In this series, we’re taking on remodeling contractors and how their business can be found online by previous and potential customers. If you’re a contractor this marketing model works, we know because we use it. If you are not a remodeling contractor don’t tune out, this advice applies to all companies who want to be found online.

Joe: Welcome back to The Being Found Show. We’re taking on remodeling contractors, opportunity, and we’re trying to pull back the green curtain and show, and explain, and tell remodeling contractors how to be found and what it means to be found. But you know what, we are talking about remodeling contractors, but the concepts we’re using, they work for everybody, or just about everybody. So don’t tune out if you’re listening to us and you’re not a remodeling contractor because this applies.

Chauncey: Yeah, let me throw this is in, that you know, we are coming at this with a little bit of research, and a basic understanding of the remodeling industry. You definitely have more experience, but my point is that the information that we’re sharing is a basic understanding and some research. It’s not an in-depth, it’s an in-depth strategy, but it applies to other industries, because if you have knowledge of your industry you can apply these things and take it in. So when we’re saying, “Okay, well a lead is worth this much,” and so on and so forth, you can say, “Well in my industry a lead is worth this much and so this means that to me.”

Joe: Right exactly.

Chauncey: I’m not sure how articulately communicated that was, but you know.

Joe: Hell, that’s the thing about live radio, it is what it is.

Chauncey: Right, right. No turning back now.

Joe: No turning back. Yeah, and so that’s the truth. What we’re trying to do is expose some of the tools and methods we use to come up with strategies. We’re not trying to tell you all the little baby steps it takes to do this. There’s sometimes hundreds of things you can do to one page to make it better. What we’re trying to do is to make sure we pull back the green curtain for you owners, so that you can apply the strategy or know if your team is applying strategies like this and maybe get a feeling of why you’re being successful or why you’re not being successful at being found.

That does lead me into the next idea. As we’re looking at the statistics and the value of the market, and say we’re looking in Memphis or Nashville, or Sacramento area in northern California, and we’re getting an idea if it’s worth marketing into that area. The next thing you have to realize is, you really got to be relevant. There are hundreds of millions, if not billions of pieces of content created on the internet every day. More and more websites every day-

Chauncey: And it’s all true. Every bit of it is true.

Joe: Every bit is true, and I’m a French model. Yeah, oui, oui.

Chauncey: Right.

Joe: Yeah.

Chauncey: You know, that joke is actually really quite relevant because you know it has to do with the trust and you know in earlier segments we were talking about preemptively answering people’s questions in a way that’s helpful. As we talk about pages, you have your page saying, “I do bathroom remodeling,” but you also have your resource pages where people want to say, “How much is it going to be?” And so on and so forth. On those pages, you want to make sure there’s a quality takeaway that somebody who came there found something that when they walked away they said, “I learned something new there.”

Joe: Yeah.

Chauncey: And not necessarily something deep or advanced, but something that helps them get a better rudimentary understanding of what they are trying to invest in.

Joe: Okay, well and that brings us to the next thing of who are you talking to? It is important to figure out who it is you’re talking to, and I think for me as a business owner, that’s one of the hardest things because I want to say, “Well everyone can buy my service.” Well, that is true, maybe everyone can buy your service. I guess everyone with a home could want it remodeled, but when you’re producing content online, you want to try to talk to each audience separately. For instance, you might talk to the baby boomer differently than you might talk to the millennial audience because they’re at different places in life. They have different reasons for remodeling.

Chauncey: Right, right. So like at the top, who are you talking to? You are talking to people who are looking for you.

Joe: Right.

Chauncey: Looking for the answers that you’re providing them. And so at that point, that gives you an understanding, “Okay, we’ve narrowed it down. People are looking to find out information from me, and I’m going to provide it.” Which types of people are looking for information from me? We’re looking at baby boomers is a big one that’s showing up in your research, and millennials is a big one that’s showing up in your research. Now, for anybody who has a family, or knows a baby boomer and a millennial, which is a lot of you, I think you’re fairly confident that when they go on the internet looking for things, they are not doing the exact same things.

Joe: No, right, right.

