Community Marketing This year, Gold Seal bought airtime and is running separate commercials on weather and home-and-garden cable channels. Four ads, for residential re-roofing, windows, sunrooms, and commercial property management, cover most of the company’s menu of services.
“We put together a Jimmy Buffet–type jingle,” office manager Jennifer Ponte says. “If we have one target, it would be the baby boomer — the empty nester putting money into the house, installing hurricane windows, or adding a sunroom.” The ads feature customer testimonials.
But having committed itself to being a local contractor, the company’s marketing strategy is to help build word of mouth through business networking and community marketing. On the Fourth of July, for instance, Gold Seal had two floats in the Temple Terrace holiday parade, where it often joins forces with the nearby University of South Florida. Ferguson belongs to at least six contractor and business associations, and the company won a prestigious award from the local chamber of commerce last year.
In addition, sales reps are responsible for contacting past roofing customers to find out how their roof is holding up, to inform them that Gold Seal Roofing & Construction is now a full-service home improvement company, and to ask for their business.
Ferguson is so convinced that eventually he’ll re-roof just about every house in the township that he has a map showing every property, with a fluorescent dot on those homes where the company has done work.
And every December Gold Seal’s truck fleet rolls out equipped not with shingles, flashing, or tools but with poinsettias. The flowers are left on the porch of every past customer in Temple Terrace.
What Ferguson hopes is that some of those customers — most of them with roofs that he installed — will now want to buy a sun-room or hurricane shutters from his company.
“We’ve been known as a roofing company,” Nicholson says, “but now word is getting out. We have five additions signed and 11 are pending.”
