In our restoration company, Power Dry, we’ve been marketing for residential water damage work since 1988. In 2005, when we launched More Floods off the success of scaling Power Dry into a multi-million-dollar market leader in the Kansas City area, it included our firm belief in the mantra ‘marketing is a process, not an event’.
Too often, we talk with owners of restoration companies who fall into the trap of thinking that marketing is something you can ebb and flow, or worse yet, stop altogether when things get busy, or budgets get tight. The reality is: for a water damage restoration company to scale and succeed, marketing must be continuous, you can never stop – EVER. Especially when you’re busy. Why? Because once that wave of water damage work dries up, you’re left with nothing and you must start from scratch.
Taking that marketing mantra a step further, there are tons of marketing studies and research that underpin the fact that process matters in your marketing. It goes like this – for every marketing ‘touch’ you make – an email, the signage on your vehicles, a mailer, a marketing event, and any and every other type of advertising and promotion you do – your audience only notices your branding 1 out of every 3 times they see it. On top of that, science points to the fact that it takes 9 consistent branding touches to take someone from not knowing you exist to being ready to ‘buy’ what it is you’re selling.
So – it takes 27 branding touches of your water damage referring parties – insurance agents, plumbers and other types – to get them to the point where they will seriously consider referring their water damage leads to you.
Here’s what that looks like:
The best way to build a strong, successful flow of water damage restoration business is to put in the time and money in a 27 Touch Referral Marketing plan. And once you have a marketing plan, follow it! Review that marketing plan regularly, test what tactics are working, refresh, tweak and renew it as your water damage business grows.
One last thing – the 27 Touches Rule, as we call it, only works if every single one of those 27 touches is consistent in its look and feel. If your logo and message aren’t consistently the same, then you are at high risk of taking the 27 touches and doubling, tripling it, or worse! If the fifth branding touch doesn’t look and feel like the previous ones, you’ve wasted your time and money because your audience isn’t going to associate that 5th touch with the previous ones.
There’s a reason the greatest, most iconic brands in the world work very hard to make sure you recognize them instantly. Can you drive by the ‘golden arches’ and not instantly know it’s McDonald’s? Can you see the mouse ears and not instantly know it’s Disney? What would happen if McDonald’s had a different font for the ‘M’, or had it in varying colors? If Disney made the mouse ears in different shapes? You get the point. Great brands go to great extent to ensure remarkable consistency in their branding elements.
If you want to see a 27-Touch Referral Marketing Plan in action, contact us and we’ll show you how it works. We’ll provide you a demo of how we do it and have helped hundreds of other water damage restorers do it for almost two decades.