Marshall Roofing’s Web site went live in 1994, at the dawn of the Internet. “But,” Marshall notes, “we’d done absolutely nothing with it since. It was an embarrassment.” In 2005, the company owner hired Texas-based production company Lawrence Media Group to help create a DVD it could use to introduce itself to customers. At first, the plan was to mail the DVDs, but Marshall learned that he could upload this information onto his site, which he did six months later. (The company still sends a disc, along with a letter from an estimator, to any prospect who calls.)
Marshall estimates that the DVD cost around $14,000 to produce and another $4,000 to upload. He wasn’t wowed by the first cut, so he flew to Dallas and re-did the introduction at Lawrence’s headquarters “right on the spot, without a script.” In fact, much of what visitors see on the video was ad-libbed, Marshall says, including its longest segment starring the company’s vice president, Chris Butler, on a customer’s roof, showing how Marshall Roofing’s estimators cost out a roofing job. Butler also goes into the home’s attic to see how well it’s ventilated, and whether interior repair is needed.
There’s an educational component to most of the videos. For example, the segment on choosing a contractor poses five questions homeowners should ask: Does the contractor have a permanent business address, adequate insurance, long tenure in the community, and does the company warranty its work? As well as, “Is the contractor treating your job like a unique project?” (Of course, Marshall Roofing can answer “yes” to all of these questions.)
Marshall says he’s still not totally satisfied with the Web site, which generates about 10% of Marshall Roofing’s leads. He wants to post more photos of work his company has completed and offer visitors a searchable database that would allow them to call up examples of that work and the addresses of the homes. He’d also like to include a calendar function that allows users to follow the progress of their project.
SALES TOOL In 2003, Kris McCurry got a call from Maija Kropp, co-owner of S&K Roofing, Siding and Windows, in Eldersburg, Md., who wanted to inject life into her company’s Web site, www.skroofing.com, which, she lamented, was “little more than an online brochure.”
McCurry is vice president of Brave New Markets (BNM), an Owings Mills, Md.–based consulting firm that specializes in business-to-consumer marketing. BNM saw that S&K wasn’t getting its site in front of enough customers, so its first move was to focus on search engine optimization. By homing in on the word “Maryland,” as in “Maryland roofers” or “Maryland siding contractors,” S&K Roofing, Siding and Windows has managed to stay within the top five listings on engines such as Google and Yahoo for most of the product categories it installs.
“Optimizing the site on search engines has been critical to [its] success,” Kropp says. S&K projected that its Web site would attract 116,250 unique visits in 2006, versus 80,128 and 52,848 in the previous two years. Kropp concedes that many come for nothing more than a phone number, but that’s OK because S&K gets 23% of its leads from the site, and generates between $150,000 and $300,000 per month from those leads (average monthly sales: $1.2 million).
The S&K site has become a useful “support tool” for its salespeople when they call on homeowners. With the exception of roofing, S&K keeps the amount of detailed product information on its site to a minimum because, say McCurry and Kropp, it prefers leaving product specifications and other technical details to its salespeople — many are former contractors — to discuss face-to-face with prospects.
The site also augments the contractor’s regular marketing by sending special offers via e-mail to visitors who register online to receive them. In October, for example, S&K promoted home winterization. Customers who got e-mail blasts from the company — Kropp says that number is between 2,000 and 3,000 — had access to a page on the site that provided information about the service and gave visitors a way to schedule an estimate online.
Kropp wants to add more before-and-after photos of S&K Roofing, Siding and Windows projects to the site, and McCurry — whose company manages all the contractor’s advertising — wants to capture customer data that could be used for marketing later on.