Alex Hewitt, Marketing Director at Ultraframe, explains the latest online tools that are available to help its retail customers generate and convert quality sales leads.

Leads are the lifeblood of any installation company and generating them online is a highly competitive; and often complex business. While some of the large regionals and nationals have multi-million pound marketing budgets at their disposal, how can the smaller installers compete and get their share of the consumers searching online in their area?

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The answer lies not only in the way that they generate their online leads, but also in the quality of their website. Most installation companies will have neither the time, money nor expertise to create a compelling site that can truly deliver results for them – unless of course, they are an Ultraframe customer.

Working in close partnership with leading digital agency, ICAAL, we can offer our customers fully bespoke websites. A far cry from the templated sites that suppliers often shout about, these sites offer unique, keyword-rich content and are SEO optimised. ICAAL is highly experienced with Ultraframe, its products and the wider glazing industry, and so minimal input is required from the installer to enable the ICAAL team to create bespoke content for them. Access to the entire Ultraframe image database also means that image duplication is avoided, while optional features such as quote engines can be added if required.

To create a site of this size and functionality would typically cost around £8k but Ultraframe has subsidised the websites so that the cost to our customers is around half of that. This kind of cost is what many installers would be happy to pay to a local agency for a simple brochure site, but by taking the help available from us, we can ensure that they get a site that performs highly as well as looking beautiful and that is created with minimum hassle – leaving them to concentrate on running their businesses.

Stephen Macintosh, Managing Director at Dunfermline-based SRJ Windows, is one of these customers. Speaking about his new website, Stephen said: “Our existing website was only built in 2017 but after attending the Ultraframe lead generation course in 2018, we were so impressed by what we saw that we decided to go ahead an

d work with Ultraframe and ICAAL on a brand new site to help us generate and convert more online leads. Aside from being very professional to deal with, ICAAL were extremely knowledgeable about the products that we sell and so the process was made much easier. Since the new site went live, our SEO has improved and leads are up 10%.”

 As well as helping our customers to create high-performing sites, we also offer a range of tools that can be added to both the bespoke sites, and to our customer’s existing sites. One of the latest is 12 virtual reality tours of different styles of conservatories and extensions which can be used, free of charge, by our customers to enhance the ‘stickiness’ of their website. The virtual reality tours allow a web visitor to look around every aspect of a conservatory or extension, from the walls to the roof, and really get the feel for how this could look on their own home. The longer someone stays on a site, the more likely they are to ultimately convert, so anything like this that we can offer to our customers is a huge bonus for them - and us.

Just as we continually innovate and enhance our product range, the same applies to our marketing support, and we are already working on the next online tools to assist our customers.