Marketing for Restoration Companies

The Goal of marketing is to present your message to the right person at the right time.  What is so difficult about Restoration Marketing is, the right person has an incredible need, for a very short time.  In this article we will cover how you can present your message.  

As a reminder strategies are the big picture. Tactics are the small picture.  A strategy is a plan of action, formulated to achieve an objective or goal. Tactics are techniques used to implement a strategy. Strategies set out what you want to do while tactics determine how you'll get there. In this article we will cover the 7 most important strategies for  disaster restoration companies.  And some of the most successful tactics to achieve our goals.  

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If you would like to learn about how we serve our clients as marketers. Then check out how we can Get you more water damage restoration Leads.

Service

Customers today already expect 'high quality service,' money back guarantees, excellent customer service, and professionalism. All companies are expected to provide these as part of their offering. So don't think that your great customer service sets you apart. You may be better in some (or all) of these ways than your competition, but the customers cannot see that until they buy from you.  And since it's something they already expected, none of these factors will really wow them.  These service offerings are the basic requirements of a modern business.  The truth is, we need to dive deeper into the service offering to really set your brand apart.  

The first strategy is the most important.  The first strategy is your service, you need to provide top notch service and products.  A deep dive into a world class service is beyond the scope of this article.  We will discuss a few of the tactics that provide oversized results for the amount of effort. The highest priority tactics include using a CRM, tracking the correct data, organization, and training.  

CRM stands for customer relationship Manager, this is a tool that organizes your communication.  Customer-centric experiences continue to define every moment in business this year, but what’s rarely discussed is what makes this shift possible for brands. To be truly customer-centric, you have to know your customers preferences and the context in which they engage with your organization. The advantages of CRM software are crystal clear: It keeps all historical data in one place, making it easier to manage customer relationships. And thankfully, the advantages of CRM have multiplied to bring multiple departments together and empower more connected teams with the same data. This way your technicians, account managers, estimators, and more can communicate consistently.  

This is the magic that fuels a customer-centric experience.

Today’s CRM tools are supercharged with integrations that foster collaboration and accessible data — all under one roof. The right tool should help companies target different audiences, design smart automations based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and manage relationships. More importantly, every department can now deliver consistent, personalized interactions in the best interest of customers.

Tracking the correct data is the next tactic.  There are a few most important metrics to follow.  Some top data points are:  profit per job, employee turnover, NPS score, overhead, and ROAS.  

Profit Per job seems obvious, for similar types of jobs (for example class 1 Water loss) there should be a consistent profit (measures as a percentage of billed amount).  For Example 2 different jobs, both class 1 water loss with a profit of 39%, and 41% indicate consistency.  While there are many reasons why consistency is important, the top reasons are that it indicated similar performance job to job, and similar process job to job.  This will also become very important when your business starts to scale as a drastic change can indicate problems.  

Employee turnover is calculated as the number of employees who leave divided by average number of employees times 100.  This will give you a percentage.  Overall in the United states there is a turnover rate of about 15%, and anything under that is excellent.  This is an important metric to track since there is a significant cost to hiring and training an employee. Additionally these staff members should carry certifications (such as IICRC WRT), and have more technical knowledge than a typical construction worker.  Tracking employee turnover can help you understand what is needed to build the most competent workforce, which will provide the best service to your customers.  

NPS is net promotor score.  It's something you have likely seen by large companies, and is the most important number to show how satisfied customers are with your work.  You send a survey with a question:  on a scale of 1-10, of how likely you are to recommend this company to a friend. If the answer is 9-10 they are a promotor, if it is 7-8 then they are neither promotor or detractor, and anything that is 6 or lower is a detractor.   Then the Net promotor score is Number of promoters − Number of detractors divided by total responses times 100.   A NPS over 50 is great! If the NPS is below 0 it shows there are some areas in the process that really need improvement.  

Knowing your overhead, the fixed ongoing costs that your company incurs.  You should endeavor to keep your overhead as low as possible, since it will affect the overall profits of your company.  

ROAS stands for Return on ad spending.  This number indicates whether your marketing efforts are paying off or not.  If you spend money on marketing you should be able to track whether there is a return (new customers) or not.  Making sure that you spend money on what makes you grow is very important, and should be ruthlessly tested.  

PPC Ads

Pay Per Click Ads are a strategy to gain new business. There are different ways to implement PPC advertising but the best one for a restoration company is with Search engine PPC ads. The specific advantage is that when someone is searching for something specifically you can show your message.   Advertising in google, and Bing is our recommendation.  Some tactics to successfully implement PPC advertising are use focused landing pages, focus on the right keywords, and continuously improve.  

