This month we’re starting a soup-to-nuts series about digital marketing for those of us in the doors and windows business. Over the next few months we’ll get down and dirty on specific topics and ways to “do” digital marketing, but this time we’ll focus on the “what is…” and some fundamentals that we need to understand.
When I talk “digital marketing” with some of our dealer partners, almost everyone is doing something that would qualify as “creating sales from digital marketing efforts.”
Over 70% of product purchases today begin with an internet search. Of all searches, 46% of those conducted through Google are for products or services in users’ specific areas. For this reason alone, it’s obvious that a part of any successful home improvement marketing plan must include at least some digital elements.
Foundationally, there are four parts to a successful digital marketing program:
It probably wouldn’t surprise you how interdependent each of these are.
The best devised digital marketing program is worthless without folks stopping in to see it. Since traffic is such an integral part of digital marketing, we’ll spend the next few visits talking through the specifics of online traffic generation.
Creating traffic the right way leads to visitors with intent. And while there are various levels from the day you start researching a major purchase to the day you decide to take delivery, the intent is there, nonetheless. The long-term mentality of focusing on current and next-day leads that I grew up with can lead to way too many missed opportunities. Stay tuned for much more on this.
It goes with saying that you can’t make a sale without someone to talk to that’s interested in what you’ve got. Intuitively you also know that traffic with high intent, when nurtured the right way, makes closing the sale almost a given. We’ll work through how to create higher closing percentages among selling opportunities through your digital marketing efforts in future discussions.
Finally, there’s the sale after the sale. Sometimes given short shrift, this way to drive marketing costs down and closing percentages up is also a function of the specific traffic and lead generation strategies that you use, along with a homeowner’s sales experience. We’ll deal with this in-depth down the road.
Next month: How to generate traffic with intent. We’ll talk then. If you’re the type that likes to read ahead, you’ll find lots more here.