CoatingsPro Magazine - January 2022
Marketing Savvy
Brandon Stanton 2021-12-28 22:08:45
Bullet-Proof Marketing Your Business: The Ever-Evolving Shopper
We all strive to be smart shoppers. We want the best deal for the dollars exchanged, and to get the best deal, we’ve been trained that we have to be smart shoppers. But are we prepared for smart shoppers when it comes to our coatings contracting businesses?
What Is a Smart Shopper?
Smart shoppers are people who:
• Have identified a problem and have explored multiple solutions to fix their problem.
• Understand what they are buying and the capacities of the product.
• Familiarize themselves with the performance expectations and price points so they are not over- or under-buying.
• Confirm their research with the contractor/installer of the product (when applicable).
• Build a scope of work that ensures apples-to-apples quotes from all contractor/installers.
• Understand the offering of each of the contractors bidding the work.
• Research the contractor/installer to make sure that that person offers installation of the product that solves their problem, that he/she has a history of satisfied clients, and that he/she offers a warranty on both the work and the product.
• Collect multiple estimates.
• Get a time commitment of job duration and an expectation of business/life interruption while the product is being installed.
If you are reading this and you say to yourself, “Wow, if they are going to do all of that, I don’t know if I want this kind of shopper as a customer,” you could be in for some challenging times in the years ahead. In the future, this will be the norm more than the exception.
Why? Because research is easier than ever, and it’s only going to be more accessible in the future.
Instead of viewing this type of shopper as a high-maintenance customer, let’s look at where an opportunity exists to capitalize on this shift in the shopping process.
Sales of the Past
The first thing to realize is that there’s an increasing trend for people to do their own research before reaching out to a company to ask for an estimate or for information. When consumers are asked why they are doing the research themselves, the most common answer is, “I wanted to come to my own conclusion versus being sold by a salesperson.” If you decode the hidden message here, what they’re saying is, “I believe what I read/research, and the salesperson is full of BS trying to take my money.”
For a long time, this has been the sentiment of consumers, but they had limited tools, so they had no options. As research tools are made available, the shopping process is changing.
Pre-2010, the Yellow Pages was the primary tool for finding a company to help you if you had a problem. They were made of a series of ads that would range from a couple of lines to insanely priced full-page options. Many people would hesitate to call those companies with the full-page ads because they thought they would pass on the marketing expenditures to the end customer.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you’d find companies that took out a tiny ad that was often overlooked because of the limited visibility. Their credibility was in question, too, because they couldn’t afford anything more than a small ad.
This obviously gave the company who took out the medium-sized ads the best chances of capturing the business.
On any ad, limited information was shared: the company’s name, logo, phone number, and maybe one tag line (e.g., “Family owned and operated since 1972”). Because of this, no one company was really pushing the sales process further than any of the others.
It was up to the salesperson who answered the prospect’s call to move the potential client further into the sales process. Salespeople did this by listening to the customer’s project scope, scheduling a time to go look at the project, and explaining why their company was a better option than the competition.
If we broke the sales process into a percentage, it would be fair to say that pre-2010, the salesperson handled about 97 percent of the sales process, and the prospect was only about 3 percent sold on the company before contacting them.
That’s why “sales” was the name of the game. A great salesperson could make a business a ton of money. Great salespeople could also be a great pain in the “you know what” as well because they knew the value they brought and would often not want to operate in any other way except their own.
This would make it very difficult for the culture of the company and for the training of additional sales staff.
A Change Is Taking Place
Around 2010, huge advancements were taking place in both search engine result quality at a local level and internet capabilities on cell phones.
Pre-2010, a lot of the websites that were populating in the search engine were lead-generation sites. If you searched for a service followed by a geographic area (e.g., roof coating Minneapolis), you would run into a list of sites that would ask for your information and send it out to a number of contractors who would pay for that information.
The game changer took place in 2010 when Google Local Business Center (established in 2005) was rebranded as “Places for Business.” Then, in 2011, “Get your Business Online” started up in the United States. This allowed businesses to create or claim a profile to tell Google who they were and the services they provided. It was a simple way to get Google to recognize the company.
Before this, Google was relying largely on data aggregators to furnish this information. If a business claimed its profile and filled it out properly, it was more likely to populate in the search results than a company whose information was pulled for the data aggregators. The reason for this is that it gave the users of the search engine a better experience.
In late 2013, Google announced that one-third of searches were taking place locally. This was the point at which businesses realized that the internet was going to be the go-to tool consumers were going to use to find them.
The big question here should be, “Why?” This will help us plan for the future. Why this shift to online? What is the internet providing that the Yellow Pages isn’t?
It’s All About Information
Think about it: Now, instead of just the company’s name, number, and a tag line, as a consumer, I can search and see if you have the service I am specifically looking for.
I can read the back story of how you got started. I can see if you have experience and a history of doing good work — in the area where I need help. I can see photos of that work. I can read testimonials from past clients. I can possibly see why my experience with your company would differ from what a competitor is offering.
It also gives me the ability to become a smart shopper and take on some of the research noted earlier. All of the items listed here previously would have had to depend on a salesperson to walk me through them. Now, I can do it on my own — before I come to you.
But don’t confuse the importance of your website. As I gather that information, I am being sold. I am deciding on who is the best option for me, and chances are high that I already have a front runner whom I will likely choose.
Because of this, you have to recognize that the sale has already begun, and the customer hasn’t even yet contacted a company! In most cases, the customer is already 40–50 percent sold before you speak to them.
If you don’t view your web assets as a sales system, you’re going to be missing out.
This is the first of three articles. In the second segment of this series, we will look at what your website should look like to give you the best chances of converting a searcher into a customer.
BRANDON STANTON is a founding partner of 405 Media Group, an online marketing company that specializes in fine-tuning the marketing processes for businesses. For more information, contact: Brandon Stanton, bstanton@405mediagroup.com.
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