Focused Landing pages are the places where a potential customer goes after clicking your ad.  You pay for each click so the landing page really needs to convert them into a lead.  A Focused landing page has content (words, pictures, video, etc) that matched the intent of what that person was looking for.  So for example if someone searches for "How to dry Carpet" then the landing page really needs to include information about how to dry the carpet.  This is a simple example, but surprisingly overlooked by many.  

Some other important factors for the landing page are a clear call to action, fast loading speed, and mobile responsiveness.   A clear call to action represents what you want this potential customer to do.  Maybe it's call you, maybe it's fill out a form.  No matter what it is, it needs to be clear and usually stated in several places.  This landing page needs to load fast.  This is a trust signal to the search engines, and will increase the likelihood of the person who clicked of seeing the information you would like to present.  And Finally and crucially this landing page needs to be mobile responsive.  That means it loads, and looks well on a mobile phone.  

Focusing on the right keywords means matching what you want to advertise to the right keywords.  You might have guessed after learning about the landing pages, search intent is very important.  So you will need to find what people are searching for, that also matches what you want to advertise.  There are several tools for this - but the easies way is to run a few searches in google and see what the top 3 (organic) pages look like.  If the top few organic pages seem to match what type of content you want to advertise - then you found the right search keywords.  

Continuous Improvement means that you are looking at the clickthrough rates, the conversion rates, and impressions.  Based on observation, measurement, and testing you can make improvements.  Small changes, like changing a headline can have a large impact on a click through rate.  You will need to run A/B tests (sometimes called split tests), to determine which combination of landing page, content, and ad will net the best overall result.  

Referrals

Referrals in the restoration industry are absolutely crucial.  People like firefighters, plumbers, police, plumbers, home inspectors, insurance agents, and many more can be a source of qualified referrals.  

In the restoration industry, it's crucial to get referrals.  You can't rely on just one lead coming in from a PPC ad or landing page, because you never know when an emergency will happen.  In order to have enough leads, you need a steady flow of new business that comes in through word-of-mouth from people who are highly qualified prospects.   That means that getting referrals is important!  How do you get them?

Getting Referrals is a very challenging process. Some  companies will pay for referrals, some will donate a certain amount to a charity for referrals, others will refer for referral.  You won't be able to get referrals if your business doesn't have a great service! So that is why our first strategy is so important.  

In many ways you need to market your business to those kinds of people who are likely to refer clients to you.  You need to establish yourself as an expert, who will keep the interests of the clients they refer as the top priority.  You also need to stay relevant in their mind so that your the first one they think of when their client has a need.  

Providing free resources to them (content marketing) is a really great way to do that.   If you can do, or produce something that helps them, that will help you to be the expert.  And reaching out with useful information (like a newsletter, or on social media) will help you stay relevant.  

Lead Providers

A lead provider is a company that provides leads.  There are several ways they get leads, but that's not so important for you.  What is important is that you can get leads at a consistent predictable cost.  And secondarily they can usually deliver leads who meet a certain criteria.  

With consistent costs, you can determine if the type of lead is able to scale profitably.  For example if you can buy 10 leads for $200, and on average you close 40%.  If your profit per job averages to $1000, then overall you made $2000.  This means that with leads like this you can scale.  Double your order and continue to grow.

With Consistent 'lead quality' you can be sure that leads meet the standards you need to do business.  This means you can spend less time qualifying new prospects.  And it means that you can really hone in your process.  

Marketing Assets SEO

Marketing Assets are the content that you develop to attract attention.  SEO is a technique that helps your content show higher in search results.  So both good content (blogs, videos, podcasts, and more) and techniques to make sure that your content is found.  

The market place is constantly changing.  What worked before may be irrelevant now.  You need to be aware of what types of content are relevant and how it's being found on the major channels (Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc).  One way that you can do this is by staying up-to-date about new trends in SEO, and content marketing.  

For most small businesses a good blog, and activity in 2 social media channels will give you the most value for your time.  Focusing your efforts in a couple of channels and producing great content is how you will stand out  from the crowd.  

Local SEO

Local SEO means showing up in local searches.  If someone types in "Water Restoration near me" you would want to your company to show up in the top of search results.  In order to do this you will want to have a Google my business, Bing places, Yelp Page, and other local listings.    

You can spend an afternoon and search for [Location] + Business listing.  And also [company type] + Business listing.  

Reputation Management

Reputation Management means making sure you are actively seeking good reviews from happy customers.  There are some companies that can get negative reviews removed.  I don't recommend this - I recommend responding directly and owning any mistakes if they were made.  

If your product is great, then you should have a line of happy customers that you can ask for a great review.  

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If you’re a disaster restoration company, the time to start marketing is now. In this article we covered how to market your water damage and emergency services. If you need help implementing these principles or have any questions about what we talked about today, give us a call at (615)-505-3150 or email hello@goals.marketing.

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