Online Marketing Strategies: Successfully Grow Your Kitchen and Bath Business
Digital marketing is one of the best investments that you can make in your company. But, like any investment, if you don’t use it wisely and set a powerful strategy, then the benefits of marketing your business online will never see the light of day. In this blog post, we are going to discuss how online marketing can be used for your kitchen and bath business and what you need to do before investing in a digital marketing strategy.
Why is Online Marketing Now an Important Priority For Your Kitchen & Bath Business?
The first step that you need to take before investing in Online Marketing for your kitchen and bath business is figuring out if it’s necessary. If you’re looking to grow your company, then the answer will likely be yes. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have an existing website – if there isn’t significant traffic coming through daily, then online marketing will be necessary.
But there’s a snag; There are so many different channels through which you may spend money, and if you don’t have a strong internet marketing strategy in place and aren’t monitoring your key performance indicators (KPIs), you could run into trouble spending money without seeing the return on your investment.
If you don’t have a solid strategy, you may overspend in one area without realizing it, and as a result, you will not be aware that you are underperforming or overspending. So what to do?
The Key to a Successful Online Marketing Strategy is Understanding ROI
The key is to understand which online marketing channel generates the highest return on your investment (ROI).
That one single-dollar bill you send out into the wide world of marketing must bring along some pals when they return. You need to keep track of how much money you’re spending and how much money you’re earning.
When you understand how different internet marketing channels function, you’ll have success because you can see that various channels are functioning in diverse ways in separate cities and even states.
Create Realistic Goals to Guide Your Online Marketing Strategy
Once you understand what channel brings you the highest return on investment, then it’s time to plan your strategy. But there is a key fact you need to be careful of; Set your goals realistic! Setting realistic goals is crucial and important.
It means that you need to ask yourself what are your goals. But most importantly, you have to create realistic goals because those clear goals are like the wind in your sails, no wind blowing in favor of a ship without direction.
How to Set Goals for Your Kitchen and Bath Business
The kitchen and bath industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world. This means that companies need to work harder than ever before to stay on top. With so much competition, it’s crucial for business owners to set clear goals and plans for their K&B business.
As the starting, you must have written objectives and plans and you need to do that for years, quarters, and monthly basis. This is how you will compare your yearly and quarterly goals month to month.
Also, you need to keep in mind that In certain states, K&B companies are somewhat seasonal. If you’re one of the sunshine states, you’re lucky. When you’re looking at a small Northern state, however, you may not get many renovation jobs, so there won’t be a lot of calls and leads at that time.
So that, while you are setting your plan, make your comparisons clear. To make your strategy more apparent and effective, you must compare it to apples to apples rather than comparing it to oranges.
Online Marketing Budget is A part of The Process
Setting your budget is an important part of the planning process. How much money do you want to make? That is the question that many kitchen & bath business owners ask themselves when they are deciding what to do with their online marketing.
If the answer is “a lot,” then you should be focusing on conversion rate optimization strategies. Many K&B businesses spend time trying to increase traffic to their website and fail to improve the conversion rate once they get there. This is a huge mistake.
Let’s make a quick assumption to make everything clear. Let’s say your simple revenue target is 3 million per year and it means $250,000 per month. So while you are creating your budget, you will consider these numbers. By looking at these numbers, you can understand what you are earning and what you can afford for your strategy. So your simple revenue target will tell you how to set the internet marketing budget for your kitchen & bath business.
Lead Generation: How to Keep Track of Your Leads
It’s the next step after we’ve established what our goal is for online marketing and how we can achieve it. Keeping track of your leads is one of the most important steps in your strategy.
It can be easy to forget about the importance of keeping track of your leads. Many kitchen and bath business owners focus on generating traffic and forget about what comes next. However, if you want to generate profit for your company, you need to take care of every step in the process. So, how do we do that?
Revenue & Book Jobs Target
Let’s make some different projections to clarify; for example, the annual revenue goal is 2.000.000, it means monthly revenue is $166,666,67, and $40,000 for the average ticket. At this point, most importantly you need to know what your average conversion rate is, from an appointment to a signed project.
Basically, you need to know how many of the people walking into your showroom will turn to a customer after you give them a quote?
Generally, it is 3 out of 10 people we can convert, and if it’s always over then that means you’re doing great, keep up the good work!
But if you’re converting 0, we would suggest you think about your prices one more time because if everyone is just coming to buy from you probably your quotes are lower than your competition.
Leads Required to Hit Target
In this step, based on previous numbers, you need 14 people; these are the serious leads. These 14 appointments are going to give you 4 signed contracts.
Based on that, you need to spend $2,431 per month to reach that $2. 000. 000 goals. It’s a revenue goal, but it’s not the profit.
Also, remember that we’re talking about an average here because there are many facts to consider.
