8 Tips for Making the Most of the New Propane.com

All the resources offered by the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) can now be found in one place:

. That includes resources for propane marketers as well as propane customers. Where previously there were 10 websites, each designed for a different market segment, there is now one site offering easy access to all those resources.

“Putting all our great content in one place is designed to make it easier for everyone — propane marketers, propane customers, construction professionals, manufacturers, equipment dealers, energy influencers — to find it quickly and put it to use right away,” says Gregg Walker, PERC’s director of external communications. “Folks need to remember just one website: propane.com.”

“Having a single website also increases the chances that someone learns something wonderful about propane that they weren’t looking for,” added Ingrid Bechard, PERC’s director of market communications. “For instance, a homebuilder who had only visited our former site for construction professionals might not have seen all our Straight Talk testimonial videos featuring farmers, fleet managers, and landscape professionals who are saving money and cutting emissions with propane. Now, that builder can use those videos to show prospective homebuyers and business partners the advantages of propane — and that builder will be more likely to consider using propane in his operations, encouraging his children’s school to switch to propane buses, and persuading a family member to switch to propane-fueled irrigation engines on the farm.”

Walker will present a seminar about the new, consolidated website at the National Propane Gas Association (NPGA) expo in April. He and Bechard shared with BPN some of the tips he will offer to help marketers familiarize themselves with the site and then make the most of it.

1. Sign up for a propane.com account. Start by creating an account. This will give access to content only propane marketers can get, like market research and national and state market profiles. (Propane marketers are called “propane providers” on the site, because the phrase makes more sense to customers and prospective customers.) To get started, from the home page, click For Propane Providers and then click the red Sign Up button.
   
   
2. Create a Google My Business listing. If you don’t already have a Google My Business listing, create one. That will make it easier for prospective customers to find you online. The new propane.com includes a guide to creating a Google My Business listing. It includes a video, guides to claiming and managing your listing, tutorials, and FAQs. To find the guide, from the home page, click For Propane Retailers and then click Create Your Google My Business Listing.
   
   
3. Make sure your company appears in Where to Buy. The Where to Buy button makes it easy for prospective customers to find propane suppliers and propane equipment dealers. Where to Buy is a new tool that replaces the previous Find a Propane Retailer resource. To make sure your company appears in the search results, create a Google My Business listing and keep it up to date. The Where to Buy button is on the home page of propane.com.
   
   
4. Remember that resources from the previous sites are available on the new site. Resources for marketers that were on the previous Council site can now be found on propane.com under the heading For Propane Providers. Safety information for customers can now be found under the Safety heading. Resources for construction professionals are now available on pages devoted to residential and commercial construction; they’re under the Other Uses heading.
   
   
5. Use Propane Can Do That materials. To tie in to this national advertising campaign, download the materials offered by PERC and customize them with your company information. In a single download, you can get print ads, digital ads, radio spots, door hangers, and more. To get started, from the home page, click Resource Catalog and then download the Propane Can Do That Homeowner Toolkit — Bundle (Product No. 8091-BU-18).
   
   
6. Promote propane.com to customers. The new site is designed to help each type of customer find the right content quickly and easily. That means you can send your customers to propane.com with confidence that they’ll have a good experience there. Consider providing your customers with links to specific pages featuring user testimonials, product availability, and safety.
   
   
7. Introduce the website to staff. Encourage employees to spend time on propane.com. Challenge them to find something on the site that they weren’t aware of before—a fact, a video, a training resource — and share that with the whole team at a monthly meeting. Create a scavenger hunt that requires them to find things on the site. Assign each employee a task to complete at the site — creating an account, creating a Google My Business listing, downloading a marketing product from the catalog—and require them to teach their colleagues how to do it.
   
   
8. Check it out for yourself! Before attending the seminar at the NPGA expo, spend as much time as you can on the new propane.com. Create an account, download products, and share content with your customers. The more you know about the site, the more you’ll get out of the session.

During his seminar, Walker will help marketers explore the new website and learn more about it. He invites attendees to bring their laptops, tablets, and phones to the event in order to participate in hands-on demonstrations.

“We expect them to see a better-looking website that performs better than any we’ve had before,” Bechard said. “It’s faster, better designed, and more attractive. It has a drastically improved search function, so we expect visitors to find what they need with a minimum of fuss. And we think they will also want to spend time exploring the site.”

Walker added, “Early feedback from the industry confirms what we saw in our tests of the new design: they’re finding what they’re looking for quickly and easily, and they’re discovering cool stuff they didn’t know we had.”

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. —Steve Relyea