The flooring industry is growing at an extreme pace. With the economy picking back up more and more homeowners have decided that it’s time to invest in new floors. As this need for flooring contractors grows, advertising costs for placement on the first page of YP.com and Yelp is inflating exponentially. That means that as demand grows for ads, the local flooring companies get beat out by big box stores with gigantic wallets.
So what can you do as the local flooring company that will allow you to compete with the big box stores but not leave you with a hole in your wallet? It really is simple. Connect with your potential clients on another level. Big box stores focus on better pricing options among other things. What most potential customers don’t understand is that with that low price also comes a lack of customer service and care.
But how do you convey that message? You don’t have the money to take out YP.com or Yelp ads, so where do you go? There are many free places to advertise that you have probably overlooked, thinking that no one would receive the message in the first place. By blogging and using social media (along with other practices) you can start raking in qualified traffic to your flooring company’s website. In fact there’s now a name for this kind of marketing; Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing…What’s that? Well good question, it’s the newest form of marketing that any business, especially B2C businesses like flooring companies, can become successful in. This methodology of marketing truly follows after its name. Your goal is to stop reaching out to potential customers and to start creating content that pulls them in. This is where blogging and social media come in to play. By writing blogs that pertain to your customers concerns and interests, you provide information to them that could help them make a buying decision down the road. Also, blogs provide a great SEO benefit that helps you rank on search engines.
Now, let’s go over social media and its benefits. First off you need to share that blog that you just wrote. “Well how do I do that?!” Wow, another great question! All that you need to do is post a status on social media that provides a little summary of the blog, ensuring to highlight a benefit of reading to followers. Take time creating this status and make sure you change the voice of the status to match each tone of the social media site. For example you can write a long status for Facebook but you have character limitations with Twitter. But there is so much more to social media than posting about blog updates. Social sites are great places to give updates on projects, provide insight to your business, and get reviews. The more that you post, the more your followers see your posts and don’t forget that each post also has the potential to be shared by those followers.
Blogging and social media is just the start to inbound marketing, but it’s a good start at that. Why spend big bucks competing against the big box stores for ads on sites that only a limited amount of people see when you can get your own traffic?
