Morgul Marketing

    Chicago, IL

    Social media for window and door dealers on Chicago bungalows, flats and courtyard buildings

    Chicago window and door buyers sort themselves by building, and the building decides everything after that. A bungalow owner is looking at the same front elevation as everybody else on the block. A two-flat owner is a landlord with a lease date to work around. A unit owner in a courtyard building cannot order anything without a board behind them. Content that treats those three as one homeowner reads as though it was written somewhere else, because it was. What a dealer here can publish that a national page cannot is the housing stock, the calendar other people's leases and meetings set, and the access problems that decide what the back of a building costs.

    Block after block of bungalows share one front elevation

    The bungalow belt was built to a short list of plans, so a video of one front window is a video of a great many houses at once.

    A Chicago bungalow puts a wide front window between smaller flanking sash, often with a leaded art glass panel in the middle, at a height and width that repeats down the whole block and the next one. A homeowner in Bridgeport watching a job filmed on the North Side is not looking at something similar to their house. They are looking at their house.

    So the caption that works names the configuration rather than the address. The front triple with art glass, the bedroom sash running on cords and weights, the small openings at grade above the basement. Readers identify themselves by the window, and the ones who do arrive at the phone already knowing what they own.

    Art glass is the subject with the most demand and the least honest content behind it. Owners want the original leaded panel kept and built into a new unit, and most of what they find tells them to price a replacement instead. Showing a panel coming out, showing how it gets set into a new sash, and being clear about when a panel is past saving answers a question the manufacturer libraries never touch.

    The repetition works in your favor twice. A bungalow front filmed once keeps answering the same question for years, because that elevation is not going to change, and the owners who recognize it keep arriving.

    The upstairs unit is only empty between leases

    A two-flat owner is a landlord before anything else, and a landlord's window job has to fit a gap that is already on a calendar.

    Leases across much of the city turn over on the same handful of dates, and the vacancy between one tenant and the next is short. That gap is the only stretch when a whole unit can be worked without arranging around somebody's furniture, somebody's shift and somebody's kids.

    It changes what the owner needs from you. Not comfort and not curb appeal. Days from measure to install, whether openings can be ordered while the current tenant is still in place, and what happens to the schedule if material is late.

    So the post that reaches a two-flat or three-flat owner is a sequence with dates on it. A unit turned over between tenants, the ordering step named, the install landing before the new lease starts. An owner of one building and an owner of six read that the same way.

    Aim it at the months before a turnover season rather than the week of one. An owner deciding in February about a May vacancy has time to order. The owner calling the day the keys come back does not, and that call is usually a repair.

    The front elevation of a courtyard building is not the owner's to change

    In a courtyard building, or a three-flat that went condo, the street face is a common element and the person watching your video cannot buy on their own.

    A unit owner can want new windows badly and hold no authority to order them. What may be replaced, what the elevation has to match afterward and how any of it gets paid for sit with the declaration and with a vote of the other owners.

    That reader is not a weak inquiry. They are the front end of a much larger one, and what they need is something they can forward into a meeting rather than something aimed at them personally.

    The video that eventually earns a whole building is a walkthrough. A courtyard building where the street elevation was done to one specification and the rear openings were phased across two seasons, filmed from the courtyard and from the alley so a board member can see both faces of the same job.

    Say the machinery out loud. Minutes, a special assessment, a management company, a scope later owners can repeat without hiring a designer. A company that talks that way in public gets forwarded into threads it was never part of.

    The alley decides how you reach the back of the building

    On a two-flat or a three-flat most of the openings face the rear, and the only approach to them is an alley shared with everybody else on the block.

    Chicago rear elevations sit over an alley carrying garbage carts, garage doors and everyone's parking. Whether a truck or a lift can hold that space for a day decides whether a third floor rear opening gets reached from outside or worked entirely from inside the unit, and it decides how long the job takes.

    Owners already know this and almost nobody addresses it. A homeowner in Logan Square or Ravenswood who has watched a roofer give up on their alley wants an answer about the back of the building before they want an answer about glass.

    The rear is also the most unmistakably local thing you can put on camera. Wood porches, back stairs, a gangway barely wide enough to walk, an alley behind all of it. A two-flat owner recognizes that view instantly, and the national brands have never published it once.

    General guidance on running a window and door feed lives at /industries/window-door-replacement/social-media, and it holds here as far as it goes. What it cannot tell you is which face of the building your buyers are actually worried about, and in this city it is usually the one nobody photographs.

    Questions we actually get

    Our buyers are bungalow owners in their sixties. Are they even watching this?
    Often not directly, and that is fine. The adult child asked to help pick a contractor is watching, and so is the neighbor who forwards a video into a block group. Social here works through the person doing the researching rather than the person signing. If nobody in that chain has seen your work on a house shaped like theirs, you are relying entirely on being the first name somebody remembers.
    Should a Naperville job and a Pilsen job look like the same feed?
    They should look like the same company and different houses. The building sorts your readers faster than the town name does, because a bungalow owner scrolling past a suburban vinyl replacement learns nothing about their own front triple. Show both housing stocks, be specific about which is which, and let each reader find the one that looks like the wall they live behind.
    Owners keep asking whether the art glass can be kept. Is that a post or a sales conversation?
    Post it. It is the single most asked question about a Chicago bungalow front and the answers online are thin. Show a panel out of its sash, show it going into a new one, and say what condition makes that impossible. The people who watch it are the ones with an intact front elevation they are afraid of losing, which is exactly the job worth having.
    A board member messaged us after a video. What do we send them?
    Something built to be forwarded. A phased scope for a courtyard building, what one specification across a street elevation involves, how a job gets split across two seasons, and what the association will have to decide before anyone measures. A unit owner reads a sales page. A board reads a document, and the company that hands them one usually gets asked to present.
    Is interior storm work worth posting when the ticket is smaller?
    Yes, because it is what the owners of original wood sash are typing. A page that explains storms properly gets found by people who are years away from a full replacement and months away from a small job, and both of those turn into work on a house you now know. It also gets forwarded within the blocks where original glass still matters, which is not a room you can buy your way into.

    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.

    Talk to us about social media for impact window and door dealers in Chicago

    Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.

    No newsletter, no drip sequence. One reply from a person.