Darren

If, from day one, you don’t manage your customer’s expectations, at some point in the process, you are going to live to regret it, even if it’s something small.

You have all the control over customer expectations, you just give it away as the sales process moves forward.

Remember, no matter what, there IS ALWAYS a sale, either you sell them on buying, or they sell you on NOT buying.

SEO is something you do to your website. It isn’t a marketing plan. Companies that live off of SEO optimization for lead generation are living on borrowed time.

At some point…and it always does, the search engines will take away whatever favor they’ve shown your site and you will then be faced with the dilemma of building traffic to your site again.

Use SEO, make it part of your site structure, just don’t count on it as a business driver.

Let me start off by saying there are no new construction marketing ideas. The way to win the game is to iterate and improve upon what is already out there.

Know your numbers

Big company, little company, it doesn’t matter. You have to know where your new business is coming from. Only then can we start a deep dive into how to make that channel work better for you.

If you don’t know or need a hand, we should talk. Get a free, 30-minute call with me and let’s get you marketing a bit better.

If you’ve hung out here at Darren’s for even more than a minute, you know I can’t stand the two most common answers to the following question;

What makes you better than your competition?

I usually hear these two answers, almost verbatim:

• Quality craftsmanship
• Good customer service

If you are new here and don’t know my feelings on these features, here it is in a nutshell; ‘those two things are what’s expected, they’re the ante. If you aren’t providing AT LEAST those two benefits, you’re not in business.‘

No I’m going to drive home the point:

A recent customer satisfaction survey found that most respondents EXPECT small businesses to be friendlier than larger businesses.

You read that right…they EXPECT it.

If you follow any marketing conversations today, you’ll hear buzz words like voice marketing, voice strategy, and Alexa, Cortana and Siri.

Voice marketing sounds sexy, even if you have no idea what the hell it is or how it works…yet.

You will, and the one thing I want to remind you of when you sit down to develop your voice marketing strategy is this; once again, you are a digital sharecropper on someone else’s platform. You won’t own the space, so be careful with going all in. You have no idea what is coming out the other side.

You’ve been a contractor for a long time. Video is crushing it on every platform on the web. You know you should be blogging but you can’t write.

Be a YouTuber instead!

Create videos that are specific to your skill sets and you WILL get viewers. Videos on how you do what you do WILL drive prospects to your website.

It’s easier to create videos than you think, and you should be doing video by now anyway. If you aren’t, start by watching some of the people you admire on Youtube and see how they do it.

Video is becoming a common way contractors are increasing their business brand, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot or take a lot of time. You can check out some of the over 400 videos I have on YouTube here.

The best way to get better isn’t with giant, leap-of-faith changes all at once. No, the best way to improve anything is incrementally, or, one percent per day improvements.

While it is important to play the long-game and pay attention to annual goals, you need to break those down and break them down to bite-sized chunks that you can improve on little by little.

If you stack good habits on top of each other, growing one percent a day is easy:

Smoke a pack a day? Smoke 1/2 less a cigarette a day and in no time you will cut down your smoking.

Not working your leads hard enough? Improve by just one percent a day, and in a month you will have improved your approach by thirty percent, that’s a big shift!

Start small and remember, you eat an elephant one bite at a time!