Construction Marketing

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!

There are times as a contractor that you need to spend some time in your own head. Time to figure out what your plans are for production, promotion, and products.

Here are 3 tips that will help you get where you want to go:

1. Find some quiet time and do something creative, even if you aren’t creative. Draw, paint, work with clay. Whatever it is, the process itself will help your mind think clearly.
2. If you think it would help, and you are willing, get a coach. Find someone who can help you through your main concerns. I help contractors with marketing, which is a huge issue for a lot of contractors, but you can find someone for just about anything.
3. Look at things in a different way. Use the zooming method. Zoom out of a situation and look at it from a much higher vantage point. Or zoom in closer and deep dive into a specific part of the issue.

Looking at things from a totally different way or from a new angle will give you a better perspective, which will give you different ways of approaching your business.

Promotion for a company named after the founder is basically, well, self-promotion.

What is self-promotion and how is it different from traditional marketing?

SP is marketing anyway possible, but with a creative flair. Here’s why that’s important. If you strip out the advertising, it comes off as bragging instead of self-promotion.

Self-promotion is about publicizing the best parts about you (which is the business). Doing this online will show up in searches when people look to find companies that do what you do.

If you aren’t converting 40% or more of your sits, it could be what you are saying during your presentation.

There’s a lot of information out there, and you need to explain exactly what your business does within the first thirty seconds, then take the next thirty seconds and explain what the benefit is to the person listening.

A lot of contractors waste valuable time giving loads of info on themselves, data, background info, etc. In the meantime, the customer is left sitting there scratching their heads wondering what you are going to do for them.

Paint a vivid picture of what you are able to deliver, sell the dream, tell a good story, make it worth their time, then explain why you are the one to make this happen. Done deal!

‬ I am often asked to write content for contractors because in their words,

‘I don’t know how to write, I don’t know how to put what’s in my head on paper or on websites, I can’t figure out how to convey what I want to talk about into words and drop it in on my site.’

So I’m going to give you a very simple tip;

The power of one

Here’s what I mean.

Start thinking about a conversation you would have with your absolute best customer. The person who’s ready to buy, all you need to do is explain to them how you’re going to do it, what the process is, how much it’s going to cost, what to do afterward, what do you do if there’s a warranty issue or a service issue, etc.

Then you write the way you would have a conversation with that best customer in mind. At the end of the day, there’s going to be thousands of people that come to your site, but what you’re going to find is that the people that click through, the people that pick up the phone and call, are the people who are going to be good customers…usually.

Everybody else that visits your site is either a tire kicker, a shopper, somebody who may have some kind of interest in what you do but isn’t ready to buy. The people that reach out to you are ready to buy.
So write your content as if you were sitting there talking to that person, having a beer, having a coffee, whatever it happens to be and make it sound like it’s one on one. Not, ‘We do a hundred things’ you say, ‘This is how we provide service to you. This is how we provide our work to you. This is what you can expect from me or us on the project YOU are trying to do.’

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, people want to do business with people, not nameless, faceless companies, they want to do business with people.

Make your content personal, make it informative, pack it with features and benefits, but most of all speak in a way that comes off like you’re talking to that particular person that’s reading that particular page at that point in time. That’s it, that’s great website content 101.