Know What to Spend on Internet Marketing
While clarifying your budget, looking at your actual profits is better because your strategy is something customized and your profit margin will give you the best result.
For instance; Let’s say you are making a million dollars per year in profit, if your marketing budget is just 3% you will be spending $30,000 for the whole year, and the average monthly budget is $2,500.
But how do we allocate those? We have 3 channels; online marketing, offline marketing, and repeat business. When we are talking about online marketing, we’re talking about SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), and all other social media ads.
As another example, let’s say we have $21,000 per year, we have different channels to spend that $21,000. For online marketing, we usually spend 35% on SEO, 55% for Pay Per Click (PPC), and Local Services Ads (LSA) and 5% is display ads and retargeting.
When you look at your SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), and display marketing, you just need $600 for SEO, $900 for Pay Per Click, and somewhere in between $50 to $100 for retargeting.
The Importance of Retargeting
By the way, retargeting is an important point for your business. For instance; someone landed on your website and left your website without giving any kind of information or sharing anything with you. We trigger ads for these people on social media, could be anywhere on their browser, we put our promotions somewhere on the web then Google just triggers those ads. This is what retargeting ads are.
What It Takes to Grow Your Business Aggressively: Strategies and Challenges
You may be wondering what it takes to grow your business aggressively. There are many factors involved in growth, including human resources, which can be limiting or challenging depending on how you look at it. If you’re thinking of taking a more aggressive approach to expanding your company’s reach and resources, then read on for the details!
It’s all how you look at your business and how hard you want to strive. Because you may have limits or you may think that you’re going to make this business much bigger. For example, your human resource. If you grow your business aggressively, suddenly you will need new designers, salespersons, and new people in your team.
If you want to do it on your own or if you are a husband and wife company and you just want to go after that high ticket client, try to do it as long as possible. You don’t need to be aggressive.
But if you are a company with 4 showrooms, 10 of them salespeople, then you might be aggressive. Because you need to saturate your salespeople, you can’t let these people sit down and wait for the leads. You need that phone ringing all the time. That’s why you need to be a little more aggressive.
Forecasting Online Marketing Trends
The Key trends for Online Marketing are changing quickly, but what happened last year will be what we see next year.
Zoom Meetings
You should be aware that Zoom meetings are everywhere now. With the COVID-19 pandemic, even the ongoing project turned to Zoom because people didn’t feel safe to invite someone to their showrooms or offices. Zoom meetings started to get more and more attention and we started offering Zoom meetings to our client’s customers.
You may think that this is not a good way to talk to people. But, don’t be afraid, you are only sharing your face, not your 2021 software or AutoCAD software. You’re just starting a conversation with a video chat, it’s like people are calling your showroom but that’s a video call.
Key for Zoom Meetings
As the key fact, do not try to design and sell anything on Zoom. Just show your company profile, your branding, show that you are there. Talk about your experience, your expertise level, and when things are kind of slow down, invite those people to your showroom for a roundtable meeting. If you’re believing that people will sign something for $60,000 on Zoom, we don’t think that is happening. If you push to sell on Zoom, it’s going to be pushed back, you can’t sell on Zoom. You have to start your face-to-face conversation on Zoom, and you have to follow up with appointment schedulers.
Appointment Schedulers
We thought that appointment schedulers are not going to work, but what we see along the way is we started those appointment schedulers just to give it a little more security for the people. Not to overbook everyone, avoid crowds in the showrooms and slab yards in order to set those people in a good way.
What happens when your leads book their appointments is; you send them a message, you tell them; You’ve just booked your appointment, when you come to our showroom we will perform our due diligence and people will be ready for you. This message, email, or text message makes your communication stronger. The same thing for Zoom meetings as well, people will be more motivated when they come because they will be prepared to buy.
SMS & Text Messages
We’re seeing a slight shift from regular phone conversations to SMS messages and text messages. When you’re texting those people they are interacting with your designers or salespeople right away. When you do it, it means that you are with the customer, you keep it warm.
Sometimes there are redundant questions because they are customers, they have the right to ask those redundant questions. And if it’s a qualified customer, they see that you are answering right away. These people will stay with you even if they receive a slower or lower amount of pricing from somewhere else.
It’s Not Just About PPC
Do you think that Google Ads are just about PPC? You might be surprised to find out the truth. As a trend, in 2018 it was good to focus on only Pay Per Click. But even then, it is not effective any longer. If you spend all your money on only one thing in one night, Google will change their algorithms and you may lose your rankings overnight.
If you just go beyond Google Ads, some different rivals are going to happen. If you don’t react in real-time, that’s not going to benefit you at all!
It’s all in one altogether, like a mix and match of your whole online marketing channels. For instance; one channel may perform less in February but it’s going to be better in March, it is going to be different in April. You will see a pattern of this data, there’s going to follow a specific pattern, and you will be able to understand where to spend your money.