In order to thrive in the home improvement business, you need to understand who your customer is, and you have to connect with them on their level. It’s going to require going deep and getting emotional. Contractor marketing takes a special understanding in order to attract new customers and to keep the existing ones.
The customer avatar
It all begins with creating an ideal customer avatar. Your overall success involves you connecting with total strangers, to get them drawn into what your home improvement business is selling and finally buying.
It takes more than simply presenting a list of products for sale, I promise you that. You need to get at who they are to be able to explain why they should buy your products. You’ll need to dig deep to find out what their deepest desires and irrational fears are.
For example, your ideal customer may be a young couple with a growing family who is considering either moving or adding on. You know an addition would be better for them, but you need to not only address their rational questions, but their irrational fears as well.
Just why should you focus on defining your ideal customer avatar? Because all your construction marketing efforts may fall flat without it. Sure, you may be having a sale, offer lower pricing, and easy to install products, but your construction marketing may be falling flat.
What should be included in your customer avatar
This is going to take you a bit of time to sit down and think FIRST, before you put pen to paper or keys to keyboard. You will want to make sure your customer profile consists of:
Basic info such as; gender, age, lifestyle, profession income.
Then go deeper and answer:
- Where are they now and where do they want to be
- What are their fears, frustrations and what keeps them up at night?
- What are their likes and dislikes
- What are they talking about around the dinner table when it comes to the service you offer?
- What do they read, watch or listen to?
- What social media platforms are they using?
- What objections will they present to you?
- What is the dynamic in their decision-making process?
As you can see, this goes much deeper than the usual, $250k dollar home, $150,000 dollar income, middle-aged buyer I hear most of the time when I ask who is your typical client. You need to dig deeper!
Now your marketing can speak directly to your best client or customer. Now make sure any copy on your website, blog articles, and email newsletter subscriptions speak to this one person. Shift your focus to your ideal customer, and you’ll find that these people respond more effectively than before.
Your young family who needs an addition will see these sites targeting them. You’ll begin to attract your ideal customer. And you know what happens when you draw your ideal customers in? That’s right, you start closing faster and at a higher rate.
I forget who said that you need to turn yourself into the customer in order to truly understand marketing. Well, this mean contractor marketing too. You can’t make every customer interested in your home improvement company, but you can certainly make one market segment feel special by focusing on them.
Parts of the customer avatar should include a person with a name, and a photograph. As you see above, you’ll want to create specific demographics on this person, and even other characteristics. An avatar may not be a real person, but it’s a melding of several different people into one. The ultimate focus of an avatar is to describe your target market. These are people that you want to buy your home improvement products and services.
Learning how to create a customer avatar for home improvement companies is an important tool for your business, website, and blog. Define your target market in depth, and watch as these people open their pocket books for you.