If our statistics are any indication, this should be a great summer especially for sealcoaters and asphalt pavers. These articles are written in advance of the time that you read them so we only have statistics for the first three days of June. As of June 3 (only three days but all we can judge at the time of this article) over 14% of the people who searched for seal coating ended up on one of our websites. For asphalt pavers, the figure was about 5%. Now those may not seem like large numbers, though we did not count all of the other search terms used, such as "asphalt" or "seal coating driveways," "or seal coating parking lots. It was strictly for the word sealcoat and the term asphalt paving. It would take the entire article to list all the different terms and the number of people who came to one of our websites after searching for those terms over a three-day period at the first of June. Our own search engine tracking has shown that we are doing better, then the last two years at this point in time; but the above for taken from a tool which searches the search results for all major search engines, and where the person searching went after typing the inquiry. So it looks like there's a lot of people interested in seal coating and asphalt paving, and about the normal number of people looking for striping, repairs, and other types of services.
We've been watching since the last couple of years have been pretty slow, but property owners and managers can't put off maintenance forever. And while they may have put it off for the last couple of years, now it is reaching the time when they are forced to do something that they may of been putting off as well as new projects.
One thing we've noticed over the years is when the season gets busy, smaller companies tend to neglect their marketing (companies not large enough to have a salesman or outside estimator handling marketing and advertising). We know ourselves that this time of year, there's a lot of 10 and 12 hour days, if you want to survive next winter. But even though the time seems to be unavailable, you need to watch what type of customers are having work done and you may need to adjust your marketing and advertising strategies accordingly. Of course, having the NPCA seal and guarantee of quality contractors with insurance and a written guarantee is a great way to boost your profit margin over the competition who may just be "cutting corners" but in all your advertising and marketing, you still need to be making adjustments and finding what's working best especially during this busy time of the year when you have the least time to work on it. Yet for many of you, if you don't get the customer now, the opportunity will be missed. We are offering discounts for members in underrepresented areas and with NPCA membership not only do you get all the increased marketing benefits to use in your marketing efforts, you get the benefit of education from educational articles, to asking questions about tricky situations from other members in our private members only forum.
We hope all of you are having a great summer, it looks like business will be picking up this year; stop by our site and say hi whenever you get the time.
