Morgul Marketing

    Austin, TX

    Social media for window and door dealers in a metro of newcomers

    Word of mouth in this market has a hole in it. The metro keeps absorbing households who have never hired a contractor here, so when a west room finally becomes intolerable there is no uncle to call and no name on the refrigerator door. The question goes into a neighborhood group instead, and somebody who has been on that street for decades answers it. Social media is the only channel that puts a window and door company inside that exchange. What follows is what to film on lots where a protected tree and a falling grade decide how the day runs, and how to answer the questions people carry in from colder places.

    The person handing out contractor names has lived here for decades

    Newcomers ask, long-time residents answer, and your content has to satisfy the second group to reach the first.

    The metro keeps taking in households with no plumber, no roofer and no window dealer. When something fails, the question goes into a neighborhood group rather than into a search box.

    The reply usually comes from somebody who has been in Hyde Park or Tarrytown or an older Round Rock subdivision for years and treats a bad recommendation as a personal risk. That person is the audience your content actually has to satisfy.

    So film for them. How the crew handled the yard, whether the schedule held, what the drive looked like once the trucks had gone, whether anyone had to be chased for a callback. Long-time residents judge trades on the parts that never appear in a finished photograph.

    Name the era of the house, not only the town. A bungalow from before the interstate went through and a Circle C house from a recent building wave are different jobs, and a caption that knows the difference reads as local before anyone watches a second of video.

    The newcomer sees almost none of this. What reaches her is a name with somebody's endorsement attached, which is the only form of proof she is currently able to judge.

    On this lot the live oak outranks the window

    Tree protection is a real review step in this city, and the homeowner cares more about the oak than about your glass.

    Austin protects trees in a way that surprises contractors who have worked elsewhere in the state. A protected tree gets a fenced root zone before work starts, and that fence tends to sit exactly where a crew would otherwise stage material, park a truck and set a ladder.

    The homeowner is not neutral either. In the older neighborhoods the tree is part of why the house was bought, and a company that damages one has lost the street rather than a customer.

    Which makes the protection worth filming in its own right. The fence line going up, plywood over roots where a load has to cross, material carried in from the curb instead of driven across the drip line, the ground raked back before the crew leaves.

    Dust belongs in the same footage. On a lot where limestone or caliche has been broken for anything, new glass is coated by mid morning, so the finished shot happens before the site goes back to work or somebody wipes the glass down on camera and says so.

    None of it is a detour from selling. A viewer who watches your crew protect a live oak has already decided what that crew will do with her floors.

    West of the city the driveway is the only level ground

    Grade, a narrow drive and a large panel of glass turn a hillside job into the most watchable day you have.

    The ground falls away behind the house out toward the Hill Country. The elevation with the best glass often sits above a drop, the drive is steep and narrow, and the only flat ground on the property points at the wrong wall.

    Big fixed units and multi-panel doors are the job out there, and they arrive on equipment. A lift set up on a driveway in Lakeway or Bee Cave, glass swung to a second floor opening over a slope, is the rarest footage in this trade and the easiest thing you will ever ask somebody to watch.

    Plan that day around the lift rather than around the camera. The machine is on site for one part of one day, the setup is where the risk lives, and nobody films from under a load.

    The audience is not only the hillside buyer. Somebody in Circle C with an ordinary opening watches that clip and concludes you can handle her house, which is the argument for showing work harder than hers.

    Say the access facts plainly while you are there. A house on a steep drive with a fenced root zone is a longer day than a bungalow in Hyde Park, and buyers who hear that before the estimate stop reading a hillside quote as a markup.

    Buyers who moved from a cold state arrive with the wrong question about glass

    Newcomers ask about keeping heat in. The problem in this metro is heat and light coming through, and the comment section stays confused until somebody says so.

    A household that moved down from the Midwest or the Northeast learned to shop windows on insulation. The vocabulary comes with them and turns up in messages, in comments and at the kitchen table in the middle of your appointment.

    In this climate the money is in what the glass does with sun. A west wall that is still hot at nine at night, glare across a television, floors going pale next to a patio door. Glare and stored heat are what the buyer lives with, and what a coating gets chosen for.

    The clip that fixes it is short and physical. Same room, same hour, an old unit and a new one on the same wall, a hand held against the inside of each pane late in the afternoon. Nobody argues with a hand on glass.

    Leave the arithmetic for the estimate. Savings depend on the house, the shade, the direction the opening faces and which utility serves the address, so describe the mechanism and let the number happen where somebody has actually seen the building.

    Everything about a social plan that would read the same in Travis County or anywhere else, from who belongs on camera to what deserves money behind it, is written up once at /industries/window-door-replacement/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Our customers care more about their trees than about their windows. Should the trees be in the content?
    Yes, and it is one of the few genuinely local advantages you have. Film the root zone fence, the plywood path, the material carried in from the street. Nothing in a national window company's library shows any of that, because almost nowhere else makes a contractor plan around a tree. A homeowner in this city reads tree care as a proxy for how careful your crew is with everything else, which is exactly the judgment you want her making.
    New arrivals keep asking what R-value we install. How do we answer that without a lecture?
    Answer the question they meant. Say that the number they learned to ask about describes heat moving through the assembly, that it still matters, and that the thing keeping their west room hot at nine at night is sun coming through the glass rather than cold getting in. Then show it instead of explaining it: two panes on the same wall in the same hour and a hand held against each one. The correction lands in about ten seconds and it never sounds like a correction.
    Jobs west of town take us a day longer than the same job in town. Do we say that publicly?
    Say it plainly and often. A steep drive, a narrow gate, a lift and a fenced root zone are the reasons a Lakeway or Dripping Springs day runs long, and a buyer who learns that from a video is not the buyer who argues about it after the deposit. It also filters your calendar. People who want a flat suburban price for a hillside install self select out before they ever reach the phone.
    Limestone dust is on everything by mid morning. How do we get a clean finished shot?
    Shoot the finished opening first thing the following morning, or wipe the glass down and say on camera that you did. What you should not do is publish a hazy pane and hope nobody notices, because the comment asking whether that is a scratch will arrive within the hour. Where rock got broken on the lot, plan on the finished shot being tomorrow's first job rather than today's last one.
    Our crews start at first light in the summer. Is anything filmable that early?
    Early is the best light you will get on a lot with no shade, and it is the only stretch of a July day when anyone has patience for a camera. Shoot the tear out and the set at the start of the shift, keep it short, and let the afternoon belong to the work. A crew that has been on a hillside since sunrise will not perform for anybody at two in the afternoon and should not be asked to.

    What is different here

    Product approval is the part of this market that genuinely changes between counties. Miami-Dade and Broward sit inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone and generally work through Miami-Dade Notices of Acceptance, while Palm Beach County work is usually documented under statewide Florida Product Approval against a local design wind speed. The two are not interchangeable on a permit, so approval language is a compliance statement rather than a marketing one, and it is worth having a dealer check their own documentation before it goes on a page.

    Window & Door Replacement Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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