This webinar can help if:

• You haven’t yet discovered what’s different and better about your restoration company.
• You know that your salespeople could be communicating more effectively to targets in a position to hire, refer or work with your company.
• You’re looking to develop marketing programs that set your company apart from your competition.

Click here to register for this free webinar on Tuesday, April 19 at 11 a.m. Central Time.

Every restorer has a couple of these relationships now. Wouldn’t you like to understand how to create them at will? This Webinar can get you started!

Click here to register for this free Webinar Thursday, April 7, at 9 a.m. Central Time.

Restoration salespeople should be consistently conducting activities that generate new business.  Most aren’t, but it’s really not their fault! Why?

• Most owners do not come from a sales background, let alone a sales management background, so they don’t know how to select, train, coach and develop salespeople. If you don’t know what to say or do, how can you expect your salespeople to?
• Restoration salespeople often work hard and stay very busy doing what the boss told them to do, but are less and less effective in today’s very challenging market. They’ll even work harder and harder getting poorer and poorer results.
• Salespeople are often missing a Sales Model, a Sales Process and a Sales Program. This means that they are easily blown off, misled and out of control—leaving them frustrated and not sure what to do next.

If these issues sound familiar, join us Thursday, March 24, at 9 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!

And don’t miss these upcoming Webinars:

Lowering the Drawbridge
Thursday April 7 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!

The Strategy and Tactics of Marketing
Tuesday April 19 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!

People who work in SEO for a living parse every word of Google’s blogs, every public statement of its search engineers and every perceived change in ranking, as they attempt to find every possible SEO edge, no matter how small.

But the fact is that most of these changes don’t affect most Web sites. And “fine-tuned” SEO, no matter how skilled the practitioner, won’t help any site that doesn’t have a solid foundation of quality content.

This latest algorithm change highlights the importance Google places on content. It actually is two changes, one to filter sites that take content from other sites, the “scrapers”, and the other to filter sites that dump loads of content that is keyword rich but generally useless to the Google user, the “content farms.”

As much interest as this latest change has gotten, it still is but one of hundreds of changes Google makes every year. The intent always is to improve Google’s utility to users, which translates to fighting the “black hat SEO” techniques that manipulate the system to improve the quality of the search results.

The primary way Google does this is by evaluating the content of a Web site. There are many ways Google does this, and identifying and downgrading content farms and scraper sites is one. Regardless content is what gets Google’s attention, and this is one of the reasons we stress the importance of having a blog. There’s no easier way to add a steady stream of quality content to a Web site.

There’s more to doing well on Google, of course, but of all the variables, quality content is the only one that is absolutely required.

How’s does your site stack up? If you’re interested in knowing how your site is performing and how it can do better, give us a call for a Web Site Audit. We’ll evaluate your SEO status, your content and more to help make sure your site fully supports your marketing objectives.

But what role playing can’t do is let you listen to yourself, to hear for yourself what you sound like when you make a sales call. But that’s easy enough to do.

Just take your camcorder (most digital cameras and smart phones have one) and record a bit of your pitch.

Then listen and watch yourself. Are you engaging with the “prospect”? Are you looking right into their “eyes”? Do you sound friendly and interested or pushy and hard sell?

It’s just like the old technique of practicing in front of a mirror, except with the camcorder you can go back and see and hear what the prospect does.

Customers flock to Facebook and Twitter to communicate both positive and negative consumer experiences. Social review sites like Yelp are exclusively devoted to letting customers talk to each other about businesses and service providers.

This is how the world communicates now, for better or for worse. You never know who may be talking about your business. But you need to know when they are. Don’t let everything you’ve worked so hard for be tarnished because you didn’t have the knowledge and tools to protect your reputation.

Remember LeVar Burton? He’s an actor that was in several high-profile projects, including Roots and Reading Rainbow. He’s most well known for playing the role of Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Burton has a lot of followers on Twitter. A lot of followers that one day saw this:

When Burton tweeted this, he had more than 1,400,000 followers. This message was then retweeted (forwarded, or rebroadcast) by more than 20 other Twitter users to their followers, whether or not they followed Burton themselves. Those retweets included the link in Burton’s original message, which takes you here:

Did 1,400,000 people actually see this? Of course not, but you can bet a lot of them did. Those looking for a rug dealers or carpet cleaner in that market surely saw it because it’s easily found on the first page of Google search results.

