What should your advertising strategy be? As we mentioned last time, that is dependent upon what you are trying to make happen.
For illustration let’s look at a client that Tim and I and Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young work with in Portland Oregon and what strategy we determined for them at the start in 2008 and how it has evolved over the years.
Roof Life of Oregon. With all the wet weather they get in the Pacific North West this business is perfectly devised to keep the moss and fungus from growing on Portland area roofs. For cedar shake roofs, it is a cleaning process that needs to be repeated every five years to help extend the life of the roof 50 to 100% longer. Maintenance over neglect gives a great looking roof and peace of mind.
Their goals were to increase the number of leads for new clients by making people aware of the need to keep their roof clean and to remind previous clients that it was time to do the treatment again.
Here’s what we came up with as an initial strategy.
Using radio, we would buy as much reach with a 3 frequency as our budget would allow to deliver our message. We dropped all other forms of media because we wanted to dominate one media. For cost reasons we chose radio.
For messaging, these were the points we wanted our ads to make:
1. Look up at your roof, if there is moss, fungus or debris, it needs to be cleaned.
2. Use a 5 year reminder like a major local event that happened five years previously to trigger the need to have the roof cleaned again.
3. A clean roof will help your roof last ten to fifteen years longer.
When we started this campaign in 2008 approximately 80% of Roof Life work was servicing cedar shake roofs.
Leads increased as planned but what we hadn’t anticipated was that people from all over Portland called because they had moss and fungus on their composite shingle roofs as well. So Roof Life had to make a shift in their production methodology to handle the different kinds of roofs.
In 2014 that unintended benefit has shifted Roof Life’s business to 80% composite roofs and only 20% cedar. But they haven’t lost cedar roof clients. In fact they have gained more since 2008.
So their largest increase in business, which is significant, has come from the composite roof sector.
So our strategy has evolved to include talking about composite roofs, and we have tapped into owner Patrick Morin’s energy and enthusiasm for what Roof Life does and we use him in the ads. We still use radio but now we also have a very sophisticated website that answers so many questions about roofing. And the radio helps drive people there.
Roof Life also measures where every lead comes from and we all receive a monthly report. They monitor sales growth daily and they do everything they can to measure the effectiveness of every internal operation. They measure referrals, repeat business and how many times a person is contacted before going into an inactive file. They measure just about everything there is to measure in their business and it has worked.
Since we started working together in 2008 they have grown multiples.
That is how having clear and distinct goals for what you are trying to make happen, a strategy to achieve it and a methodology for measuring it can make a business successful.
That’s how you do it too, don’t you?
Leave a Reply