Marketing Strategy and Consulting for Distributors and Contractors

Start with what is already working

The first step is an honest audit of what exists: the website, search presence, reviews, ads, email and the sales process, and — the part usually skipped — which of them is actually producing work.

That last question often has no answer yet, because lead source is not recorded anywhere it survives. Finding that out is itself useful. A plan built on guesses about what works will move budget in the wrong direction.

What a written plan contains

The plan is a document you can hand to a new hire or a vendor, not a slide deck that made sense in the room.

• The customer segments that matter, what each needs to hear, and where they look for it
• Channels in priority order, and the ones we recommend not spending on
• A 12-month calendar built around your seasons, your vendors' programs and your sales targets
• A budget by channel, including what co-op funds can cover
• The measures that count — inquiries, booked jobs, orders and cost per result rather than impressions

Ongoing consulting

A plan does not run itself. With ongoing consulting you get a senior point of contact who meets with you monthly, or weekly in busy seasons, coordinates the work across our team and your other vendors, and moves budget toward what is working.

That includes the work that sits between departments: campaign briefs, branch and regional plans for distributors, marketing plans requested by manufacturers, and helping the sales team with materials and follow-up.

Plans for multi-branch distributors

A distributor's marketing happens at two levels at once — the company brand and each branch's local market. A plan that only covers head office leaves branch managers improvising; one that only covers branches produces twelve different-looking companies.

We build one plan for the company and break it down by branch or region, so each manager knows what is coming, when, and what they need to provide.

Why A&B

We run the channels we recommend, so the plan is written by people who know what each one costs to do properly. And because we are accountable for execution too, a plan that looks good and does not work is our problem, not a document we handed over and left.

We will also tell you when we are not the right fit for a piece of it, and when the constraint is not marketing at all — slow follow-up, pricing or capacity — because more spend will not fix those.