Marketing is the backbone of your company’s future growth. Done right, it allows you to guide the direction of your business one to five years out. The challenge we are focusing upon here is the one where a contractor is a hybrid of being a remodeler and being a home builder. There are marketing strategies that overlap both business models, while there are others that are unique to each business model. For contractors who work in both realms, you have to maneuver carefully. Marketing will vary for each type of business, and a contractor needs to avoid following one-size-fits-all marketing tactics.
Remodeling vs. New Construction
The main reason the marketing tactics differ has to so with lead times: Remodeling projects often require less time to complete than new builds. Of course, there will be common marketing strategies, such as taking pictures, getting videos, and creating new web pages. But you need to approach each separately.
Social engagement. Regardless of whether you're a remodeler or a new-home builder, you will take before pictures (the lot before the build in new construction; the condition of the home in remodeling), work-in-progress pictures, and photos of the completed project.
If you're a remodeler, you might make a single social-media post to show off the project using a handful of finished project images, as well as an image of what the project looked like before your company arrived. You may even wish to include an image or two showing the remodeling process. At most, due to the shorter time required for completing remodeling projects, you may first make a social post using the before photo and work-in-process pictures to update viewers as to what you are up to, and then a second post to show the finished project.
Building a new home is completely different since you can take advantage of leveraging how long it takes to complete the home by making many social posts over an extended period of time. The first social post can show the vacant land and a second post can show the designs. Then you can follow with another social post when the excavators arrive followed by another post showing the foundation being created. The next post can show the framing. You can continue with many milestones until the finished home build is completed.
In short, each remodeling project will provide you one to two social posts while a new home build may provide one or two dozen periodic social posts. If you approach your social posts this way, you can better balance the two sides of your business if you are engaged in both types of work.
Videos. The same strategy can be incorporated with video marketing. While a remodeling project will typically provide an opportunity for one or two videos, a home building project may provide opportunities to create many small videos to showcase each milestone. Just make sure you learn how to make use of YouTube’s features, specifically how to consolidate all these shorter videos into a single grouping. Similar to having a single webpage featuring a project, YouTube has a Playlist feature to group many different videos into a single project.
Webpages. Building a new webpage to feature a remodeling project is easier than creating a webpage for a new home build. A remodeling project will have much less content and takes less time to prepare. However, a new home build will take considerably more time, so it may be better to create the webpage early in the project and update it periodically as the work progresses. That is, begin building the webpage as soon as you have at least one or two key images such as the vacant land and designs in place. Then you can update the webpage to reflect changes to the ongoing story.
Balance Your SEO Strategy
It is important to be aware that the cosmetics and storytelling or your projects are separate from the efforts you take to attract search engines to your business in order to generate new leads - the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process.
SEO tactics can get pretty involved, and it may be prudent to hire an expert to help you. The basic idea is to be able to identify you target customer and think through the terms and topics they might be searching the web for in order to find a company like yours. You want to be sure you include these terms on your site in the descriptions of the projects you feature and in blog posts that give prospective customers information. And regardless of your business model, you should include the name of the city or county where you provide services so that if a potential client is researching remodelers or builders in that area, your website appears near the top of the search results list.
Since homebuilding requires a longer time to get leads that convert to customers, it is smarter to focus on this SEO topic sooner than later. That is not to say SEO isn’t as important for remodeling as home building; it is just that the remodeling side of the business naturally tends to generate more content opportunities to incorporate SEO on a more frequent basis. To bring some balance to the new construction side of the business, you have to break up the content opportunities for various stages of new home builds, so you can incorporate SEO for the project more frequently. Rather than just waiting for the build to be completed and getting just a singular SEO boosting opportunity to promote a finished project, consider documenting the design, foundation, framing and finishing stages, and perhaps other milestines, to get multiple SEO boosts.
The Marketing Edge
Unfortunately, residential contractors are notorious for ignoring marketing, regardless of whether you are a remodeler or home builder. Simply knowing that the industry is behind in this critical business aspect is already a competitive advantage. Why? Because most contractors do not have to work as hard at marketing when the majority of their competitors are complacent about it. You don't have to work as hard to stand out and differentiate yourself in the marketing space. Doing even a modest amount of marketing opens a huge avenue of opportunity to get ahead.
If you do both remodeling and new homes, be sure to correctly focus your marketing objectives. Remodelers tend to fall into a quicker marketing cycle, different than the pattern for homebuilders. Images, videos, social engagement, websites, and SEO are all relevant to both business models. The trick is to realize that they operate differently, and you should approach the strategies independent from one another when your business combines both remodeling and new construction.
