Not Your Father’s Marketing Plan

For now, Facebook is “another avenue to get current information out, whether it’s photos from a job in progress or a little blurb about something that may be happening in the company. Website updates can be costly and time-consuming if you do them right. We used Facebook because it’s user-friendly—anybody in the office can do it. Of course Facebook is going to evolve, and our strategy will evolve with it.”

Don’t Overlook the Costs

One perception Tibbs advises remodelers to guard against is the notion that Internet and social media don’t have a substantial marketing cost. “I think we all have tended to overlook the amount of time it takes. For a while, I wasn’t charging the hours I was spending blogging and doing newsletters to the marketing account. It was kind of living in overhead, and we really didn’t have a handle on what our marketing costs were. If you go to the effort of capturing those hours and charging them in the right place on the profit and loss statement, it does really add up.”

Tibbs likes to keep a balance between evolving digital marketing strategies and what has always worked.

“I see again and again the thing that cements a relationship and will really nail a sale is the face-to-face interaction between two people with a business card exchanged. It does go back to the basics at some point,” he says. (For more information about effective business cards, see page 27.)

“The way you attract people and get your name out to them is certainly evolving and changing,” Tibbs concedes, “but when it comes to those first couple of meetings after the dialogue has started, quite honestly, it does go back to the basics and to some degree the tried and true.

“I would add, this is a time when successful companies should be taking some calculated risks, trying new things and learning from their failures. I know budgets are tight, but if you become paralyzed about trying something new, you’re really going to miss a lot of opportunities.”