Pro Spotlight: Carol Morgan

We are honored to have interviewed Carol Morgan, Founder and President of Denim Marketing. In this Pro Spotlight, Carol Morgan lays out a clear route to establishing a connection to your clients online, talks real about what it takes for a company to succeed in today’s digital world, and gives us a useful recipe for SEO content. 

How did you and Denim Marketing get started? 

So, it’s actually kind of funny and a little bit of a long story but I'll just hit the highlights and try to make it short and fun. My first, about 8 or 8 ? years out of college, I worked for a couple of different attractions in attraction marketing, and did public relations for both the Zoo in Atlanta and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. At some point, I just decided that I would like to work fewer hours, and work somewhere that I didn’t have to work every single weekend. 

So, I started looking for a job and I landed at a marketing agency that had a specialty in real estate and developers. I worked there for about a year and then I had this wonderful baby who is old enough to legally drink now, how crazy is that? After my baby, I went out on my own and started my company. That was way back in 1999, and I thought that probably because of my background, I would end up with a lot of nonprofit clients. I figured out very quickly that I actually had a niche with builders and developers that nobody else was meeting.

Soon after launching, we became one of the go-to companies for builders and developers in the Atlanta area. And then, through my associations and affiliations with NHB, I’ve been able to grow that regionally and eventually nationally. We work with builders from coast to coast now. 

How did you come up with the name Denim Marketing? 

Denim Marketing, we just named it because it fit our brand. Just like Denim, our brand promise is that we are trustworthy, reliable, and really just fun and comfortable! It just hit me when I was driving down the road one day, we needed to rebrand. We hadn’t come up with anything and I thought ‘Oh, Denim, that would be fun!’ So we searched it online and it was available everywhere, which we thought was just a great sign, because when you’re rebranding a company, it’s all about having something that is specific to you.

It was only a few years ago that we rebranded, and you could find everything clean on all the social media sites. We became just @denimmarketing everywhere and just went with it from there. Denim Marketing felt like it reflected us perfectly. We loved how it showed that we liked to have fun and get creative with our marketing. Now people will find us by our branding and work with us for that reason. Sometimes it just fits. 

It’s funny every now and then, people really think we literally market blue jeans. I will get contacts through our website for companies abroad, who make denim, wanting us to market their denim. So, that part of it’s been really funny, but it’s good to have a good laugh every now and then so, that’s just how I’ve looked at that.

What are the trends you have seen throughout your years in marketing? 

The biggest trends are just everything online, and anything that has movement. Videos are becoming more and more popular and that’s not going to go away. So if you haven’t jumped on the video bandwagon yet, come up with a strategy and start producing video. We see videos, Podcasts, like Revivify, are really ramping up to becoming popular, as well as vlogs which are video blogs. 

Anything digital is trending, so Matterport Tours, where people can walk through your house, or virtual reality, where they can walk through your house virtually are huge. That’s really where the market is going. It’s all going online and allowing the buyer to see your product, shop your product, and make a decision to keep your product in their mix when they decide to go and look at it in person and on-site. 

That’s the biggest thing we see, the fact that everything is going online and that it’s so much more sophisticated than it used to be. With marketing, you can really target people effectively through Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and all the different ways you can re-target using the Facebook Pixel. And that’s not even getting into what you can do with Google, and Google pay-per-click, and the retargeting through Google. 

We’ve also seen a lot of marketing utilizing Geo-Sensing, It’s all very stealthy, and even through your email marketing you can use it to re-target people. So, I think that’s just the way it’s gonna go, we’re just gonna become much more diligent on following-up with people that have expressed some interest in our products because we’re now gonna know through all these different tools, that they’ve been to our website and that they’re interested.

How would someone go about creating a strong online presence in the building industry? Where is a good place to start? 

If they’re just getting started, then they want to make sure first that they have a really well-built website. A website makes it possible for somebody to do quality Search Engine Optimization, and have a place to anchor your marketing back to from all the other sources online. Whether it’s you or someone you hire, there are a lot of ways to create a user-friendly website today. However, it’s important to be careful in this step that you are not compromising quality, and that you are putting the proper time and money into a website that will serve your business for years to come. 

The second thing to have in place and well planned is your branding. Ask yourself questions like, is your logo recognizable? Is it something that’s going to work well in different sizes and shapes? All the different social media sites display the logos differently, some of them are round, some of them are square. What emotions do the colors in your branding invoke? And then shifting to questions about what your brand promises. What is your unique selling proposition, and what's unique about your company? Once you have answered those questions, think about how you tell that story to your customer base. 

Every single thing you do should support that brand promise. Tell your story across everything you do, from how you answer the phone, to what your emails look like when they get sent out, to the follow-up from your emails. Sometimes people do really well and other times there’s a lot of room for improvement. So, build your website, and then your brand.  

