Storm chasing vs long-term relationships: Two sides of the same coin

The website for Urso Construction LLC is a holding page (no content) but owner James Urso's storm-chasing marketing in Ohio attracted attention from the local newspaper. This is a Google maps image of where the business is located.

This Google News alert under the keywords "construction marketing" caught my eyes last night. In Roofer Offers Unusual Marketing Ploy the Port Clinton, Ohio News Herald reports:

DANBURY TOWNSHIP -- When an out-of-town construction company began distributing flyers and knocking on doors in several area neighborhoods recently, some people became suspicious.
Urso Construction LLC, based in Cardington, about 40 miles north of Columbus, ran a full court advertising press promoting new roofs at no cost to homeowners.
Sue Cunningham, a Danbury Township resident who lives in the Perrysburg Estates subdivision, said she was suspicious.
"We had numerous visits and also cards and flyers," she said.

The story proceeds to describe how her insurance representative thought the offer was fraudulent, then the company's owner, James Urso, who said the company is not replacing just any roof.

Specifically, he said, they will replace roofs damaged during a severe wind and hailstorm that occurred June 25.

"This is one-hundred percent legit," Urso said. "I'm just doing what other contractors aren't."

Well, of course, some others are -- this is the business of "storm chasing", noticing where a hail storm is likely to cause roof damage, and then moving into the marketplace with aggressive marketing to encourage homeowners to file insurance claims. Provisions in Ohio insurance law make this ploy both rational and practical, as in storm-damaged areas, insurance claims cannot affect your coverage or ratings. In other words, if you qualify, and there really is storm damage (often invisible to the naked eye), the contractor can get the insurance company to repair or replace your roof, for "free".
Fair enough. I learned about this stuff during my visit to Ohio last November, and a posting by Ed Falko on contractortalk.com puts the storm chasing game overall, though not referring to any specific business, in a less-than-positive light.
Compare "storm chasing", however, to the processes involved in winning most significant construction contracts or business. You'll find the market divided into two groups: the frequent, repeat users of construction-related services and the occasional client, who might need a one-time major project.
Frequent users usually have a combination of sophisticated procurement procedures and rules and lots of hidden rules, based on experience and relationships. You'll certainly find that in much government work -- sure, the opportunities may be "open" to anyone who qualifies, but you are much more likely to win if you have a solid track record and get along with the individuals running the department.
Occasional users, whether they be for major residential remodels, or a business expanding to a new location, are harder to find at the early stages of the decision-making curve. In any case, they are generally not going to rush their decisions: They will listen to trusted advisers, friends, colleagues, and others before believing anything you say. Sometimes, friends give them bad advice, but it is "more right" than your perceived self-interest. Here, you need relationships with the people with the key relationships to make things happen.
Is "storm chasing" (done ethically) bad? Of course not, but you will need to travel in spaces which make many people uncomfortable. Yes, you probably need a hard-rock canvassing crew to succeed.
Is relationship-building and finding lucrative projects involving scale and scope, what you want to do? For most readers here, it is. The challenge, as I've discussed over the past couple of years, is that I cannot give you a one-size-fits-all-universal-solution-that-you-can-implement-in-10-minutes.
Then again, look at the start of this posting: A news article in a local publication. James Urso certainly didn't seek out the news coverage, which isn't totally flattering, but at least gives his side of the story. But what if Urso had been pre-emptive and thought of ways to connect with the news media in his area before the reporter called? (And does he have a proper website for his business?)
I sense that for many people in the construction industry, media relations and publicity are true "sleeper" marketing resources. Probably few contractors use these resources because they are uncertain (you cannot control how or when the media will report on your business -- though you can influence the decisions), and require everything else to be in good order first: Your service quality, reputation, and marketing collateral including website and follow up systems need to be in place before you even think of seeking out publicity.)
But the main thing is probably lack of knowledge. Here, while I may not know how to shingle a roof and have no interest in chasing storms, I can help.

Relationships underlying marketing

You achieve the magic construction marketing moment when you reach the level of communication that trust and respect are considered the core of your relationship -- not "selling something".

In fact, I would argue that with rare exceptions you aren't going to sell very much until you achieve this status.

However, you can't usually achieve this high relationship quality by conventional selling practices. I mean, do you really trust someone who telemarkets you, or really believe the advertisements you read?

But it is easy to lapse into the conventional, in fact, it is natural -- you think this is the way it is done, and so do it. You are "marketing" after all.

Yet, when you look at your business, you see that virtually every (profitable) sale you make actually occurs when the relationship founded on trust is so strong that your price doesn't matter. (Well, your price indeed matters, to an extent, because if you have a relationship based on trust, you would never abuse the trust by gouging someone or charging a price outside of the realistic value you are delivering.)

The irony is that our business is primarily selling the standard stuff -- advertising -- but we sell most of what we sell by connecting more closely with our clients and their own relationships.