Chauncey: You know they are drastically different in their outlooks, and what they want, and how they’re going to get there. What they’re willing to spend, when they’re willing to spend it, how far their research is going to go, they are just drastically, drastically different.

Joe: Okay, so let’s try to give an example right off the cuff, Chauncey, I’m going to read to you a little more research-

Chauncey: Okay.

Joe: And lets you and I try to describe how a, what might a remodeling company do to speak to this audience, okay. Hopefully, we don’t fall on our face here. This is from the Joint Center for Housings Studies with Harvard, and here’s what they say. They say, “A large percentage of baby boomers want to stay where they are. Many won’t be able to live on their own for health or financial reasons. JCHS, that’s the Joint Center for Housing Studies, predicts boomers will leave up to 12 million housing units for those reasons between 2015 and 2025. Many of those homes are well suited for younger families, in that they are typically older and more affordable.”

The Joint Center writes that, “And given that older households generally live in their homes for some time, and spend little on improvements in their later years, younger buyers of those homes will likely want to invest in significant upgrades.” If this study is to be accurate, and there’s going to be 12 million housings, we now know that there is a group of young people who are buying older homes and are likely going to want to upgrade them. And those are now, and that is a specific audience for us to talk to, right?

Chauncey: Yeah, so I got a bunch of stuff right off the bat.

Joe: Okay.

Chauncey: So a baby boomer is potentially leaving their home, and a millennial is potentially moving into that home. Which one is going to be more likely to use the air conditioner?

Joe: I don’t know.

Chauncey: Which one is going to be more likely to have a washing machine, or wash them by hand? The air conditioner is a prime example. Baby boomers, they’re probably a little more accustomed to the life that they were, and these young guys, girls, families, that are coming into these situations are more apt to-

Joe: Deal with it.

Chauncey: To utilize the tech, no, no, no, no, I don’t think so at all, they’re more apt to utilize the technology in front of them, but then they’re also more apt to be aware of the fact that this older house needs better insulation, needs to be better kept up to keep up with that new technology.

Joe: Okay.

Chauncey: You know, and dishwashers.

Joe: Let’s follow that stream-

Chauncey: My mom was a baby boomer. Yeah, okay.

Joe: Follow that through, so you’ve identified some of those, so what, now as a business, and again audience, we’re doing this on the cuff for you, so now you’ve identified some of those as a remodeling contractor. What do I do with any of those? Would I write something like maybe the top five, would I write something in the title, might be the top five things to remodel in your new old home.

Chauncey: Yeah.

Joe: So what would I do?

Chauncey: At the very most basic answer would be, make your visitors aware that you know about that concern. You can do that in several ways. You can do it with a page. You can do it with a post. You can do it through social media shares. You can do it in your gallery, where you’re talking about, “Here’s the before and after, and what we were able to do for this young family. There are lots of different ways that you can go about it, but the message is still the same. Whether or not you’re aware that this is a problem, we’re aware that this is a problem, and we can help you with it.”

Joe: Okay, so now you and I come from two different ends of the spectrum. You are just gifted at understanding how to do this stuff, and how it fits. And I look at it on the other side of, I wouldn’t even say strategy, might be a little better strategy that I am, but I look at from the business person’s perspective of how do I make this a scalable part of my marketing? How do I make what Chauncey’s saying something that works?

What I want to point out is, what we just talked about with these statistics and these techniques is, that it’s possible to identify where you’re talking to somebody. It’s also possible to identify who that somebody is likely to be, which lets you know likely what their challenges are, then you can use the internet and tools to verify there are their challenges. Now you’re talking to a specific person in a specific place, you are now being found by the right people, in the right places, with the right content, and that’s really what Being Found marketing is.

Chauncey: Right, and this, before we move on, this Joint Center for Housing Studies leaves us with the implication that the young people who buy the home are going to want to upgrade it. But also, the older people who are leaving the home, you know, they’re no dummies either, they want to get a better price for their home, so they are going to want to sometimes update it prior to selling it as well. You’re also targeting that answer at the person who wants to add value to their home.

Joe: Yeah, so at somewhere between 2000 and 6000 dollars per sale, I think it’s worth being found. Okay, so we are coming up to the end of the segment, and we’re going to be right back. You’re listening to The Being Found Show.