Most marketing assumes a shortlist. The customer wants the thing, is weighing two suppliers, and your job is to be the better one.
Renovation does not work like that. A household with an old roof is not comparing your firm to the firm in the next town. It is comparing doing the work at all against leaving it another winter, and the second option is free, requires no decision and no one in the house has to agree to it.
That is who you are actually against, and almost no renovation content is built for it.
What postponing feels like from the inside
It is not laziness and it rarely comes down to price alone.
People put off this kind of work because it is a large amount of money for something they cannot see afterwards, because they do not know who to trust, because they suspect the quote will change halfway, and because the whole thing means strangers in the house for an unknown number of days. Any one of those is enough to produce another year of waiting.
Creator content is unusually good at all four, and unusually bad at the thing brands normally brief, which is explaining product superiority to somebody who has not yet decided to buy anything.
| The real reason for waiting | What a brochure does | What creator content can do |
|---|---|---|
| I do not know who to trust | Lists certifications | Shows the same team, working, for eight minutes |
| The price will move | States a starting price | Explains how a quote is built and what changes it |
| I cannot see what I am buying | Shows a finished room | Shows what happens behind the wall before it closes |
| It will disrupt the house | Says minimal disruption | Films the actual mess, and the actual clean up |
Read the last row twice, because it is the counterintuitive one. Showing the disruption honestly reduces the fear of it. A household that has seen what day three looks like stops imagining something worse.
The product disappears
Insulation, a heat pump, new frames, a rewire: within a week of the work ending, the thing the customer paid for is invisible or ignored.
That has two consequences for a brief. Filming the product on its own is close to useless, because a photograph of a finished wall is a photograph of a wall. And the real subject is the work rather than the object: the sequence, the care, the moment somebody explains what they found and what they did about it.
The most persuasive footage in this sector is usually an installer talking to camera about a problem in somebody's house, filmed by a creator who was there. It requires no script and it does what a brochure cannot.
What to commission instead of a product video
Three things, in this order.
One long piece per typical job
Not a case study in the corporate sense. A recognisable job, followed from the first visit to the last day, edited to twenty or thirty minutes for the site and cut down for social.
Nobody watches it end to end, and that is not the point. It exists so that a hesitating household can watch the ten minutes that address their own fear, which is a different ten minutes for each viewer.
Short pieces that each answer one question
What happens on day one, what you do about the neighbours, how the quote changes when something unexpected is found behind a wall, what the guarantee actually covers.
Each of these removes a specific reason to postpone. Commissioning ten of them is more useful than one polished film, and they are cheaper because they are short and unscripted.
Your own people, not actors
The installer who has done this for twenty years is more convincing than anybody you could cast, and the content is not competing on production quality anyway.
The practical constraint is that they are working. Book a creator for a day on site rather than asking the team to film themselves between jobs, which never happens twice.
The Belgian specifics that matter here
Two of them, and both change the brief rather than the message.
The support schemes are regional
Support schemes and permits are regional, and what applies depends on where the house is and on what is being done. Content that mentions any of it should point people to the regional counter and to their own installer rather than stating amounts, because the numbers change and a video keeps running for years.
The language line runs through the street
This market is bilingual at the level of the street, not the region. A firm working around Brussels or in the language border area will have customers in both languages in the same week, so plan the language versions at commissioning rather than translating later, when the interview is already shot in one language and the subtitles look like an afterthought.
What never to say
No promised savings, no payback period, no guaranteed grant. Those depend on the building, the household, the tariff and the scheme in force, and putting a number in a video makes it a claim you have to stand behind for as long as the video is online.
Describe what was done and let the customer speak about their own experience. That is both safer and more convincing than a figure nobody believes anyway.
Keep reading
- The Sale You Lost Is Not in Your Analytics
- The One UGC Brief Marketing Does Not Pay For
- Somewhere in Your Company There Are Two Briefs
- Here the approval comes first, not last
- The complete UGC guide for Belgium
Frequently asked questions
Does this work for a small installer with no marketing team?
It is arguably better suited to them, because the whole approach depends on real people and real jobs rather than on a campaign. One creator day per month covers it.
Should the content show the price?
Show how a price is built, not what it is. That answers the fear without creating a number you have to defend or update.
What if a job goes wrong on camera?
Then you have the most valuable footage in the sector, if you are willing to use it. How a firm handles a problem is the single thing every hesitating customer is trying to find out.
Do we need customer permission to film in their home?
Yes, in writing, and agree what happens if they later change their mind. Householders are usually happy to be filmed and much less happy to appear in a paid advert without having been asked.