Greetings Floor Dealers!

I’ve surveyed hundreds of floor dealers across North America.  In my surveys I always ask these two questions:

  1. How are you promoting your business?
    The answer I virtually always get: Internet, newspaper, radio, TV, direct mail.
  2. What are your results?
    The answer I virtually always get: lousy, hit-and-miss, unpredictable, disappointing.

In spite of this, dealers stubbornly cling to outdated advertising methods that do not work, even after admitting to me that they know they don’t work.  Case in point: I spoke with a dealer in Florida who told me he was spending $20,000 per year on his yellow page ad.   When I asked him about his results he replied, “lousy.”

Lousy results.  $20,000 down the drain.  Ouch.

Unfortunately, this frightful level of waste is not uncommon and I’ve discovered that it  happens mainly for three reasons: 1) There is a ton of misunderstanding among floor dealers about advertising; 2) they are unaware of alternatives to “brand building” types of advertising; and 3) as a result dealers wind up copying each other.
Over the next three installments in this series we will explore each of these reasons in detail, and exactly what to do about it.

Reason #1: There is a ton of misunderstanding among floor dealers about advertising.
Advertising falls into two broad categories: Image Advertising and Direct Response Marketing.  If you’re a floor dealer, it’s absolutely critical that you understand the difference between the two or your advertising efforts are doomed to mediocrity or complete failure.

Image advertising is when a company attempts to gain customers by building name recognition.  This is done by putting their business name out there over and over again via mass advertising.  Just Google flooring, or look in the yellow pages, newspaper, billboards, etc., and mostly what you will see are image or “branding” ads.  Generally these ads all say the same thing: the floor dealer’s business name, bullet points of what they do, and a phone number.    These kinds of ads virtually never give compelling reasons for a prospect to buy from one company vs. another.

Dealers experience four serious problems when they attempt image advertising:

  1. It encourages price shopping.  Image ads usually offer no compelling reason to choose one dealer vs. all the others, so by default the prospect winds up making a decision based on price.
  2. Image ads are difficult to track, so dealers have no idea if an ad is working or not.
  3. It can take a very long time to see results.  The theory behind image ads is that you put your business name out there over and over again and eventually, on the strength of name recognition, people will buy from you.  This can work, but it’s an extremely slow method of gaining customers.
  4. It’s extremely expensive.  Major corporations like Home Depot and Lowes can afford to saturate market regions sufficiently with advertising to build up name recognition.  But there is tremendous waste involved and the average dealer simply cannot afford this.

Because of these four serious problems, most dealers succeed in spite of image advertising rather than because of it.

Direct response marketing is the second method for promoting your flooring business, and it’s what I teach my Flooring Success Systems members to use.  Direct response has the following critical elements:

1) A compelling offer
2) A strong call to action
3) A deadline.
4) Unique benefits of your product/service
5) It’s trackable

Most importantly, a good direct response ad answers the unspoken question on your prospect’s mind:  “Why should I choose your flooring business versus each and every competitive option available to me?”

In the next installment, I will discuss effective alternatives to image advertising.

 

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.
See what real, live dealers are saying!