How to Dominate your Industry with Digital Marketing

The digital age has changed how we do business forever. With the click of a button, you can push your advertising message out through multiple platforms, quickly and easily.

But so can everyone else. You can’t go online without being bombarded with an endless stream of ads.

The result?

Your prospects are very good at ignoring ads.

For these and other reasons, online visibility — by itself — is not an advantage because almost everyone is visible online. It’s the bare minimum. To dominate, you must do one of two things: outspend your competition to be more visible; or use a more strategic approach.

All marketing efforts should begin with a list of past customers, their referrals and referral partnerships with aligned businesses. These are proven buyers and referrers of your service. Don’t ignore them. Send a monthly printed newsletter and use digital communication: e-mail, social media and text messages.

Invest in alternative digital strategies only after you’ve set up regular communications with your list. The reason is almost all other strategies are for targeting strangers. So, take care of your friends first, strangers second. The overwhelming majority of flooring dealers don’t do this and, resultantly, leave millions on the table.

A critical consideration before spending thousands of dollars on digital advertising is the ad’s message. While this seems obvious, most flooring dealer ads have lousy messages.

Here’s an exercise that illustrates my point. Go to your business’ website. Now pull up the websites of your three biggest competitors. Look carefully at the message on the homepage of each site. I’ll bet the message includes the business name at the top, a list of products and services (maybe with some teaser pricing or a claim to be the cheapest) and contact information. In other words, the messages are identical.

How does this give you a competitive advantage?

It doesn’t.

Since the messaging of each ad and website is the same, the flooring dealer that can throw the most money at it and, through brute force, create the greatest number of impressions with targeted prospects is the one who dominates. This includes appearing at the top of search results — if you don’t appear in the top three or four, you generally lose — ads, ad retargeting, search engine optimization, social media and so forth.

This is called brand building or image advertising. The idea is you put your business name out there over and over again, in multiple places through a multitude of channels, and if people see you enough times, they’ll buy from you. This undoubtedly works but the flooring dealer who dominates is usually the one with the deepest pockets. They can afford to put out far more ads and to hire experts to laser target the best prospects.

But what if you can’t afford it? Or if you can, you’d like your ads to be more effective?

In both cases, you need a more strategic approach. This will be covered in Part 2 in this three-part series.

Jim Augustus Armstrong is founder and president of FlooringSuccessSystems.com, a company that provides floor dealers with marketing services and coaching to help them attract quality customers, close more sales, get higher margins and work the hours they choose. To obtain a free copy of Jim’s groundbreaking flooring industry report, Stop Leaving Millions on The Table, visit FloorMillions.com. Jim can be reached at 530-790-6720 or [email protected].