Hardwood Floors April/May 2025

Marketing (Continued)

Homeowners looking for flooring solutions have questions. Often, they have queries they need answered that they’ve never previously considered or even articulated. Your content should answer these questions with simple, easy-to-digest answers. If you’re constantly providing content that offers what people in your area are looking for (and what they didn’t realize they needed answers to), your content will rise above that of your competitors and result in more appointments and sales. When you establish that your business is more knowledgeable than the competition, you create an environment of trust and reliability through high-quality content alone. When you have a steady stream of content that provides what clients

are looking for, you’re building brand loyalty. People looking for information about flooring services in your area will know to come back to your website; additionally, they will recommend you to others. This personal connection is built over time through putting in the work and focusing on both quality content and establishing expertise. Now, we can’t talk about content creation in 2025 without addressing artificial intelligence (AI). It’s certainly true that you now can create a lot of content, both words and images, very quickly thanks to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, among many others. Should you take advantage of these tools? Absolutely! Should you also be carefully scrutinizing what these tools produce to ensure the content meets your needs? Definitely! Here’s the thing: These tools do a great job of creating lots of content very fast. You can learn a few basic prompts and be off to the races. With that said, AI is not a miracle worker. It’s just a tool. Technically, it doesn’t know anything; it simply has been programmed to reflect what it believes you’re looking to communicate.

Sometimes it does a great job. Sometimes, quite frankly, it doesn’t. You can make AI results better by improving your prompts as you go along, but even with that, it’s incredibly important to carefully review what AI produces to ensure it reflects your brand. Again, you want to be sure you’re producing high-quality content for your website, and with AI, there’s always the danger that its copy can be overly generic or unoriginal – or not even reflect your products or services correctly. Please don’t misunderstand. Ignoring AI entirely is a bad idea; it’s being incorporated into all sorts of business processes today, and it would be foolish not to take advantage of that. (Some of your competitors undoubtedly are doing so.) However, you can’t just let it loose with no oversight. Use AI to come up with flooring content ideas for you. Create prompts that help educate homeowners on the flooring products and services you provide. But never forget the next step: Review the content, tweak it as needed to fit your needs, and make sure it fits exactly what you want to communicate. As artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent, search engines such as Google are becoming better at determining the difference between truly beneficial, original content and generic copy. Google will reward you with higher search engine results page (SERP) placement if your content shines above that of your competitors. Welton Hong is the founder/CEO of RRM@home, a marketing firm specializing in solutions for home improvement businesses, and the author of Your Digital Floor Plan: Digital Marketing Strategies for Flooring Businesses.

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