Does This Sign Still Work?

Brian Williams, Co-Founder & CEO

Article Category: #Strategy

Posted on

photo of a signI noticed this sign in my suburban DC neighborhood. I presume it refers to home additions, which around here generally means dropping at least $100K to add on to already high-priced homes. For most people, their home is by far their most significant investment. Does anyone just call a number posted on a pole and ask them to start working on a project of that magnitude anymore? Trash removal, maybe, but home additions? Wouldn't a nice, short, memorable URL be handy in this case? In a busy area like DC there's lots of construction work, but also lots of competition. The good contractors are overworked and struggle to be responsive to new inquiries -- a problem since providing accurate price quotes is a time-consuming process that requires real expertise. Filtering out the less valuable, less committed prospects is half the challenge. Up-and-coming contractors might do great work, but without a book of testimonials and work samples, they struggle to find good opportunities and grow their businesses. Doesn't a solid web strategy make sense for both? The established guys can use the web to route, filter, and respond to new sales inquiries. The new guys can market their good work and make a solid first impression. With the right search strategy on the front-end, both can attract lots of prospects. With targeted email marketing on the backend, both could maintain top-of-mind awareness with their contacts. Add solid analytics in the middle and they'll have the insights needed into how the strategy is working to be able to make smart, cost-effective decisions on how to tweak the strategy. That's the great thing about web marketing right now: it's established enough to drive legitimate business (in some cases, enormous amounts); but, the most effective strategies are still new enough to allow the more aggressive and savvy (not necessarily the more wealthy) companies to make big advances over their competition. Who knows -- maybe that sign was put up 10 years ago ... but, of course, back then additions.com was probably available.
Brian Williams

Brian is Viget's co-founder and CEO. He does everything from advising our clients to building our conference tables with his bare hands in our Falls Church, VA, HQ.

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