Giving Thanks

Our entire team at American Ratings Corporation wishes you and your loved ones a wonderful Thanksgiving season. For me, this is the time of year to give thanks to special people and reflect on outstanding deeds—an ideal precursor for personal and business planning.

Besides focusing on family members and friends, I’d like to take stock of what we’ve achieved together in the Diamond Certified Program this year. I’m thrilled to report that both consumer awareness of and preference for Diamond Certified companies increased in 2013. To accomplish this, we:

• Created the new Diamond Certified Directory Update print and digital series, which was mailed and emailed quarterly to requesters and higher-income homeowners. This resulted in a 24% increase in our print circulation and generated thousands of additional tracked calls to Diamond Certified companies.
• Invested heavily in our digital presentation of Diamond Certified companies through our web and mobile development, as well as expanded our editorial content and digital advertising. These programs resulted in an increase in our Google site ranking and a 36% increase in website page views.
• Ran diagnostics and analyzed 224 websites of Diamond Certified companies to help improve their digital performance.
• Dramatically increased the number of people who joined our Diamond Certified Preferred Consumer program, which now has more than 50,000 members (up from zero members in 2011).
• Created and soft launched Diamond Certified Experts, which, in the coming years, will position Diamond Certified company owners as helpful local experts and Diamond Certified companies as top rated for quality.
• Created a turnkey Facebook help and feed program for Diamond Certified companies, which helps set up or improve their pages and automatically provides a feed of popular Diamond Certified Tips and recent survey responses from satisfied customers.
• Ran more TV and radio spots to bigger audiences, which resulted in an estimated 250+ million consumer impressions.
• Created the monthly Diamond Certified Company Stat Report, which provides each Diamond Certified company with more than 100 data points and tracks the performance of the Diamond Certified Program on a single piece of paper.

The Diamond Certified Program: A Winning Plan for 2014
We asked ourselves, “Can we top this in 2014?” The answer is, “Definitely!” We’re in the final stages of planning for next year, and we’re developing powerful plans to propel each Diamond Certified company in 2014. I’ll announce our winning plan in my January letter. I’m confident that in this coming year, we’ll see an increase in both the power of the Diamond Certified Program and the number of quality-seeking new customers Diamond Certified companies attract because of their top rated status. (As always, our philosophy is to add significant value to the Diamond Certified Program without tacking on any additional charges.)