Monday, August 13, 2012

Choose your roofing customers - outbound vs. inbound marketing


Regardless if you install residential or commercial roofing systems, creating the opportunity to choose your customers instead of hoping the phone rings or getting an email from your website's "Contact Us" form will ultimately lead to greater financial success and much fewer headaches.

Too often we practically beg for work - any work, as long as it helps to keep our crews busy and pay the bills. But over time that leads to diluted service offerings and a splintered work force. Your marketing efforts suffer as well, as it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Choosing Your Customers
This can mean several things, including differentiating potential customers based on personality, geography, credit worthiness, financial solvency, existing roof size, existing roof system, existing roof age, their reason for needing roofing work, their preferred roof system, their level of environmental consciousness, and more.

Disqualifying certain potential roofing customers helps to streamline your operations, materials purchasing and your advertising, which ultimately improves your profit margins or enables you to compete more aggressively with low-bid contractors. It also enables your company to focus, to truly become an expert, and to develop a strong reputation as "the company" for the specific work you bid.

'Spray and Pray' vs. 'Ready, Aim, Fire!'
Inbound marketing in essence is the reliance that people will find you and contact you when they need work. It is the "spray and pray" approach. Outbound marketing is the opposite - it is the aggressive pursuit of work, and can more easily be targeted to a defined customer profile. It is the "ready, aim, fire!" approach.

With the right marketing, content development and search engine optimization over time, inbound marketing can have a similar eventual outcome. But by clearly articulating your "perfect customer" (e.g., government buildings, new construction, manufacturing facilities with asphalt roofs looking to reduce energy consumption, residential homes after a hail storm, etc.), you can laser-focus your advertising, sales pitch, inspection and bidding processes, materials acquisition, installation methods, and more.

How Do I Target Customers?
Researching customer contact information online is easier than ever. Once you have profiled your target customer you can get specific names, titles, email addresses, mailing addresses, social media profiles, and so much more with a few clicks using resources such as Google, LinkedIn, Spokeo, and others.

Creating a simple Excel spreadsheet with all of this information arms your sales and marketing team to aggressively pursue work that fits your company's expertise.

The bottom line is that it is better to define your customer and aggressively pursue him or her than to wait for someone to contact you and do the best you can with what they need.

Want to Discuss or Need Some Help?
If you would like to discuss this in more detail or would like assistance implementing an outbound marketing strategy so you can better pick your roofing company's customers, please email RoofPal@gmail.com any time.