Spend a little time on social media and it won’t be long before you start seeing pictures of window and door installations being proudly shown off by those who carried out the work. Plenty of pictures taken on phones and spread throughout the world of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and any other platform that allows you to share images.
This is where one of the biggest hurdles in marketing can be overcome.
A picture tells a thousand product options
If you speak to manufacturers, they will tell you that the biggest problem in putting together a new brochure is images. Unlike installers, who are onsite most of the time, suppliers and manufacturers rarely get chance to get out on the road and see their product installed to then be able to take pictures of them. This is a problem if that supplier is wanting to produce a classy, up to date brochure showing off their best bits.
It’s easier for installers to get hold of images. They are the ones that establish the relationship with the home owner. They are the last ones on site once all the work is done. They are at the coal face so to speak, and the manufacturer is in the part of the chain that the customer rarely sees.
Regardless, from a marketing perspective, it’s these images that are extremely valuable and one of the best forms of marketing.
Partnership
Manufacturers need these images as much as installers do. Yes installers need to show off to other home owners the standard of their work and the range of products possible. But suppliers need the same images to be able to show off to the rest of the industry and any other potential new installer customers of what they can do for them. So it’s important that there is a solid installer/supplier partnership.
In order to encourage installers to pass on images of their work to their suppliers, there has been a number of monthly competitions to find the best ones. Solidor has one. Atlas has one. Truemans has one. REHAU has one. There are lots out there. It’s a great way to promote the products of those suppliers across social media, but it’s also a great way of gathering lots of quality installations that may later be used for other purposes, such as brochures, leaflets, website galleries and so on.
It’s a novel way of gathering the gold dust that is quality installation images, without having to pay someone a handsome fee to go and get it done on your behalf. The installer benefits from a bit of free promotion and recognition of the work, and the supplier benefits as they start to build up a bank of installation images.
I would recommend that all suppliers start to do these sorts of things. It’s highly effective, free, and both the installer and suppliers benefit.
Brochure quality
You need to step it up a gear though when there’s a new brochure in the works, and it means not using pictures taken on mobile phones. A lot of the work on social media is taken on a smart phone, and that is perfect for that medium. But if you want to create a classy, high-end brochure that really wants to get the creative juices flowing from the home owner, it’s time to call in a professional.
Luckily there are companies out there in our industry that can take care of this for you. The most obvious ones being Future PR and Purplex. Companies like this can get onsite to a number of installations, take excellent, professional grade photography, as well as shoot cool new content like drone footage, which really will become more and more popular very soon, trust me!
There are some very high quality brochures out there right now. Some that come to mind are Morley Glass’ latest one, Evolution, Solidor etc. All focus massively on quality imagery to take care of the selling of the product, with very little text clogging up page space. In a world of digital and social media, image is key. So get a professional!
So if you’re an installer and you have a few images of your work saved, send it through to your supplier, they really will appreciate it!
Couldn’t agree more.
As a trade fabricator we’re always on the lookout for nice pictures of installations, preferably without van doors, ladders and reflections of skips in shot!
And a couple of tips: take some photos of the inside view as well, and don’t forget to take some ‘before’ shots to show off what an improvement you’ve made.