Marketing Team
We often joke that we are a marketing company that happens to do gutters. We learned early on that if we were going to be a company that “only does gutters” we would have to do a lot of them. We knew for our franchisees to be successful we couldn’t just tell them to spend 3% of their revenue on marketing and wish them a good day. Just like everything we do, we took this to the next level by building an in-house marketing team.
The marketing team oversees, and supports all marketing avenues and campaigns including social media, radio, print, media, creative campaigns, etc. They are there to support each branch and help them to grow their presence and business.
The marketing team takes care of the heavy lifting such as blogging, SEO that continually increase the brand and awareness for all locations, while incorporating advertising efforts that speak to your unique community. While the marketing team has developed many winning campaigns, they also know that some of the best ideas are likely to come right from our franchisees. What’s great about this is our franchisees have a design team at their fingertips to develop marketing pieces specific to their area and concepts.
We have been at this since 1999 and have all the best marketing campaigns at your fingertips as well as a design team to work with you on custom campaigns. Upon signing the FDD, we are ready to launch a robust, and fully optimized website, for you, as we do for all of our divisions. Many franchises will only add their franchisees on a single landing page, which will not give you the SEO impact you need to drive business through your website. You will not just be listed on a single “locations” page.
When a new market is purchased, the marketing team will build an additional 20+ landing pages prioritized for the local market for the territory. These pages are plugged into the core website to share rank and authority allowing the pages to position in search results faster.
Every month, the marketing team will present an analysis report of the marketing efforts and how they relate to the goals set for the franchise and the division. These reports serve two purposes – to both advise the franchisee on the best local marketing practices and to educate the franchisee on how to determine the best local marketing practices.
The team provides the following marketing services for our franchisee:
- Full graphic design services for print and digital products
- Scripts for radio, press releases, TV commercials, etc
- Local listing placement in top 6 data sources as well as Google Business places and Yelp.
- Reputation management across the review sites
- SEO and SEM for each location’s website
- Vehicle wrap design for company cars
- Analysis of marketing and consultation of marketing best practices
- Reporting on marketing efforts and goals achieved
- Consultation on new marketing ideas, practices, and channels
- Management of all marketing avenues
Contact Center
The hardest part of starting your own business is trying to do, and manage everything yourself. We knew before franchising that we had to “test” our model out. We were fortunate to have two willing family members partner in our second, and third locations. In theory, and in our heart after all the work and research we put in, we believed our systems and model should work. However, both locations struggled to keep up with the system practices that produce a five-star experience. We took a step back and saw that the main aspect contributing to them falling behind, was the volume of phone calls, and scheduling needs. That day, we decided to create a plan to build a Contact Center. Working together with all divisions the Contact Center evolved into what it is today.
Our Contact Center is staffed to answer any and all calls that come in requesting a quote or appointment for all franchise locations. They handle requests through email, web chat, and phone as well as scheduling appointments. These appointments are placed directly on a calendar that is tied to all sales and installers. They always work directly with the customer and their schedule. This line of communication is what helps us to stand out from the rest, and has significantly contributed to our level of organization and promptness as a company.
This one implementation has taken us from “a typical contractor” who can’t call back on time, can’t remember appointments, and are seemingly unorganized to a system driven company with all the right tools to succeed at their fingertips. It has also replaced the need for our franchise locations to hire and train an individual to answer phones, schedule estimates as well as installations, giving them more time and revenue to concentrate on growing their business.
Training and Support
We tackled this business alone for the first ten years making, every mistake in the book, and we pushed through a recession, restructuring, missed paychecks and more. Because of these hardships, and lessons learned, we understand what it takes to not just make it in business, but to thrive. We decided to franchise only after completely replacing ourselves with people and systems in our NY Head Quarters, to allow us complete freedom to support our franchisees.
We will always be there for you throughout this journey and continue to help and monitor your business plan as well as create a blueprint with you that outlines your goals, business practices, and systems to implement. We will train your guys here in house, as well as come to you for further training. You, yourself, will also spend time training with us. We provide a hands-on learning experience for everyone.
Training for you will include a detailed schedule of general product and service review, technology training, observing crews preparing for departure, safety, skills ladder training, and hands-on installation training.
We remain in contact with all of our franchisees from the beginning continuing throughout the entire process. We did a lot of research before franchising and found the #1 complaint of existing franchisees was the lack of support by the franchisor. We are not this absentee franchisor once you buy a franchise, and do not leave you on your own to “sink or swim.” Your success is important to us, as well as, knowing you have all the right tools and campaigns to help you succeed. All of our resources at our headquarters like the Call Center, and Marketing team, will always be available to you.