Door Industry Journal - Summer 2018

Also online at: www.dijonline.co.uk domestic garage doors 37 THE door industry journal summer 2018 Social media: Social media is a key ingredient. Get your latest installs uploaded and don’t worry if the cement mixer is still in the shot, you are not taking a holiday snap. People will look past it because they follow you to look at the items you are installing and how they might look on their home. Use a brief description but don’t be repetitive, as 20 posts saying “new garage door installed” will quickly be scrolled past. Upload all of your work, making it part of the clean-up at the end of the job. The best pictures tend to be “before and after shots” - and don’t be shy about being in the picture, because customers seeing you in front of your work will create a bond as if they know you. Just remember to get the home owner’s permission first. Facebook: Sell on Facebook, savvy installers are there already. We know most customers spend a lot of time scrolling through Facebook and therefore you have a massive ready-made audience that 20 years ago you could only have dreamed of reaching in months of advertising in the Gazette. It is reasonably priced and can generate a great return if you provide a “special offer” or a “great deal”. Try a base model door to start with that seems affordable to most people. A four- thousand-pound garage door needs “selling”, whereas a base model will most likely sell itself, your customers of the future will not be looking in the local newspaper as falling distribution figures are a sure sign of the times. Is Google advertising an alternative? Search engine optimisation specialists will generally promise a number one spot on Google, but we all know it’s harder than it looks and if there are 10 installers covering one area, then 9 SEO specialists are failing. Don’t expect immediate results either, it can take months to climb the ladder to page one with a new website, in fact pages 2 ,3 or 4 should be seen as good progress. So, is paid advertising the answer? The answer is Yes and No. Firstly, is your website mobile friendly and as up-to-date as possible, because paying for visitors to your site can become a bidding war nightmare and having potential customers land on an out-of-date website means they will most likely click away just as fast, meaning you see your bank account drained faster that you can fill it. Monitoring is the key here to ensure that your bids and daily spend are manageable, the biggest mistake however is to bid a low daily amount, your budget runs out early and feel you have wasted your time and money with little return. If you are going to try this type of advertising, then at least set your entire weekly budget on it to gauge if your traditional advertising or Google AdWords works best for you. Also set your keywords and location carefully as you don’t want people clicking on your ads for a new garage door in London if you only cover Manchester. When you get a lead, use technology to help complete the sale. Use a cut and paste app from the App Store or Google Play, many are available for free and work very well. Try photo merge by Odyssey, it’s free and you can take a photo of the customers’ house and then select a door from your photo library dropping it onto the existing door and showing a convincing picture of how a particular style will look on completion. Show the customer the door they have requested, then the next one up in the range and you may have just upgraded the sale. You don’t have to rely on the customer’s imagination and there are no surprises when the job has been done. Manufacturers will have a media library that you can obtain your images from without having to take pictures out of the catalogue. Use review sites: Set up an account and ask your customers to leave reviews, but ensure that you then look after your customers, this may sound like I’m stating the obvious and something that we all try to do, but bad reviews can set us back and seriously harm future sales. Even if you are old school and avoid all the areas I have talked about here, your customers will be sure to find bad reviews and decide against using you. Occasionally, you may have an interesting or unusual job come up, so submit the story to the Door Industry Journal, you may just get it featured on their blog and in their weekly newsletter. And if worded carefully, it will help with your website’s exposure and Google will most certainly pick up your company name for future search results, not to mention that getting published on this kind of media, can give potential customers confidence in your services. Even if you are late in adopting changes in technology and online marketing, this shouldn’t be seen as a reason not to give it a go. If the implementation seems a little difficult to start with, you’ll soon figure it out and you never know, you could increase not just sales but the all-important profit margin too.