Listen to this

John Warren, director at Lasco PR & Marketing, says that effective marketing relies on two things – understanding your audience and your market. 

It’s simple. If you have something that’s worth listening to, people will listen. If you don’t, they won’t.

That’s ultimately what marketing is: getting people to sit up and to listen.

What you tell them needs to sit within a strategic framework, aligned to business objectives. For most window and door companies, that’s sales, but if you want people to buy more, you have to give them a reason to listen to you and then communicate clearly how your offer can benefit them.

While that’s marketing in its simplest form, to be effective you need to understand two things (which marketers regularly overlook): your audience and your market.

If you don’t understand your market, you can’t possibly hope to develop a marketing strategy that allows you to do what you’re there to do effectively, which is to get people to buy more.

If you know who you’re trying to reach, and what they’re looking for, you can.

How you do this will depend on who you’re trying to reach (which is also often overlooked), but the principles remain the same.

If you’re selling to other businesses you need to demonstrate how they can make more money, more effectively, and at higher margin.

If you’re reaching out to consumers, it’s about aspiration: stuff that’s cool, desirable, or enriches their life in another way, for example home improvements.

Our continuing colour campaign for Deceuninck illustrates this succinctly.

Deceuninck wants to sell more foiled product (that’s not unreasonable for a systems company). To do so, it needs homeowners to buy more. In between are fabricators and installers – Deceuninck’s b2b audience.

For homeowners it’s about aspiration; new windows and doors that make their home look better, make it more secure and warmer.

Like Deceuninck, Deceuninck’s b2b customers – fabricators and installers – want to make more money. We need to show them how and why what Deceuninck is saying will deliver for them.

To do that we need a strategy. We need evidence. We need to start at the end of the supply chain and understand what the end-user wants, so that we can show the installer that homeowners want and are prepared to pay more for colour.

We also need to remind them that it doesn’t take any more time to fit a foiled window than a standard window, and that their margin will be higher without any increase in overhead – selling colour will allow them to make more money.

To do that Deceuninck needs credibility. What does a systems company know about what homeowners want? Well, if it asks them directly, it does!

We commissioned research through leading market research company YouGov, which asked a cross section of UK homeowners what their priorities were when choosing new windows and doors. They told us that colour and aesthetics were critical in driving purchasing decisions (if you want to find out more, a white paper is available here: https://www.deceuninck.co.uk/en-gb/colourwhitepaper).

That meant Deceuninck could go back to installers and to fabricators to highlight the opportunities to sell more and make more money.

The campaign runs across multiple channels: print, digital, social and in-person events. The medium doesn’t matter, it’s about the message: what is worth saying, what will make prospects listen, and what will make our clients make more money.*

*Footnote: The more colour the industry sells now, the more it guarantees its future market as colour preferences change. It may seem hard to imagine it now but sooner or later, anthracite grey is destined to go the same way as avocado green bathrooms!