How a Used Car Dealer Saved My Window Covering Business

In 2009 my blind business was suffering the ravages of the recession just like every other window covering retailer.

Direct mail and the yellow pages stopped working.

My brother who owns a car business shared with me what he was doing to generate new customers and how amazing his growth was.

He went from 6 employees to over 100 in a few years. I was very anxious to learn his secret.

More on that in just a moment.

The problem was I knew consumers were still buying blinds, but they were unable to find me. I just had to get their attention. I needed to be where they were. I needed a way for them to find me, instead of me trying to find them.

At the same time as the great recession, there was a shift in consumers shopping habits. Shoppers were going online is massive numbers, to shop for everything from ceiling fans to window coverings.

So I made the decision to generate all my leads online.

This one decision saved my business.

The solution was simple: Become an expert at Search Engine Optimization and generate all my leads online. Since I knew consumers were becoming much better educated on custom window coverings, I might as well become the source of their educational materials.

I started producing educational videos, articles, and reports about window coverings. This worked. Things were starting to turn around. I was starting to make money again.

It now came time to test the secret weapon, Google Ads. It turned out to be the marketing tool of the century.

I now knew where and how every marketing dollar was being spent. I finally saw how many customers saw and clicked on my ads. My profits were growing exponentially. It was a marketers dream come true.

I soon discovered that the only place that mattered to get the customer’s attention was at the top of Page One of Google.

I had to figure out how to make this work. The math is really quite simple. If I set a budget of $600 a month for clicks and that generate 100 clicks to my site from highly targeted customers, and that generate between 4-6 bids per week, then I only needed to close one sale a month just to break even.

Now that I knew the solution, it was time to implement. Have you ever tried to understand the Google Ads interface? It’s ridiculously complex and you need hundreds of hours of training to understand it.

Fortunately, my brother helped me. After I became convinced this was the ultimate answer, I started my certification process to become a Google Partner.

My goal was simple, I’ll become the Google Ads expert, so I can make my business hugely successful. At the time I was thinking I would franchise my Shutter Nation business. Little did I know online marketing would turn into a full-time job. I retired from my window covering business and devote 100% of my time to helping window covering dealers generate leads online.

Making this simple and affordable for window covering retailers was my main goals. I had to make it easy to understand. I developed a simple to understand report. Each week a report is sent to every dealer with predetermined Key Performance Indicators which are laid out in a simple to understand way. The report includes a dozen metrics like the number of people who saw your ads, the number of people who clicked on your ads, and how much you spent per click. This data is what I use to constantly improve your performance.

If this sounds like a solution you’d like to explore, please contact me at Exseed Marketing