Marketing stratedy in off season

[Bayn Wood]

Any Ideas, everything here in Mchigan is slow
We are trying to get the most bang for a buck of course

We do Yellow Book
Door Hangers
Yard Signs

[Kim Katwijk]

Brian
have you thought about holding a deck party after finishing the deck in a neighborhood. ask your client to invite their friends and neighbors to deck party. the best advice I can give you is buy a Vidalia Grill I have one. It is the easiest Grill it To cook on. it leaves it to meat moist and tender you can find them at www.VidaliaGrill.com have your client provides drinks so you're not liable. Get 20 people for minimal cost of food to spend an hour's time with you. And it will lead to jobs.

[Kim Katwijk]

Yellow Pages advertising is something I have been working on. As I look through many phonebooks I find that the vast majority. OK all. have been written by Yellow Pages sales people. If we were have a conversation. And I asked you what separates you from your competition. The first thing you tell me should be and you Yellow Pages ad. But it is never found. The statistics prove people aren't really interested in the name of your business or how many years experience you have or a laundry list of what you do. They are however interested in what you can do for them. As with all advertising Yellow Pages be to have a goal. This goal should be to attract their attention. Second tell them why you should do business with you. Third get them to call you and not the competition. There is so much more about Yellow Pages advertising that I can tell you. Or show you. E-mail me with your e-mail and I'll send you some examples.

[Bobby Parks]

Bayn, I'd like to know a little more about where you are in Michigan. Are you in a larger metro area or small town? Is this typically a slow time there or is this something that occurs closer to Winter? Have you tried any other marketing approaches in the past beyond what you've mentioned? I don't know your market but I can tell you what has worked well for us. We always push hard for customer referrals which accounts for a significant portion of our sales. We try to have varying direct market pieces targeted into specific zip codes or areas where we feel our customer base is. These are sent out in a time staggered manner. A lot of what we do is thru the local newspaper but its done with a catchy colorful add at a very good cost per piece. We also have our self listed in certain neighborhood directories along with direct mailings . Your probably already doing the hangers in a similar way. I assume you have a web site or will work on that as well as having your self listed on Decks.com etc. Another thing you should consider is joining NADRA which Kim will give you more details on. NADRA will also list you on their site that prospects will use to find you when they do searches. One other thing that we do when we feel we're entering the offseason is to offer our customers a Winter discount to encourage them to not wait for Spring to do their project. Its a real discount that you can decide the amount or percentage but it can make a differnce in terms of bridging Winter to Spring. It can be tough to come up with immediate reflief if the phones are quiet. I'll put more thought into this. It's late here and my brain is drained. Bobby

[Bayn Wood]

We are in the northern suburbs of Detroit largely populated area
The auto industry is faltering and that is the main economic base here
Everything has been down but it seems when this time of year comes nobody is thinking about decks or patios
That is the bases of my question, with decking building in northern climates being seasonal
And with a down economy should you focus on spring and summer months for the bulk of the advertising and gain enough back log of customers to carry through to winter
Or is it worth it to advertise in a fall end of the season time
We have only been specializing in decks and patios for 2 years and before that we would do a little of everything but we wanted to become specialize in one area and avoid jack of all trade master of none

Thank for your feed back
Also Kim here is my email
autumnwoodinc@msn.com

[Bobby Parks]

Bayn, We market in some form throughout the year.I'm in the South and I've never had to deal with the Winter situation you have there. I would think that marketing as deep into the season as you can would be good. Spring time is good for all of us and certainly marketing then and hopefully building some type of backlog would be good. You might want to consider the Winter Discount program I mentioned. You could include this on the marketing you use late in the season and state that instead of waiting until Spring to call you and get on the schedule, get on it now, and have it ready when Spring comes, and save 5-10%. If you have estimates out there that the customer did not go with ,consider calling them and checking to see if they have done anything and if not offer it to them now. Again I'm not used to dealing with having to overcome brutal Winters and restricted outdoor building seasons. I do know that some contractors mix in basement and remodel type of jobs just to stay busy. Kim has researched and perfected the Yellow Page approach and this will help you in the long run but maybe not now. This is off the top of my head but you might include a line about Winter Discounts just to help keep the phone ringing during the late season also.

[Bobby Parks]

Bayn, by the way, I've been to Detroit on my way to Pelee Island in January and I remember how cold it was. Its hard for this Georgia boy to imagine trying to work outside there. The more I think about it the more I think you might need a short list of remodeling project types.

