AskDickWagner - Disaster Restoration Consulting

Collaboration Marketing is a new, more social friendly strategy that deviates from old traditional methods where companies used interruption style advertising and promotion, as ways of marketing. Instead, it focuses on attracting customers by way of understanding their needs and fulfilling their needs, providing a dramatically more personalized customer service. Collaboration Marketing involves strategies that are customer tailored and all aimed at maximizing and adding customer value before, during and after they have purchased the products or service.

Collaboration Marketing can involve the use of third parties to add value to customers’ relationship.  Strategies are often geared toward viewing marketing as “many to one” rather than the common strategy of “one to one marketing”. It also involves collaborating with prospects and customers by way of connecting each prospect or customer with others, with the aim of adding and maximizing value for customers. This is the  represents a “pull” approach - where the marketer becomes so helpful to customers that they seek the marketer out, rather than a conventional “push” approach blasting marketing messages out in an effort to find customers that might be receptive to the marketer’s offering.

Rather than the traditional notion of owning the customer, collaboration marketing strives to give each customer the perception that they own the vendor. By helping to connect customers with other entities, collaboration marketers develop richer profiles of customers and their needs and preferences.  The marketers goal should be to learn as much as possible about their customer and the customers industry. 

Potent new platforms and tools, ranging from the Internet, Cloud, and Web services technology and powerful analytic tools are becoming available to help vendors implement these new marketing programs and deliver on this new brand promise. One writer on collaboration marketing notes, ”If you aren’t developing a “relationship” with a prospect or client that includes Collaboration, you are not staying in today’s game. The game has changed, the rules have changed, and if you aren’t careful the players (you) may be replaced”.

Differentiation in our extremely crowded marketplace is a business essential, not only in terms of a company’s success, but also for its continuing survival. So often we are rather arrogant to believe our business is so “one-of-a-kind” that if they want what we offer, then they have to do business with us!  

In today’s world of about seven billion people with millions of businesses, and most of developed society using Social Media, it is highly unlikely that our business is: “in a class by itself, rare, special, unequaled, unique, unparalleled, unprecedented, or unrivaled.”

Because very few of us can truly say we are unrivaled or unequaled, we need to establish a solid Differentiation, separating us in some way from our competition. Generally, disaster restoration companies, independents and franchises alike use similar equipment to dry buildings, or remove smoke odor and soot, or clean up mold.  The days of being one up on your competition by having a special piece of equipment or process is long gone and so is your ability to say you are “unrivaled” in what you do as part of the mitigation or restoration process.

Bluntly, this means you have to continually re-invent your company, ever conscious of what might differentiate your business from the others and then promote that differentiation!  Even though you will be hard-pressed to be unrivaled or unprecedented, and there may be one or two others in your market that offer a very similar product or service, you can still take an aggressive approach to differentiation.

Ok, where do we start?  I know that everyday most of you start your day very early and work 50-60 hours a week thinking about bidding jobs, getting materials on the job site, writing estimates, pulling permits, trying to get your guys to show up to work on time and trying to get paid for the work you did months ago.

What I also know, is that many of you pay a lot of money for insurance that is expensive and does not cover your butt for everything you have going on. Perhaps this is because you’re leaving the responsibility up to one of your office people that are not really completing the application to include all of your operations or scope of work you are performing; leaving you fighting with the carrier in the event of a claim only after them finding out that you never disclosed everything on the application. Or maybe the application is not being updated from the previous year and you have taken on more work or bought more equipment.

I would love to tell you that it’s all basically the same, but that’s not the case! Generally Liability basically covers you if someone slips or falls over your extension cord or you break Grandma’s antique vase, as well as products and completed operations.  Your policy probably has a Total Pollution Exclusion, coverage that would be very important to a Fire/Water Restoration Contractor; meaning your policy does not cover anything to do with a liquid, solid or gas (simply put, your policy excludes mold, lead and asbestos).

There has been a massive marketing effort by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies to promote their services to every company that has a website.  Most of you know that I teach a Social Media Course for Restorers and many have attended my classes.  During those classes, I’m always asked “should I hire and SEO company?”  My answer has always been a loud "NO."

First, if you follow a very simple process on your own, you can dramatically improve your page ranking WITHOUT hiring it out

Most importantly, many SEO companies (probably most) love to give you all the hype about how they will improve your page ranking, but fail to tell you that if you want to discontinue their services, they’ll trash you all over the web!