Greetings Floor Dealers!

65,000 consumers from the U.S. and Canada who bought flooring were asked this question in a poll: “What prompted you to buy this time?” Here are the top five answers:

  1. 50.6% A referral from one of your past customers
  2. 8.9% I drove by your store
  3. 3.1% TV or Radio Ad
  4. 2.2% Social Media
  5. 2.1% Internet search

I dedicated my last two articles discussing implications of this for floor dealers, and I discussed strategies to capitalize on the biggest source of revenue for floor dealers: repeat and referral customers.

Let’s assume you’ve got your repeat and referral marketing strategies in place, and they are producing for you. You may now want to turn your attention to boosting response from your social media and website marketing.

Notice I said “may.” I worked with a dealer who had a staff member dedicated to handling his Facebook marketing. He managed to boost his revenue from that source to about 5%, more than double the average for social media, but it took a lot of time and effort. He decided that these results were worth the expenditure of time, energy, and money required. You’ll have to make that determination for your company. But keep in mind that digital marketing is most likely never going to generate a huge portion of your revenue—certainly nothing close to repeat and referral marketing—so be careful that you don’t spend more time on these strategies than the ROI warrants.

With that in mind, let’s look at boosting response with your website marketing.

Website Marketing

Your first task with website marketing is to make sure your website can be found. This is done through search engine optimization (SEO). I have a book on SEO that’s two inches thick and was obsolete by the time I finished reading it. Which highlights the challenge with SEO for flooring dealers: there’s a lot to know and the rules constantly change. Therefore, unless you really enjoy the topic of SEO and doing a ton of reading to stay on top of the trends, I recommend you hire a reputable company to do it for you.

Once people find your site, your next tasks are to 1) create differentiation from all the other sites, 2) position yourself as a trusted advisor, 3) compel an immediate response from the visitor to buy or take some other action, and 4) capture the visitor’s contact information for follow-up marketing. There are many strategies for accomplishing these four tasks, but let’s look at a relatively simple one that you can implement fairly quickly: offering a free report.

When a visitor lands on your site, they see a message in the top third of the page saying, “WARNING: Don’t call or visit any floor dealer until you read this free flooring guide. You will learn 6 costly misconceptions about flooring, 3 common mistakes to avoid, and 5 critical questions to ask any dealer before purchasing.” In order to download the report, the visitor must fill out their name, email address, and phone number. This will accomplish the four tasks:

First, very few flooring sites have an offer like this, so it creates differentiation.

Second, it positions you as a trusted advisor. When they read your report they will see you as an expert authority on flooring.

Third, it compels an immediate response from the visitor to take action.

Fourth, you’ll capture their contact information. This acts as a filter to identify those who are really serious about buying flooring. Out of 100 visitors, only five may opt in for your report, but those five have raised their hands and said, “I’m interested in flooring!” You can now do follow-up marketing to these contacts, including a follow-up call.

In the next installment we’ll look at strategies for boosting response with social media.

 

To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”

Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
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