How to reduce missed marketing opportunities for your flooring business

Here are five key areas epoxy pros can work on to reduce their missed opportunities.

Here at FloorWIZ, we speak to hundreds of flooring professionals to better understand their sales and marketing challenges. It’s how we make our tools and services more useful.

One key issue we see a lot is how a lack of time means missed sales. Great opportunities keep slipping through the cracks because there is simply too much of the day job to do to keep things going.

Of course, we didn’t just ask, we thought about how we could help - ensuring busy flooring owners are putting tools and processes in place to avoid missing good opportunities and maximising how their marketing to get the most out of every lead that comes in.

Here's what we came up with.

Automated Followups

One of the most common reasons businesses miss out on sales opportunities is the lack of a good and timely followup. This isn’t isolated to just flooring pros, but our research does show that it’s a big opportunity to fix for many in the decorative concrete business.

Simply put, a potential customer is reaching out for more information. They may be looking for a job quote or consultation, or they may be asking for more information on a particular product. Whatever their query is, if they don’t hear back from you in a timely manner, they will look for an alternative - your competition.

Now, a lot of guidance on this will push you to look at CRM tools. This is a great solution! However, they can be expensive and there are a lot of options out there to look into. To add to this, the way you capture this information can really influence the way you follow up. If you're looking for cost-effective ways to bolster your digital marketing, we've put together this handy list of free digital marketing tools to get you going.

Example,

If you get loads of enquiries through Facebook or Instagram, have a look at setting up a Meta Business Manager account with them and trying their lead management tools. This is completely free and lets you send automated message responses back to anyone who drops you a message asking for more information.

Most flooring pros we work with get enquiries through the website, which makes a CRM a good idea. You can also get by with some of the free options that are available from various providers. Hubspot offers a free version of their CRM as does MailChimp, so it’s worth starting out with these before you invest. We share our five favorite free marketing tools in a recent blog post here.

We’d also be silly not to mention that FloorWIZ lets you manage your leads with instant email followups too. When your website visitors use the FloorWIZ visualizer on their site and save their design, they receive an email with their new flooring idea. Better still, so do you! The beauty of this is that FloorWIZ has been in touch with your lead and you can get in touch again with all the info about their chosen products already there. Win - win!

Feed the impatient with instant online estimates

Time is money, and your potential customers are often looking for quick answers. The internet is impatient and if you take too long to respond to an inquiry, you will find your lead looking at other options who will get back to them quickly. We see it all the time - leads come in, the business doesn’t reply until the next day, the lead is with someone else.

Our top tip? Online estimation tools.

A good chunk of the time, your potential customers are looking for one key thing, prices. By offering online estimates, you can speed up the process, provide transparency, and improve your chances of securing a job without ever needing to put pen to paper.

Consider adding a user-friendly online quote tool on your website. There are plenty out there to choose from defending on what your website runs on. This will allow customers to easily input their project details, get a rough estimate, and make an informed decision faster. Not only does this save time, but it also shows that you're responsive and tech-savvy, which builds trust. If you're in need of some technical assistance, get in touch about our marketing and website services.

Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation

This is where you need to grease the wheels. Simply put, if your website isn’t set up for conversions, you’re leaving potential customers, and their money, on the table.

There are many ways you can optimize your website to bring in more sales leads - it’s all about providing information and resources in exchange for capturing the information you need to contact the potential customer. These can be simple tools like a contact form or more powerful solutions like our visualizer.

However you do it, prioritize getting it done. Websites that are confusing or difficult to navigate are the number one reason your visitors will look for answers elsewhere. Hubspot offers some great advice on how to buff your website for lead gen here. Before all that though, here are a few quick wins you can make sure are in place to improve your lead generation:

• Include prominent calls to action like offers for a free quote or consultation on your website pages.
• Make sure your contact forms are easy to find, and more importantly - work on mobile!
• Link your website to your social media channels and other contact tools like a phone number.
• Create focus pages for any deals and offers you have. These tend to be called landing pages and act as a focus point for where you want to draw your audiences through your marketing activities.

Think of ideas that would encourage your website visitors to engage with your website. FloorWIZ is a great example of this for marketing a flooring business with users being able to try out your products and see them in their room spaces before saving their designs. Once they save that design, your lead is captured and your sales conversation begins. You can see the lead gen working for yourself in our free demo here.

Check out the home brew - the power of local marketing

In the worlds flooring, many customers are looking for a nearby, trusted contractor. To ensure you're found, it's essential to invest in Local SEO and properly set up your free Google My Business profile. We talk more about this in our post here. By optimizing these, your business will appear in local searches when potential customers are looking for flooring services in the areas where you’re based. Our research shows that this can have a seriously positive impact on your marketing results, and well worth the time and effort.

Regularly update your Google My Business profile (it's free!) with photos of your work (especially those more out of the box metallic designs), customer reviews, and up-to-date business hours. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, as high ratings can help build your reputation and trust.

If your business is easily discoverable online, it will significantly increase your chances of attracting more customers. If you’ve put in place the measures about lead generation that we mention in section 3 - you’ll see your leads soar.

Four tips, for ways to reduce your lead churn

Reducing missed sales opportunities requires consistent effort and an optimized approach. This can be a pain to do as well as trying to get the existing jobs finished.

As we’ve been through above, there are a few things that can be done to make your lives easier when it comes to caring for your customer enquiries and turning leads into job bookings.

Be consistent, it takes a lot of constant tweaking and improving to get your marketing working well. Trust us though when we say this needs to be part of your plans to grow your business. Otherwise your leads could keep slipping through your fingers!

If you’re looking to delve into this a little further but don’t know where to start, our team are offering a free digital marketing strategy courses for flooring professionals who are looking to take their business to the next level.

Simply complete the details on the page here and we’ll send you an invite for a free 45 minute strategy call with our qualified marketing professionals.