[Bobby Parks]

Bayn, I'm making my rounds and had to stop by the office. One other thought occurred to me. Take advantage of the free listings you can have thru vendors such as Deckorator Railings and the composite makers. They will list you as a preferred contractor and some prospects will find you when they look for a contractor in their area. These are little things but you never know where the next job will cvome from and all these things working together will make a difference. Good luck Bobby

[Bayn Wood]

Thank you, Bobby for your feedback

We do finished basements and other seasonal remodeling

The draw back to basements is, It is difficult to bid large projects and know all costs involved unlike decks, where it is easy to estimate material fudge factors and labor over runs and be competive. Which is a must in this econmey

[Bobby Parks]

10-4 on that. There is alot more involved when you're doing remodeling/basements etc.

[deckman]

With so many people online these days I think the best bang for the buck is a good website that shows up well on the major search engines. The best site in the world does no good if people can't find it. You need a web guy that knows how to get you ranked near the top on types of jobs you want to get.

Another thing that works well for me is having my supplier give my number out to those who call looking for a deck builder. Ask the owner if you could build a display deck in their yard in exchange for referrals. Maybe build him a deck at his house, something like that. You have to give something to get something. My wife thought I was crazy when I built a big deck at the sales managers house for free until all the calls came in. He paid for materials & I did the work. It's a win win situation for both as you get the job most of the time & they get the lumbers sales that could have gone to another lumber yard.

Also offer your customers a referral award, a c-note per referral for all jobs you get. Nothing motivates like money.

Al;

[OK1]

Kim I would like to receive some of those examples. My emails is decks@justdecksatlanta.com.

[roof cleaning]

10-4 on that. There is alot more involved when you're doing remodeling/basements etc.
Aint that the truth, it is not as simple as it looks.
A LOT more involved.

[A.V. Decks]

I started 20yrs ago doing home improvement and remodeling so to take on suck seasonal projects such as basements and additions isnt that bad for me, but yeah, definitely more involved with those type of jobs. Last winter when things were really slow I started designing websites for other clients using mine as a show piece. I am about to redo mine as after two years Im kinda tired of looking at it. Websites definitely helped me with sales. I was surprised at the number of hits I was getting daily just from having a site indexed on the web.

Did the yellow book once.......once.
waste of duckys really.

Word of mouth is the best but not always the fastest. I offer end of summer specials, free rounded faces, cheap composite flooring (3.50 sqft.), whatever it takes to sell the deck. I still do door hangers and flyers, some local advertising in the classified paper.

Decks just dont keep you going all year, least not here in Pa. I also do interior trim for both residential and commercial clients to help thru the off season. Deck building is my choice of things to do and is how I have my business geared, but if I ever find myself in a jam and needing to feed my wife and kids, Ill flip burgers to make ends meet. (well maybe)....

[Bob Bulick]

Recently as work slowed down I was trying to come up with an idea to increase prospective calls. I was also thinking how this was a banner year so far and how suddenly it was going in the dumper.

What I decided to do was send a news letter out to all my faithful and '09 clients announcing there names going in the proberbial nail bag for a chance at a $50 dinner gift certificate. No strings just thank you for a great year.

Then, I pointed out the value of referrels. And if they should manage to motivate someone to call and ask me to come out and talk about their project I'd put their name and their friends name in another nail bag for a chance at yet another certificate.

I also pointed out some new things I was doing i.e furniture making. Those things that would help me eventually retire to my shop over the next few years to earn a living.

It's been just one week and from the 30 or so mailings I've one referrel. I don't need much and just this one could carry me through this winter.

[Bankston]

Two things that have helped us are having a professionally done website and direct mail. The direct mail has been hit-and-miss, but if you can identify a development that has some potential, it's worth sending some letters with some color pictures or something similar. For example, if we've done one-two jobs in a newer development, I've driven around and took down addresses, and sent mailers w/brochures soon afterwards.

The website has been a great help. It won't get immediate results, but long-term, if you're able to put up a good site, over the months you're likely to have some response. Take a look at some sites of builders, and see what they are like. Pictures are a must, and it's nice to keep things simple so that people don't have to dig deep on the site to find what they are looking for.

I wish you the best--I know it's tough finding work in the wintertime.

[BreyerConstruct]

We've sent a nice looking letter on our letterhead to all of the prospects I've met with this year, who we'd actually consider doing their project. Basically touching base, let them know 08 prices are about to expire, let us know if they'd like to get together, etc.

1 small porch is now a "go", and a medium-sized deck has begun talking to us again (unsure of the economy- but conversation!).

I don't know how many letters we sent out, maybe 50-100? I weeded thru them & it felt like 100's, but I didn't count & mail them.

HTH,
~Matt