Tales From The Show Floor: Takeaways From IRE

Myself and some AdPrompt team members headed to Vegas in January for the International Roofing Expo and had one goal – to talk with companies about our powerful and new localized advertising and marketing solutions that can help them reach more customers and learn firsthand what they need (and what’s missing) to be more successful.

Our mission at AdPrompt is to help small businesses connect locally with their customer base. It’s our passion to make this connection available to everyone. Advertising and marketing shouldn’t be beyond the reach of small business owners and, ideally, fueling these hard working companies with new lead channels turns them into bigger companies.

Blue-collar businesses are the backbone of our communities. They build and repair our homes, and keep things livable. They are also a subset of businesses that really need help staying visible in their local marketplace. They build amazing things, but often find themselves too busy to conduct new business efforts or too slow investing money and strategies to market to new customers.

I have a background in contracting and know this industry really well. I know their pain points and their challenges when it comes to lead generation. We spent two days on the show floor talking with manufacturers, suppliers, software companies, and contractors… and we got a GREAT reception.

Here four key takeaways from our conversations:

Key Takeaways

1. More leads please:

Everyone is looking for more leads. Standard recommendations of finding new business are mostly saturated with suggestions for social media and SEO. It’s expensive, it’s not optimized, and it takes a lot of effort and time to maintain - which they don’t have.

2. Cost-prohibitive:

A lot of business owners we connected with commented about how much they paid to hire someone and then how much more they had to put towards ad spend and not end up with the results they had hoped. Many are looking for new ways to go about this.

3. Unclear goals and ROI:

A common theme from the people we talked with was inefficiency. They know it’s important to market and advertise their business but they struggle to see the return on investment (ROI) and the impact those precious dollars are having on their bottom lines.

4. AI is the new shiny toy:

“AI” solutions were all over the show floor and the question of the day was – “what makes you different”? Our answers covered a lot of their concerns. AdPrompt has the ability to make ROI very visible by pushing leads into their CRM systems.

AdPrompt can schedule weeks of marketing in one sitting; can do video as well as photo advertising; has an embedded technology layer that learns based on performance and improves over time; and sits on a technology layer that adds security and integrity to the reporting they want and need. We can expand their digital footprint along with other powerful end points that aren’t saturated because we’re custom-built and purposefully-designed to reach a hyper-local audience, which is exactly what they need.

We were welcomed with open arms and received overwhelming positive feedback and are thrilled to be building great relationships, not only at the individual level, but also at the corporate level of some of these industry-leading brands. We know that AdPrompt will be a huge benefit to hard working contractors all over.