and access to all their plans,” Steve Ramaekers says. He had Co-Construct added when his company’s site was updated and calls it “one of the best things we’ve ever done.”

Feedback loop. Client testimonials are great, but they’re also one-sided. It’s likely that visitors assume you’re not going to put a negative comment from a past client on your website. And why would you?

What carries far greater weight are views gathered through an independent third-party survey company, such as GuildQuality, which surveys clients and links its feedback results from your site to its company site. Click on any one of 10 subject headings on Eberle Remodeling’s website, for instance, and a link on the left side of the screen says, “Click here to view our customer satisfaction ratings,” and steers you to the company’s GuildQuality page, which incorporates responses from 72 clients and gives the remodeler a “100% Recommended” rating.

Blogs. Do you blog? Should you try to? Joseph Gilday, of Gilday Renovations, in Silver Spring, Md., recently had the company website redesigned. The new design includes a blog called Field Notes.

“I wanted to do something useful and personal,” Gilday says. He plans to include not only notes and photos, but streaming video in which designers or technicians will address some point in a project currently under way.

Blogs can enhance a site in several ways. If current, they add something newsy and immediately relevant. They also burnish your expertise in the eye of the prospect looking for information. In addition, a blog adds text to your site content and enhances your chance of being picked up by search engines.

Menke says that her company’s next website challenge is to add software that makes it “more blog and photo-focused and less ‘portfolio’ focused.” The goal is to further differentiate the site. “We do not want a static, ‘looks like every other remodelers’ website,” she says.

Here’s the caveat: Don’t blog unless you can do it regularly and often. “What we see,” says Audette of Three Deep Marketing, “is that, most of the time, people put up [a blog] and then don’t do anything with it. If the guy can commit to it, he can start broadcasting his blog posts all over the Web.” If you can’t commit, it’s better not to bother.

—Jim Cory is editor of Replacement Contractor, a sister publication of Remodeling.

It’s Everything Personal

What remodeler has the luxury of doing anything as goofy as “tweeting” in an economy like this?

The better question might be: What remodeler has the luxury not to dabble with online social networking as part of a well-rounded marketing program?

“I have to say: If I wasn’t doing all this stuff, we might be dead right now,” says David West of Meadowview Construction, in Georgetown, Mass. Besides his website (fourth version), he spends 30 or 40 minutes each day on the likes of Twitter (microblogging, 32 million users as of early June), LinkedIn (business social network, 41 million members), and Facebook (200 million users) — all of them free, efficient, and far-reaching.

In return, West’s rewards have included:

Through LinkedIn, getting to know a magazine editor who later selected the company for a heralded “Best of” list, and getting referrals from fellow National Association of the Remodeling Industry members for projects closer to Meadowview’s area than their own.

Through Facebook, getting connected to an old friend who is now a Realtor and has since referred work to Meadowview Construction.

Through Twitter, enabling hundreds of his “followers” to quickly click to Meadowview’s website, read its LinkedIn testimonials, and see its work on YouTube, such as a slide show of a poolhouse the company built and a video called “Drawers Closing Softly.”

“I’m not an in-your-face sales-pitchy guy,” West says. To that end, he avoids using social media for what he calls “smiley-face” promotional chatter and strives instead to be current, helpful, and interesting.

He updates his LinkedIn status nearly daily and tweets in a way that is personal and frequently funny. “If people are responding to you, they’re thinking about you,” he says.

West isn’t alone among remodelers, but his active and deliberate use of online networking puts him ahead of a field that was slow to embrace the notion of marketing, much less Web marketing.

Close behind are the likes of Len McAdams, whose 33 years running McAdams Builders, in Kirkland, Wash., tell him that “we can only sell so much work” to people in his age range.

He’s been experimenting with several online networking sites. “They’re a growth medium for the future, and I don’t think we can leave out any opportunities until we find the right one,” he says.

Some experts even cite “hyper-local marketing” as the leading way that Twitter — which is essentially a person-to-person medium — will change U.S. business forever.

Already, some remodelers are tweeting to their followers about events such as open houses, newly completed projects, and restaurants offering a free meal — after a remodeling consultation, that is.

—Leah Thayer, senior editor, REMODELING.

source: Remodeling Magazine