Time to Reassess Marketing Strategies

Most remodelers didn’t start out as marketers. They became business owners and marketers almost as an afterthought, and some of them still aren’t comfortable in that role. Compared to framing a room addition, marketing is still something of a mystery. In good years, marketing wasn’t top of mind. Word-of-mouth and referrals kept many remodelers more than busy. In many cases, that has changed.

It doesn’t help remodelers’ comfort levels when someone like business author Seth Godin writes a book titled All Marketers Are Liars. Instances of chicanery and malfeasance in the remodeling industry are not hard to find, making Godin’s premise all the more uncomfortable for some remodelers. Fortunately, Godin has since seen the title as a marketing faux pas and renamed the book All Marketers Tell Stories.

Godin may be on to something, particularly with the new title that will set fewer teeth on edge. Marketing is about telling a story, the title posits, and looking at it that way demystifies the process. Thinking of marketing as storytelling also makes clear the risk of embellishing that story or telling it poorly; reality will quickly catch up with a fabricated or flawed tale.

What’s Your Story?

The back-to-basics questions that Godin says marketers should ask themselves are simple:

What’s your story? Will people believe it? Is it true?

"About seven or eight years ago, I decided this just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t my personality, and I didn’t enjoy it." Daniel Wolt, president and founder of Zen Windows

Two remodelers with whom Qualified Remodeler spoke are indeed telling their stories, albeit in different ways. Nevertheless, it’s clear they’ve given their marketing plans a lot of thought and spent a good deal of time and effort crafting their plans.

Daniel Wolt, president and founder of Zen Windows, Columbus, Ohio, has simplified the marketing process, and he’s glad he did.

Wolt’s window business wasn’t always the “kinder, gentler window business” that it is now, he relates on his Web site. It was about telemarketers and canvassing to get leads, high-pressure in-home sales with both the husband and wife present, monthly payments and the whole bag of old-fashioned homeimprovement sales tricks, as Wolt calls them.

"We were doing what I call shotgun marketing. We didn’t have a plan, and we didn’t measure anything. We kind of knew from the phone calls that were coming in [some of the marketing] was working, but there was no consistency, and there was no plan." Dawn Steimer, owner of Master Custom Homes Remodeling

“About seven or eight years ago, I decided this just wasn’t for me,” he says. “It wasn’t my personality, and I didn’t enjoy it.” He looked around at his family, many of whom were professionals of one kind or another— lawyers, accountants, dentists—and realized “they don’t go knocking on doors, making phone calls, bothering people and pressuring them into doing things.”

Call Me

Wolt decided to remake his window business on that model. “My wife, a dentist, will not get on a phone and start cold calling people to see whether they need a root canal. If someone’s mouth hurts, they’ll call her,” he says.

Wolt asked himself why he couldn’t set up a business model where if someone’s house hurts, the homeowner would come to him. Skeptics will certainly doubt his model, but Wolt points out, “Since the inception of Zen Windows, we have grown from roughly $600,000 in year one with one crew and myself to current revenues of more than $2.8 million for 2010 with five crews always working, a full-time assistant and a full-time Internet-marketing guru.”