And how did the proprietor of the rug cleaner company respond? Either he failed to reach out to Burton to try to solve the problem or he flat out failed to notice. More than a year later, Burton’s negative review is still there and the company’s Yelp page still links to it.

What can you do to avoid this happening to your company? First, set up a Google Alert for your company’s name so you can monitor when people mention your business online. Turn the positives into testimonials to attract new business and address any negative issues swiftly to demonstrate that your company doesn’t tolerate poor customer service.

When you do reach out to dissatisfied customers, don’t be defensive and don’t be aggressive. Don’t focus on the merits of the issue. Focus on the problem and make it clear you want to solve it. Listen and ask questions until you find the pain, and then fix it.

There are plenty of Internet users who just enjoy complaining, but you’ll find that most people with a legitimate customer service issue just want their problem solved. They will be happy to remove or correct a negative review as long as you just take care of them.

Most people add their URL in the box, as instructed, but use the default name for the link. “Company Website” doesn’t really do it, though, when it’s just as easy to put in your company’s name. Better yet, you can use SEO keywords, like “Water Restoration Experts.”

“Water Damage Experts” too limited for your? Well, that’s where the first of the three forgotten lines come in. You can have up to three links in the Websites section, and there’s no rule that they can’t go to the same place. So you can add “Sewage Cleanup Experts” or “Mold Remediation.”

There’s a 22-character limit, but otherwise, you’re free to use anything.

For both SEO and people clicking through, it’s better to have each link go to a different page: “water” to your water restoration page, “mold” to your mold remediation page, etc.

The third forgotten link is the link to your public profile. The link that LinkedIn assigns is hard to remember, for you and for people you may want to give it to. Fortunately, LinkedIn lets you customize that, too. You have up to 30 characters and, so long as it’s not already in use, you can use your company name or any other memorable, relevant word.

As we become more and more engaged in an app driven, instant gratification model of life, it’s easy to forget that the actual experience of filing and settling a claim is not always an easy one. More often than not, it requires the help of a real-life professional to navigate successfully.”

Can technology assist in the process of filing and managing a claim? Of course it can. But regardless of how beneficial technology can be, people still desire the comfort, empathy and responsiveness of dealing with other people like themselves in a time of crisis.

Consumers don’t need to deal with an agent when they buy or renew policies. The financial numbers for online insurers like Geico and Progressive make that abundantly clear. But the tradeoff is that they don’t have an advocate on their side when they actually need claims service.

Helping agents communicate this idea  to their policyholders – how they provide the people part of the equation when it’s needed most – should be a key component of any restorer’s agency marketing program.

My question to you is how is your restoration company helping the agencies in your market make their policyholders recognize the importance of having a real live agent on their side?

Weathering the Storm gives you the tools you need to build a profitable business in the commercial, industrial and institutional markets.  This intensive, 2 1/2 day seminar gives you everything you need to begin implementing your program immediately, including marketing operations manual, support documentation, sales collateral and more.

Click here  or call 773-777-9956 to learn more and register for Weathering the Storm.

According to the Aon Benfield Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report, there were 314 separate natural catastrophes worldwide, from events such as earthquakes, floods and severe weather. They caused economic losses of nearly $252 billion in 2010, with insured losses of nearly $38 billion.

In 2009, 222 events combined to produce $58 billion in economic losses and $20 billion in insured losses.

The top 10 insured loss events of 2010 accounted for $23 billion in insured losses, about 61% of the total. They were five severe weather events, one winter storm event, two earthquakes and two floods. The remaining $15 billion insured losses were a combination of winter storms, severe weather, flooding, tropical cyclone activity, earthquakes and wildfires.

The highest insured loss of 2010 was the Chile earthquake in February, estimated at $8.5 billion in insured losses. The flooding in Pakistan caused the greatest single event economic loss, reported at more than $30 billion.