The third thing is content. From the website, to your brand, down to your content, be in control of the message you are putting out there. So many parts of marketing fall into the bucket of content. In the content bucket are your videos, your Matterport Services, the text on your website, your public relations, as well as all blogging and social media. 

Somebody just starting should look at these three pieces first, and figure out how much traffic they're getting from what they’re doing in those three areas, and then you add advertising to enhance the traffic as needed—after you’ve got those in place.

Sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch, so if you’re a new builder and you’ve never done anything, it’s easy breezy to start from scratch because you’re building it all from the ground up. What we encounter a lot are builders that have been around for a while and they used a realty firm they’re no longer using anymore. Well, then find out, they built the Instagram but they don’t have access to it, or they’ve got 50 different versions of their logo because it’s changed so much and nobody’s really kept up with it. 

So, in some ways it’s easier to start from scratch and make it really clean than to go back and re-tool somebody’s business that has this giant online mess. We do a bunch of both, and I love doing both, but it is very different to work with a startup versus someone who’s 10, 15, 20, even 40 years down the road.

What differences do you see in working with start-ups versus established businesses? 

Working with established builders is something that I really pride myself on. When we’re working with a builder, we really want them fresh, crisp, and buttoned up. We strive for everything to make sense within their brand and their messaging. It’s not always easy, sometimes it takes a while for a multitude of reasons. We run into issues especially if they don’t know who has control of those assets like their logos and passwords, and other complications with bringing new life to an old system. It takes time, but it’s a real joy. We will spend days, weeks, and months getting into those small, but important aspects for our brands to help raise them up to what they can become. 

What challenges do you face matching a builder or designer’s style in the field versus how they represent themselves in their brand and online? How much of your work goes into bridging that gap? 

It can be very challenging. It just needs to be cohesive whether they’re talking to you or looking at you online, or talking to a sales agent in the field. When people interact with you, it all needs to feel like the same company. It’s all part of that experience and buyers today want a very seamed up, crisp, responsive experience. 

How does Search Engine Optimization play a role in marketing? 

If you’ve got your content out there and you’re blogging, your blogs will help you rank higher in a search for two reasons. First, people will search for the topics you are writing about as a professional in your field. Secondly, blogs and videos will also keep potential clients on your site longer, which also helps you rank higher in searches. Additionally, a site that loads really fast helps. There are so many things that go into getting a website to rank today. I always say that SEO is a lot like making soup, because it takes multiple ingredients at the right measure to make the correct soup and to make it work together the right way. 

You have a lot of female employees, especially for a business in the construction industry. Will you share with us, what built your team towards that gender equity? 

Well, that’s interesting, and I think it’s a challenge in our space. I’ve had a few people be frustrated with us for not having any men on our team, and we have in the past. It’s just happened that the last few times we’ve interviewed, we haven’t even had any men apply. 

It’s kind of an interesting, opposite thing that’s happened with Denim Marketing versus what you typically see in the industry, which is exclusively men applying.

Everyone in our industry really needs to look at the skill set of the people applying and really, promote women within their company when they are available and talented professionals.

I love the stories of the women who’ve started, say as a sales agent, and then worked their way into sales and marketing, and then the next thing you know, they’re the Operations Manager. So many of the daughters of builders are now getting involved, all of the women who are starting their own building companies. 

I do think it’s really important that your company reflects society. That can mean making sure multiple generations are represented. We have 3 generations of women working within our company. Hiring with diversity allows you insights into all different perspectives of buyers from different generations. Having multiple generations as well as people from different ethnicities and backgrounds and different walks of life, everyone. We’re all selling homes and selling products to people who fit this massive, different, multicultural melting pot, and we need to be able to address all of their needs and speak to them the way they want to be spoken to. 

What would you advise someone that’s coming into the construction industry?

Oh wow, it’s just a great field. For anyone who’s thinking about coming into the industry, my advice would be to do an internship first. Especially if you’re just coming out of college. If you can do an internship your senior year, that’s gonna really help you to know ‘Is this something I really want to do?’ 

We’ve had a lot of interns here at the agency, throughout the years, and it’s always interesting to see them either really thrive and love what they’re doing, or say, you know ‘This has been really fun but I wanna go into a completely different type of marketing,’ or ‘This isn’t at all what I thought it was, I thought we’d be planning parties all day long.’ 

So, you know I’m assuming if we get all these very distinctive, very different responses, that it would be the same as getting out in the trades, or doing something more hands-on in a building company. Getting that experience will assure you that you’re going in the direction that you’re really passionate about. Take that path and it will land you your first job in a fulfilling career.