You probably appreciate these principals if you have built your business in good times by "relying" on referrals. You do your work well, you build the relationships with your clients to such a level, that they tell their friends and colleagues about you, and your order book is full.

Unfortunately, when things slow down, you may be tempted to fall into conventional marketing traps -- or be sold a pile of crap by conventional marketing sales representatives.

How do you get around these marketing myths and achieve meaningful results. I'll go out on a limb and suggest three ideas to follow:

1. Build on your referrals. If you have great client relationships, connect (more closely) with them, in a systematic but human way. You'll achieve far greater results with this form of marketing than any other option.
2. Look at media publicity as the most cost-effective non-referral marketing opportunity available to you. Media publicity can include your own media; namely blogs, videos, and Internet forum participation. It can also be independent editorial coverage in publications, websites and radio/television stations. We make most of our money by providing advertising-supported editorial publicity; done right, this can be a great seed for independent editorial coverage, and is far more effective than conventional advertising.
3. Remember that relationships don't need to correlate directly to any selling or "business development" but you want these relationships to focus within your ideal client community. In other words, focus on giving, sharing, and connecting without worrying about return, but hang out in the right neighbourhoods or with the right business associations.

Does this stuff work? Absolutely. And you don't have to sell a thing to find the clients you really want to serve if you get it right.

Construction Marketing Publicity

Here's a video where I outline the options and choices for obtaining media publicity for your business. Publicity is probably the most cost-effective marketing approach -- behind enhancing and encouraging referral and repeat business, of course -- but is much more challenging to plan and co-ordinate than conventional advertising and sales approaches.

Instant friends (really?)

We publish regional construction publications. Instead of promoting the self-serving interests of construction marketing organizations here, I might as well promote my own product. But this passes the blog's "smell test" as few readers here are likely to be advertisers in our publications, but there' s lots of free news within the publications (which you can access from our website without sharing your identity or email address, unlike the two examples below.)

Within the last day, I've received a couple of seemingly simple gifts. In one case, an organization published a comment on my blog. Unlike auto-generated "spam comments' this observation appeared genuinely relevant to the blog. Trouble is, embedded with the comment was a link to a site offering some sort of "window cleaning e-book" for (just) $29.95. Maybe it is a good offer. I don't know. But I'm certainly not giving them a free link to boost their search engine rankings and business, when I don't know them anywhere but the comment.

In the second situation, someone who has tried to market a contractor-relevant service on contractortalk.com sent me a thoughtful video and asked me to post it. The video has some value the service may be real, but the page you go to when you link off the video takes me into spaces I associate with Internet scam land. I am confident the service provider isn't running a scam, but equally, I don't feel comfortable rushing off and providing instant credibility to his business.

Are both of these businesses doing something wrong? Yes, but before I explain where they are failing, I should explain where they are succeeding. They are thinking publicity, media (blog) relations, and "free press". These initiatives can produce the highest return (outside of effective referral business development strategies) of any marketing approach you can achieve.

For example, imagine a positive front page story in your local newspaper, television station, or, for that matter, a plug on Oprah. You don't pay a fee for this publicity, not a cent, and yet the business generation power is incredible.

(Publicity through this blog obviously is less meaningful, but if you have a service relating to construction marketing, you may wish to ride on the blog's high Google keyword rankings.)

So where can you go wrong in seeking publicity?

The main failure of publicity-seekers is that they forget the publisher generally operating a business, too. And I have a basic guideline that helps me determine whether someone should get "free press" for something they are promoting.

"Is the value of sharing the news an order of magnitude greater to the readers than the person receiving the free publicity?"

This is why I especially enjoy publishing stories of contractors who have achieved marketing success, but are not using their success to promote a contractor marketing consultancy. Leonard Megliola at Bestline Plumbing in the Los Angeles area, for example, is running a plumbing business and isn't pushing e-books on marketing (and he gives away his marketing resources and manuals without charge.)

The person seeking my attention with a video blog, (I believe in Ohio), is selling a marketing service of some sort.

I look for "scare offs" or warning signs.

Some people have taken Internet "marketing courses" where they learn how to manipulate their ways onto blogs, use videos, lengthy "squeeze pages" and the like. I'm sure these techniques work, but they are also the techniques of scam artists. I need to be satisfied of real authenticity. When I see the "standard techniques" used to sell me stuff, I run for the hills.

Some days, even if you do everything right, you get nowhere.

Unlike advertising, you don't have control over the timing, direction, and use of your publicity initiatives. Maybe when you send me your press release (or video blog), other things are happening of higher priority or urgency, or I'm just in a bad mood. Whatever, you can't control the media like you control your advertising. Yes, you can do things to turn it on, but you can't just necessarily flick a switch and expect it to work right away.

Can the people who approached me obtain "free publicity" here in the future. Possibly. They'll have to pass my smell tests.

In the meantime, here is one of my own videos.