We are not looking to be demeaning at all, but the nature of so many contractors is geared toward short-term goals so there is a natural gravitation toward trying to close the deal versus giving any or little attention to long-term objectives.
Contractor sales is the short-term goal to persuade a prospect to purchase your service. Contractor marketing is the long-term goal to identify customer needs, create services to meet those needs, then promote and advertise to generate leads. These leads then filter to the selling cycle.
Selling is more straightforward such as having a nice voice message when someone calls and you are not available. Then there are the leading questions before you meet a prospect. Of course you need to know your business to follow up with an estimate (if you cannot close on the spot). And hopefully you have some tools in place to nurture leads and estimates that are still in the undecided column.
But who has time for marketing when you are so busy chasing leads, ensuring the work gets done and collecting your money? You do – and there are so many ways for you to do so on the current job.
Most contractors view the current job based on the how much the sale is worth and what they hope to make out of it. But let’s take a step back and think of all the ways one can take their work and package it for future marketing opportunities.
Let’s say you are on a job, how many different marketing concepts can you think of? We can think of a lot.
First comes the customer testimonial. Didn’t get one? Well Angie’s List is probably happy since they are generating millions on this concept alone.
So how about some pictures? Didn’t get them? Oh well, Houzz is probably excited while they saturate the lead gen world with pictures.
How many things can you think of by combining a customer testimonial and picture? Well a picture is worth a 1000 words, and many times these words are a story helping you identify what you do, the challenges before the job, the beauty of what was created , where the job was done and it can be capped off with someone else (your customer) validating everything you said. All of this is “Content” which is what everyone on the internet is fighting for.
Sure, the content needs to be formatted in a special way to be optimized for search engines, referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But SEO is easier to learn when you understand the content is needed first – and every contractor has so much content available from every job they go on. Teaching SEO is rather easy for us when content is available – getting contractors to understand this and getting the content in the first place is many times the bigger challenge.
We are a very strong proponent for every contractor having their own website and marketing it like there is no tomorrow so all the lead generation companies have real competition not from each other, but rather the contractors themselves. Contracting is another form of art, and that art can easily be turned into a marketing machine for future leads.
Marketing was also covered in an early MyOnlineToolbox Introductory Free Contractor Website SEO Webinar. We introduced how you can learn to market your contracting business in a fun way.
Markup & Profit was the sponsor of the above webinar. They are also one of the contracting industry’s premier business management consulting groups with coaching, training programs and coaching offered the following comments in their August 28th, 2013 Newsletter.
And you can start anytime to control your online marketing destiny to generate leads with your own Contractor Website. It all starts with Online Marketing Education for SEO and it is just a click away on the Learn Now image below.
You will learn how to market your business and not need a Lead Generation company.
Most important, all your information will remain your own to drive traffic just to your website.