Web Marketing Makeover

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.